Addison always prefers winter until it engulfs her home in a white shroud. She wakes one morning in mid-January to pale skies and the skeletal forest outside her cabin half-painted in white snow, and suddenly she’s aching for spring flowers and autumn leaves. The pile of firewood has dwindled away at the worst time, of course, so she can’t even mope from the comfort of her fire.

She wraps herself in suffocating layers, laces her boots too tight, and steps out onto the inch of snow that has been blown onto her porch. The thermometer hanging at the top of the steps is half frozen, with its red alcohol solution hovering right below zero. It is deadly, finally silent. The only movement comes from a few black crows flitting around the bird feeder hanging over the porch railing.

Her driveway meets her at the bottom of the porch stairs and trails off into the woods, curving out of sight. Her seclusion here is a false one. If she walked for ten minutes, Addison would find cornfields and see a road that would take her to town. But the forest swallows all of that. The sounds of cars, the lights of the city, the closeness of people. None of that reaches her here.

She trudges through her yard and takes the wood axe from inside the cobwebbed shed. Her steps crunch and crack beneath her, her breath fogs in the air ahead of her. The stack of 8 uncut wood sits at the edge of the forest beside a scarred stump. She marches toward it, trying to find satisfaction in the routine but only feeling colder and lonelier than she has in a long time.

The axe is a chipped and aged old thing that she remembers her parents using to do this very same thing. They’re gone now, along with everyone else. So she cuts the wood alone, setting a mid-size log vertically on the stump and splitting it with a single, practiced swing. The halves tumble to either side, and she picks another log.

A twig snaps in the woods, and she lowers the axe to her side. There’s a figure in the trees. A man wearing a patched suit, so gaunt that he could be one of the trees. His skin is the color of gray slush, his eyes sunken and sightless. Yet he stares at her, unswaying in the wind that whistles through the bare forest.

Addison raises her axe and splits another log. The sound draws more figures to watch her from the trees. They wear what they were buried in, their Sunday best, even as time has rotted it away to tatters. She feels very, very small beneath their gaze. There’s a pleading quality to the procession. They don’t shiver or shake or say anything, but she knows that they’re cold in a way that she can scarcely imagine.

A half dozen becomes a dozen. Two dozen. They are utterly still, only appearing when she looks down at her work. There is a cemetery nearby, between her cabin and town, but she never hears anything in the news about disturbed graves or missing cadavers. Addison does what she can, leaving flowers and cleaning gravestones. She donates to the tiny, chilly local church and prays kneeling in front of the stained glass images of saints and Christ.

But they always come back.

I can’t help you, she wants to scream as she loads the cut firewood into a bag. I don’t know how to help you.

Addison turns and hurries back toward her cabin. The dead make no noise, yet she knows that they follow her across the yard. I’m sorry, she begs internally. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

The interior of her cabin is dark and cold. She shuts the door behind her and locks it. When she turns back around, dead eyes stare back at her from her windows. She wants to retch and cry, but she’s so, so cold.

She loads the furnace with shaking hands, places a bundle of kindling inside, and lights it all with a match. At the immediate glow of the fire, the dead begin to rap their hands against the sides of her house. It’s a quiet, persistent cacophony that she would think was rain if she didn’t know better.

Addison lays on her side beside the fire and curls around herself. The heat from the furnace is a distant comfort, one that she never enjoys anymore. The dead continue to knock. Desperately asking to be let inside to warm up beside the fire. She covers her ears and shakes her head. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.