A Shrike Alighting Upon Her ✔

I. Empty

She arrived in the prairies with a joke her father used to tell repeating in her mind. The prairies are so flat you could see your dog running away for weeks.

There was something appealing about that empty space, especially when her head felt over-full. So she left the ever-lasting sun, the coast, and the bustle of the sunset strips for something alltogether different.

Loggerhead Lodge, it was called. An isolated farmhouse surrounded by vast plains, put up for rent by an elderly couple who wintered in warm places like the one she'd come from. All the photos of the place were taken in summer, when the fields were gold, the skies cornflower blue. It made the farmhouse look idyllic, peaceful, safe.

Most importantly, there was nothing around it for miles.

She drove her airport rental with the heater on full blast, watching a very different picture come into view. The house had the same red walls, the same tall windows, the same wrap-around porch as in the listing, but this version was painted by a cynic. It started as a small dot on the horizon that bloomed into a red blemish on the white waste. The house squatted in the void of the prairie. Photos had not captured the dilapidated wooden fence dipping in and out of the earth like the crooked spine of a half-buried leviathan. They had not captured the looping coils of barbed wire along the fence's beams. They had not captured the sagging barn with its doors and rotting boards groaning in the wind. With an overcast sky and waist-high drifts of snow against the lodge's walls, words different from 'idyllic' came to mind. Desolate. Wounded. Hungry.

It would be her home for a month. Looking out at it, she felt very small. It had been the purpose of her visit. To be insignificant and aimless. Now she was here though, she felt a prickle of something different. Like an itch, if an itch was an emotion.

She got out of the car and into the first real winter she'd ever felt. The cold had teeth, and it sunk them in, needle sharp on her skin. Her winter coat and gloves were abandoned in the overheated car because she hadn't anticipated how quickly the icy air would penetrate her wool sweater. She collected the keys with shaking fingers from the mailbox at the front gate.

As she prepared to open the gate to admit her car, something caught her eye. Something small with trailing ends that shivered in the wind. For a moment she thought it had been an illusion. A shadow in her periphery that vanished once investigated. An after-image from staring into the bright snow too long.

With a sick drop in her stomach, she realized that it was neither.

A tiny field mouse hung limp with its flesh caught on a spoke of barbed wire. Pieces of it had gone to the elements. Only its face, tail, and the sinew between remained. For a horrified moment, she could only wonder how it got there, how it managed to get so hopelessly snagged.

Then the cold climbed its way up her fingers, and it was time to push open the gate and get back into the sanctuary of her car.

The driveway was a road in its own right, and the closer she got to the lodge, the less hospitable it appeared. Bushes that had been thick with foliage during summer had shrunk to skeletal brambles. A hawthorn tree, which had bloomed with red berries in the photos, stood as a leafless sentinel next to the farmhouse. The snow clung to everything in a thin, filmy dust. It muted all the colours. Turned everything a different shade of grey.

She dragged her luggage through the snow to the front door, the wind clawing her back toward her car. She tried each key before the last proved successful.

Inside, everything got quieter. The howling wind sounded far away, the cold replaced by a burning sensation as the blood rushed back to her fingers and toes. Her face felt stiff. If she wrinkled her nose, it felt stuck that way. Putting down her bags and shedding her outer shell of clothing, she appraised the place that would be her home for the next month.