MAKER’S MARK

It was the smell I first noticed when I opened the door in the morning. It was a smell that didn’t fit with the crisp cold and the blinding white snow just outside. It was a smell that belonged with steamy heat, fetid swamps, and the damp. Death was the word that leapt to mind and then evaporated in the cloud of my next exhalation. Had some animal crawled under the cabin during the night to escape the bone chilling temperatures and found out too late that the light from the windows held no warmth?

Stomping my boots on the rough pine threshold and clapping my hands together, I shook my head vigorously. Time to chop wood. Now where the hell was the ax? The fire of last night’s Maker’s Mark heading down my throat had wonderfully mimicked the soft tongues of flame licking up from the fireplace wood. But last night’s indulgences were obviously to blame for this morning’s olfactory hallucinations. For hallucinations they must be, as I looked over at the thermometer. Even without my glasses, which I must have misplaced in last night’s ragged bourbon fog and the fact that my eyes were watering, obviously from the cold, I could tell that the mercury hovered around zero. And it doesn’t take a freezer salesman to tell you that decay doesn’t happen at around zero.

Maybe Mary would know. And I wouldn’t have to tell her about the Maker’s Mark, would I? After all we had come up to the cabin to get away from all that. The multiple rehabs, the recriminations, the fights.

“Mary, come smell this!

Mary?”

I turned.

The inside of the cabin was as silent and dark as the smell.