Miles to Go

Shortlisted Finalist, Short Fiction: National Capital Writing Contest, Canadian Authors Association (2014)

Release Year: 2014 (unpublished)

REVISED: 2023 (definitive version)

Emptiness. Isolation. Regret. Each hung over Allen’s conscience like a storm cloud as he sat in the dark recesses of his lonely, dimly lit living room. Candles were scattered about upon windowsills and tables, barely lending a proper definition of light. The thought was there, but it hardly counted in the deep, vicious night. This owed to the real storm being outside, of course, one that could only be rendered through the wrath of a Canadian winter. The frigid maw of the unknown had left his small, single-level shack of a house cut off from the world and paralyzed in the cold, with the closest resemblance of civilization several hours away. The snowplows hadn’t been around for days.

“This is the stupidest fuckin’ place I could be right now,” Allen mumbled to himself. Living alone hadn’t exactly done wonders for his mental health. All that was left were hopes of a stranger stumbling in through the many inches of ice and snow covering the ground. Deciding it was time for a little exercise, he rose from the groove in his reliable old armchair and meandered with a flashlight into the kitchen to fix something to eat – an apple and half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

The storm had been devastating the sleepy countryside where Allen lived for about four days now, thrashing the house about with heaps of elemental fury. Power had been out since nearly the beginning of the ordeal and, considering that he hadn’t felt much like leaving the house beforehand to get supplies, even the candles and batteries were running out. Food was at an all-time low, and so was morale. Not all that dissimilar from the days of deployment overseas. Even in these conditions when any form of insulation served as a blessing, the worn-down retiree kept a pair of large curtains thrust open in the living room, petrified from the cold, the glass too thin to compensate accordingly.

Allen was waiting. Waiting and watching. Hoping for all that ever mattered to him to arrive on the doorstep. He needed his purpose for staying alive to greet him soon. Falling carelessly back into the comfort of his chair, he poured himself a drink into the same grungy, scuffed old glass that had been satiating his hungering desire for inebriation. His best friend of the past several days if not for longer. Raising the chipped glass to his lips, chapped and weathered, he paused for a moment, contemplating the murky, golden-brown depths of the glass, hoping that somewhere within would lie the comfort, love, and joy that he had been longing for every single day for so many years.

But it was always a placebo effect. An illusion. Torture, really.

“Are you gonna get over here, or what? Goddammit, Miles,” Allen muttered once more, this time into the glass, possibly in some feeble attempt at scouring an answer from the temporary liquid solace it could provide.

Both Allen and Miles used to be surrounded by the most fascinating people, joy, merriment and laughter. But as the years faded, so did the faces of those they knew. Now, almost sixty years since first meeting, both men were the only survivors of the memories that they experienced and shared together. Even the vicious winters out in the country couldn’t prevent the flesh of the faces they once knew being rendered from the bones within the earth.

Neither of them had anyone else in the world. Neither of them had a purpose. But one thing stayed constant – Allen’s ever-endearing love and need for Miles, and the secret passionate desire he felt for his old friend through all the years. They had both sensed it and were finally prepared to act. In hindsight, nobody else was in the way. There were no more excuses.

Peering over his uncleaned spectacles upon a letter sent from Miles five years ago in the middle of a December blizzard, a sense of hope and faith snaked through Allen’s heart, past the stents and artificial arteries. For the umpteenth time, he read it and held the weathered letter close to his chest.

I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on us. Love, Miles.

Surely, after five years, there was little chance of seeing Miles enter his creaky, cold living room. However, this was all that had kept Allen going for so long. Miles had never given him a reason to doubt. Still, after this Christmas if there was no news, he was prepared to throw the letter aside.

Later, Allen looked out the window at the frozen, crystalline abyss set before him. It was Christmas day, though the tail-end of it, and he hadn’t left the armchair in almost twenty-four hours. Getting up for the bottle of Jack – which now lay near-empty – and the apple – which somehow found its way as far under Allen’s chair as possible – was enough of a shock to his system. Too much excitement for one day, he thought to himself only half-sarcastically. Night was beginning to fall, and the cold was creeping further in.

In that moment, a set of headlights appeared through the dark cold void of night, illuminating the ice-laden trees like crooked, demonic ornaments of shivering glass. A truck was slowly wandering up the lonely road to Allen’s house, not going more than perhaps ten kilometers an hour. Excitement rushing through his veins, he sprang from his chair and slid as close to the living room window as possible.

Wind was blowing ice and snow about, but Allen could still make out the blurry shape of the truck as it crawled ever-cautiously up the road, closer and closer. He bolted to the closet near the door and pulled on an old, dirty yellow winter jacket, a pair of mismatched alpaca wool mittens, a tattered tuque, and a pair of seemingly ancient winter boots, their gripped soles worn down to barely anything after years of country living.

Pulling the jacket hood excitedly over his head, Allen ran back to the window, gazing out at the truck, only a few hundred feet or so away from the house.

“Miles. I’m here. I swear,” he mumbled once more, his voice lilted with hope and relief. “It’s okay, take your time... I can see you. I can finally see you.”

Allen opened the door and couldn’t help but dash outside as quickly as possible, adrenaline cutting through the minus-thirty-seven air. Miles had to be in the truck. It would be utterly senseless for anyone else to travel through the wilderness for hours to reach him.

Losing his footing by way of the worn-down boots, he slipped aggressively on the ice. Falling on his stomach, Allen felt several ribs break beneath him in agonizing pain, leaving him broken and screaming. As he tried to lift himself off the ground, the pain seared through him like a hundred razorblades slicing his stomach to shreds, causing him to recoil and roll onto his side. Peering down, he was horrified to notice that two ribs had poked from his flesh and through the thin jacket. Crying out in pain and traumatized, doing all he could to remain conscious as the frozen wind, snow and ice pellets whipped around him, Allen kept his tear-filled gaze transfixed upon the truck, not far away at all now but wishing it would get a move on. The snow was beginning to blind his view, and surely Miles was experiencing the same situation, he thought.

Suddenly, Allen could make out one particular feature as the vehicle edged closer: a plow, affixed to the front grill. The truck’s driver struggled to see through the storm, not noticing Allen’s limp and snow-spattered body near the front door. Just as the truck reached the end of the drive, twenty feet or so from the house, it then half-heartedly pushed away a strip of snow as it turned around and hummed back up the lonely road, sand peppering the frozen ground behind it. All the hope that remained had bled out, dripping from Allen’s protruding ribs.

“I waited as long as I could, Miles… I-I’m sorry,” Allen cried out into the night, blood and ice dampening his clothes. “I needed you. I was so ready.”

He then sensed that it was all over. A foolish old man, playing a foolish game. Nobody was coming. Anger resonated deep within him, both at himself and the deathly circumstances.

“To hell with you, then! All of you! ENOUGH, GODDAMMIT!” he shouted at the abyss before him, rising to feebly crawl with no destination in mind, blood dripping from his gut like a slowly dripping faucet. He didn’t want the pain anymore, the endless days of watching, the empty valley mocking him. The taunting. The waste, in every sense of the word.

Slowly, all while gradually losing consciousness, Allen peeled off all his outerwear and clothing. Only the coldness, the stillness, could soothe the pain. Holding Miles’ letter against himself in a gentle, heartbroken caress, tears following the lines of his unloved face, Allen laid out in the frozen black of night. Completely naked and exposed, he permitted the elements to punish his seventy-six-year-old body further with shards of ice and snow. Shivering, inconsolable, and suffering in every way imaginable, Allen gave the letter a final kiss of tenderness before relinquishing it to the wind. It sailed through the cold air, vanishing like the ghost that had haunted him for so long.

All the warmth had soon left Allen’s body and, slowly, he was losing feeling in every limb. The night grew colder and stronger, but all of his senses began to numb along with the pain. All was shifting to a peaceful serenade of silence as the wind’s wicked howl began to fade. In his final moments, Allen glimpsed another set of bright lights. A horrified, equally regretful face soon appeared through the cold, their words inaudible. There was only silence.

“M-Miles... I love you. I’m sorry,” Allen whispered, as his view of Miles’ face was enveloped in blackness.