Snow Trapped
A short story for your enjoyment
Winter is long and extremely cold, Arlene realized just how cold it really is after her car got stuck in the snow and ran out of gas and she had to hike to the cabin in the woods through knee-deep and sometimes hip-deep snow. She knocked on the door and called out, “Is anybody there?”
She received no answer and tried the door and found it locked. One thing the lead singer of Brainstorm knew was that she had to get inside and get warm, or she would freeze to death. She walked around the cabin trying windows and found them all locked.
“This is not how I want to die,” she muttered to herself with the cold seeping into her bones. Back at the door, she tried shoving her shoulder against it, but the door was too heavy for her lightweight to break through. Her only hope then was to break a window and climb in and hope that the owner would accept her apology under the circumstances. Being a world-famous musician, she could certainly afford to pay for replacing the window.
The window closest to the door she tried to do a trick her stuntman boyfriend did in the movies he plays in by jumping through the window. She took a step back and ran at the window, jumped and face-planted with a thud into the window, and fell back on her butt. The owner had apparently installed unbreakable glass in the cabin.
With a sore face and wounded pride, Arlene got to her feet and tried kicking the window and cursed out from the pain of breaking her toes. From her purse, she took out her tablet and tried sending a message to her band’s manager, but out here there was no Wi-Fi internet, and her cell phone battery had died.
Hobbling along the deck she tried banging on the windows calling out for anybody who might hide inside and not wanting to come to the door. She cried for help from anyone inside, from God and Jesus Christ. Arlene didn’t really think God would answer her prayers it was after all the first time she had talked to God in 10 years. I probably have to do a little more chatting with him than when I’m in a bind, she thought. “Well, if I get out of this one, I’ll start praying every day, Lord.”
Shivering and with her teeth chattering, her only hope now was to knock the doorknob off, not being experienced with emergencies. The only thing she thought she had to use was her tablet. Oh well, what’s $1,500 when it comes to your life?
She knew the answer to that, of course, was nothing, so she tried to slam the tablet against the doorknob over and over causing the doorknob to bend slightly and her tablet to crack and the glass screen to shatter.10, 20, 30 times she hit the doorknob with the computer only managing to bend it slightly more than what she had before the computer broke into five pieces.
Crying now, she figured that whoever owned the cabin probably wouldn’t find her until spring, assuming wolves or coyotes didn’t make a meal of her dead body. In one last act of desperation, she started kicking the doorknob 15 times before finally breaking it off.
“Thank you, Lord,” she cried as she stuck her finger in and pushed out the other end of the doorknob. She pushed the door open and made it inside, closing the door behind her. She covered herself with the bearskin rug that was lying in front of the fireplace. Safe and getting warm for now, she would next have to start a fire to stay warm until she could somehow send for help.
A narrated version of this story is also posted to YouTube.