Rachael Riley’s “Sightline” is a beautifully rendered story of grief for the narrator’s recently deceased father. Following his funeral, the narrator departs for the cabin their father tended and maintained, where they develop an unexpected friendship with a neighbor. And it is at this cabin where they are forced to confront their complicated feelings for family. Congratulations to Rachael on a terrific debut short story!
His arrival comes in pieces—a gunmetal boat, a low motor hum, a flash of blue life vest. The welcome-home sound of hull against quai. I wait for him near the end of the dock but do not reach for a rope.
He holds the boat to the dock with a gloved hand. He has known me since I was small, he tells me, though this grey, grizzled man is a stranger to me. As only strangers can, he shares his life in digestible chunks. His wife died last year and he lives on the lake alone. For two weeks, he tells me, he has seen the thin light of my cabin sifting through the trees. He remembers me. He’s glad I am here.
He is on his way to visit his traps. Would I like to come with him?
I do not make a habit of getting on boats with strangers. There is something familiar in the way he looks at me, direct, yet cornered. There is something in the slope of his words and I find I cannot deny him my borrowed company.
It is winter, but before solstice. Before the light returns and the snow comes to soften angles. The landscape is still raw as a graze. We ride the chaloupe through the black water to the island where he has his flat-sets. Where no one can get hurt. As we get closer to the shore, there is a layer of ice clinging to the surface of the lake. It is as thin as a promise.
There is a technique to breaking the ice, I learn—a gentle rocking that accentuates the motion of the boat. It propels the broken shards away, leaving a path, a return.
The island is uninhabited. From its shore, I try to spot my small cabin but it is tucked away across the water. My neighbor points out a curl of smoke from his fireplace, a bend over from mine. He tells me to look for the cluster of sheds—they are huddling shadows in the bare trees. They are where he processes the kills, turns fur to hide. The pelts have never been why he hunts and the recent surge of interest in coyote rugs and throws surprises him.
I can see the peppered, reddish fur, its contrast against white linen sheets. I can see a pack of them sleeping against a polished concrete floor, reshaping themselves when the owners are not there. The low musk of animal rising through the walls. I do not tell him this.
He leads me to the traps that dot the clearing, glinting and cold. Coyotes run in circles, he explains, tightening as they get closer to their prey. This is why he arranges the traps as he does.
He resets the ones that have sprung and coats them with a skunk scent that he buys off Amazon. It clings to the metallic jaws like sweat. Most of the traps are empty. One is not. It is clamped around a leg, ravaged and red and still dressed in its tan and grey fur. The chain that secures it to the ground is stiff with blood. There is no sign of the rest of the animal.
My father is dead. The thought comes while I examine the exposed white of the leg bones. My father has been not-dead my whole life and now he is the opposite. It feels wrong that such a change could come cleanly and quietly. There was no wound, no blood, no fight. No chewed-off leg.
The neighbor resets the pan. We have caught nothing today and soon it will be too late. We return to the boat and retreat until the ice-skin yields to dark water. The path in is the path out. Two days after we reset the traps, the temperature drops. The island reaches for me, the ice stiffening like a hand.
* * *
Our family used to spend every weekend at the cabin, until my sister started complaining about the cramped walls, the encroaching nature. The dust made her asthma act up and we stopped going. In our absence, my father cared for the place, as he cared for many things. The wood is stacked high and the blankets are thick enough to keep out the draft.
I find isolation but no escape. My father is in the palimpsest of repairs, in the crooked coat hook. I hear him in the whir of the stubborn water pump that he cursed at like it was a misbehaving dog. When I sleep, I leave the curtains open. I do not want to think of curtains closing around his narrow hospital bed.
The first night the lake is solid, the moon is a half. It spills handfuls of light onto the once-water. The howls of coyotes rise up and I look out my window for the shadow of their movement against ice. I see nothing. They scream and yip and laugh and I have never heard anything as human as they sound in the darkness. It is a street party of the wilds. It is language twisted in a way that I can almost understand.
I am not alone. I call for the cat, in part to check that he is inside and safe, in part to hear my own voice. Downstairs, the dog is undisturbed from her feet-twitching dreams. The fire is too warm, my father’s armchair too plush, for her to be drawn away by the unhinged joy of her cousins.
I am more easily tempted.
Every night, I hear the coyotes. Each time, they are closer and it is harder to resist. Their calls awaken a part of me that I have not met before. That part wants to kick off the blankets and slink out the door, skin raw against the frozen ground. This me does not mind the pain. They only want to go and see what waits.
Wild things can distribute their weight far better than we humans. We expect that the world will hold us, we do not pause and test. I know I cannot cross, that the ice is not ready for the burden of me. And I know too, what I will find if I make it to the island’s shore. Coyotes capering in circles that get smaller and smaller, evading the glistening mouths of the traps. One of them will have three legs. She’ll laugh at me, showing her bloody teeth.
* * *
Before I left for the cabin, I had to attend my father’s funeral. I kissed the chilled skin of his cheek. It was smoothed to a mortician’s impression of life. I know the process now—they empty the bodily fluids down the drain and replace them with chemicals that hold decay at bay. Each body part must be massaged to ensure no extremity is allowed to decompose.
His stillness was as strange as seeing him in a well-tailored suit. He was not the type to rest, always moving, always finding something to do. Was. Had been. The verb tense sat in my throat like an egg as they lowered the coffin to a dull grinding of gears, a chorus of distress. The mouths of my mother and sister were round. I said nothing. I saw nothing of my father in what was buried.
Back in my hollow apartment, my bags were packed and waiting. The dog and cat were bundles of confused excitement. A taxi idled outside. The driver was unimpressed with the animals and the distance until three extra fifties convinced him there was no problem. Four hours passed in silence.
The cabin waited down a steep driveway. It looked at me with the longing of empty windows, as though I would be the thing to fill it. It had been years since my hand had found the light switch but a body doesn’t easily forget its way.
Under the bare bulb, the room sprung to life. It smelled of dust and dryness, and him. I have never been able to capture the smell of someone with words, no matter how I try. He was, at once, the oil which he used to tame his beard, the grease of a chainsaw, the tang of a pasta sauce left simmering. All of these and none of them—my attempts feel as pointless as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille trying to distil the scent of glass.
I opened windows and ushered the remnants of him out into the cold. The wind snuck in, carrying with it the drawl of the taxi’s motor as it retreated into the distance.
I don’t drive. I’m a poet and years of walking the streets in search of line breaks has given me an abhorrence of cars. Things move too fast when you’re driving. There is no time to think and too many consequences at each turn. The part of me which likes a tight, three- line ending worries that I cannot be trusted with a steering wheel.
Not driving is part of the foolhardiness of coming out here, my mother reminds me, begs me. If something goes wrong there will be no rescue. She has checked the distance. I am an hour’s drive from the nearest hospital, if an ambulance can even get down the driveway at all.
Messages do not reach our cabin, so I walk to the main road to hear her warnings. It is a good thing, these calls—the dog needs the exercise. She can’t be trusted unleashed in all this forest. The times we startle deer, she strains to join them. Her body holds the same lines of longing that my own does, tucked beneath the covers, when the coyotes sound the night.
If she goes, she will not come back. She will be swallowed by trees, by the urgency of now. She will forget how comfortable it is to lie on a couch, meals delivered to our waiting mouths.
I hold her lead tightly while my mother strains on the end of the line, begging me to see sense.
I tell my mother that her husband was right by a hospital and that didn’t change anything. She cries. I have ripped her open like a seam. So often I seem to do this with my words. The call drops before I can apologize—even by the road, the reception is tenuous. I send a reassuring message and hope it will get through. I love her, I am fine, but I am not coming back. Not yet.
* * *
In the dark hours, I await calls of a different kind. Sleep eludes me as I stare into the halflight, across the frozen water. I cannot see the coyotes but I can imagine how they run, tongues lolling, eyes bright. Each night, they get closer and closer to my window. My father is dead, I tell them. Sometimes I say, I am here, come find me, what are you?
When the neighbor checks on me, as he does every week, I tell him of the coyotes. He reassures me that they don’t get close to civilization. Looking at the tiny cabin, this construction of my past, I hope it doesn’t count as civilization. I want this place to be the peak of solitude. I want it to demand a type of self-reliance that I have never needed before.
I take pride in keeping the fire stoked. In the evenings, I add the largest log I have and close the flue, banking the embers. It feels like success to bring them back to life every morning with a slow, exhaled breath. There is a poem in that if I look. I do not. I don’t want words to follow me here, though they try.
It is a simple existence, heating soup on the fire and thinking of nothing. Nothing except that I could exist like this forever, led from one moment to the next by need alone. Though, I cannot separate my self-sufficiency from my father. He cut the trees which I feed so diligently to the flames, he gathered the wood and waited for it to dry. He made the soup that fills my pot and left it frozen, waiting for me.
* * *
Weeks pass. The solstice comes and goes. It is almost Christmas and I am gifted extra minutes of light. Snow has been falling in its all-consuming way. When it stops, everything is changed and too bright. Drifts lie high outside the windows. I clear a narrow path to the woodshed and am pleased with myself until I realize the sliding door has iced itself closed. I am out there with a hammer and a knife trying to crack the ice around the doorframe when the sound of a motor is carried through the trees.
I know it is not the neighbor visiting from the next bend of the lake, bringing supplies I do not need and conversation that he does. The engine does not cough enough to be his quad.
A sleek minivan rounds the corner. I want to turn, go back to the cabin, shut the door, shut her out. But I walk towards my sister’s car. She steps out into snow higher than her boots and looks down at it like she has been personally wronged. In that moment, she could be our mother. Their faces are sculpted from the same pale-hurt clay.
My sister asks why I haven’t cleared a path and I tell her I wasn’t expecting visitors.
She is as carefully dressed now as she was at the funeral, soft wools and softer colors. A white jacket, a girl-pink scarf. I ask her what she is doing here and she tells me that it is her cabin too.
It feels strange to hate your sibling, even if that hate only flares for the life of a match. I want to scream that it is because of her that we stopped coming here. I want to lean in close enough that she feels my breath on her face and tell her that our father was always taking care of everything, but never taking care of me. I want my words to carry spit, venom.
By the time she’s inside and free of her winter gear, the moment is gone and the kettle is singing on the stovetop. She hands me her jacket, expecting me to hang it for her. It is impractical in this world of ash and animal hair. I put it on the skewed coat hook.
She looks around the cabin. It hasn’t changed. It is one room and a loft, where our parents once slept. The fire and its wood take up half the ground floor. The two well-loved chairs have always pointed at the woodstove and the view beyond it—endless shades of white and blue that make up the winter lake. When we were children, we pushed the chairs back and laid a mattress right by the fire’s feet. I wonder if she remembers.
The cat has taken over one of the chairs, leaving a coating of ginger hair.
I tell my sister that she can move him. She waves a hand in his direction like she can remove anything by intention alone, even years. The cat makes no move under her demands and I lift him to the floor.
My sister is a beacon of unease in the cabin’s studied stillness. The cat glares at her from a corner, the dog’s tail thumps hopefully. My sister shifts in the seat and picks up a book that’s been left lying open on the windowsill. Its spine is broken. My father is in the folds and the ripped corner. He was never the type to treat books gently—they are a tool and a good tool must be used.
She holds it up like a question. The worn cover shows an old ship, sails streaming in an imagined wind, tossed on a lively sea. It paints a promise of whimsy and adventures and love.
There is a wound I hide, up under my clavicle. Of course, my sister is always the one to find it. Our father read pirate stories until the pages frayed but he left my poetry collections immaculate. Each one I gave him, my name marching across the cover, was opened once, then closed. My words, myself, unread.
I lie and tell her it is research. I ask if she wants tea.
She does.
I pour the steaming water into each cup, hoarding the heat of it greedily. My hands throb from the cold and the fight with the woodshed door. I pass her a mug that is a cheerful yellow. It has always been my favorite and I wonder why I let her drink from it.
The neighbor arrives, the quad a heartbeat in a bare forest. His knock is a welcome interruption. He is here to check on me after the big snowfall, see if I need anything, and I invite him in, to sit. I find him a cup. My sister remembers him—she asks if he took her fishing once and he agrees that he might have. He does not look at her directly.
I lean against the counter. The dog rests her head on the neighbor’s knee as though she has never been so tired.
He doesn’t stay long. I hear him lift the shovel and the rhythmic grind and fall of snow as he widens the cleared path. I pretend not to notice but when he is done he leaves behind a different sort of silence.
I break it. I ask my sister what she is doing here and she asks me the same. I tell her I am here for the fresh air, the quiet, to get away from her.
It isn’t fair. But neither is her being on this chair, between these walls.
She tells me I can’t hide here forever.
I sip my tea, so tepid now that it tastes like nothing, and don’t reply. I don’t need to. It is clear that I can bury myself in this forested existence. I have done just that. I add more wood to the fire, encouraging it to hiss and spark.
She sips the tea, sighs like a wounded animal, and asks if I have anything stronger.
In the corner cupboard is a bottle of whiskey that our father never finished. He liked a sip or two after a day out in the cold. I hate the heat of it, but she is quick to dump her tea down the sink and fill the mug with a decent helping from the bottle. The booze smells antiseptic in the bare room.
We sit and watch the flames. I tend to them, while she tends to her cup. I pretend not to see the refills until she spills over, the booze making her voice thin, everything threatening to break.
She asks me how I could leave when I was supposed to be there, to look after her.
The light is fading. The woodshed door is still iced closed. The dog paces and I lead her outside before dusk takes over completely. These are the things I must tend to—not her. My sister is not my responsibility.
I do not turn on any lights as night falls. Leave it to the fire to illuminate what it can. The yellow cup is on its fifth serving of whiskey. I have been counting, watching the tide go out in the bottle.
My sister is crying and telling me that it is all too much, clearing out our father’s office and dealing with our mother, who is worried about me. She does not say the word father, but uses Daddy, lifting the syllables that always caught in my mouth.
She tells me I am selfish. She reminds me she has a husband and child, a family that needs her.
I tell her to go back to her family.
She tells me to fuck off. So I do.
I fuck off to the loft, leaving her with her booze, a blanket, and the dog. She can sleep in front of the fire, like a child. From the bed, I watch the night spread over the frozen lake. The island is a shadow of trees and wilderness in the distance.
Below, she is a flurry of tossing and sniffling. Every time she goes to the bathroom, there are footsteps, the unmistakable sound of urine against porcelain, a half flush. She sets off the water pump twice, making the cabin grumble and shudder. I am not used to having someone living and pissing and hurting where I can hear them.
The coyotes do not take long. They come with their laughing and jostling. I want to open a window so I can hear them better, to pull their calls closer until I can understand. But it is cold out and I don’t trust my sister to keep the fire burning. Tucking the blankets over my feet, I wait, knowing she will come.
The ladder creaks as she climbs up to me.
She asks if there are people outside, says that their talking woke her.
I know she wasn’t sleeping. I pull back the blankets, inviting her close, like we are still young and her fear is still small and easily solved. She settles beside me, pulling the covers so tightly under her chin that my feet are exposed.
I tell her that it is the coyotes.
She shudders, her anxiety as alive as it has always been. I tell her stories, as I did when she was a child and so was I. It was something my father taught me, a way to look after my sister. He took care of our mother and I took care of her. Mother and daughter, cut from the same cloth, he always said.
What material was I made of? What was so different about me that I did not need care?
I tell her the coyotes live across the lake, on the island there. That they are nomads, and in winter they cross the ice for prey. That we are not prey and we are safe. I lie to her, tell her that while I’m here, nothing will hurt her.
Voracity doesn’t matter—she hears only the patterning of my voice. It carries her into an unlikely sleep while, outside, the coyotes’ revelry rises. They have never been so close or so joyous. It is deafening. The room fills with their shrieks and want thuds in me. If my sister were not a warm weight beside me, I would throw off the cabin walls and step out into the winter dark.
But she is, and I do not. I listen as their excitement builds to an explosive crescendo. It holds for a lingering moment, a last invitation in the note — and then it is interrupted. A gunshot breaks the night. It echoes from the north, towards the neighbor’s cabin and it is not the first time. He has apologized before. He doesn’t want to worry me, he’ll try and get one if they come close.
The night falls quiet. The silence folds around my sister and me. I curl my knees under the corner of blanket that she’s left me, and tumble into sleep.
* * *
Morning comes slowly. I wake, not to the light, but to an anxiety that closes my chest. At first, I think it comes from waking up next to my sister, a thing I haven’t done in a decade. Her soft, whiskey breath. But as I convince the embers to flare, let the dog out and back in, feed her, set the coffee pot to boil, there is no breath.
I leave the coffee untasted. I cover myself in layers, hesitate, then shove the pirate book in my pocket as an excuse. I can tell the neighbor that I thought he might like it. Not that I was worried. Not that the sharp retort of a gunshot chased me through my dreams. The dog is disappointed eyes on her armchair. Outside, the buckles on my snowshoes are reluctant to let me in.
The neighbor’s house is a short walk across the ice compared to trying to navigate the snow-thick road. Layers of snow have hardened to a crust. Other animals have passed this way and I am almost certain that the lake is ready to hold my weight. I hug close to the shore anyway, always one to deny myself risks. The snowshoes force patience into my pace, one step after another.
At first, I think it is my father lying there on the snow. Between neck and thick jacket, I can see a peak of pajamas. They are the same grey-blue checked flannel that my father loved. The neighbor must have shopped at the same place, I think, knowing the thought is doing its best to protect me from the snow and the blood.
I thought an ending would be easier if it were not sterilized and contained. If there were no machines counting the divide between life and death. It feels no better, like this.
The wrinkles on his face are deeper in death. His eyes stare up at the morning and I wonder if he saw it dawn, or if he died in darkness. I suppose it doesn’t matter. My eyes skip to the mess of torn flesh that was his stomach. Grey and red and a strange brown which I cannot identify. One pale wrist is exposed, too thin to have ever lifted a shovel or split wood or held a boat to stillness.
The neighbor heard the same call I did. The coyotes summoned us to the night and he had no one lying beside him, demanding he stay inside. The shotgun lies next to him in the snow, like an afterthought. No dying hand reaches out for it.
He must have fallen in the darkness. I wonder if he lay, unable to lift himself and watched the flashing eyes as they circled closer, closer. If he called out for me, thin cries, that slipped away into the night. Or if he invited them in, pack, his inevitable end.
I do not realize that I have knelt on the snow until the dull cold digs through my pants into my knees. My snowshoes are awkward—I kick free of them to tend to him better.
There is no warmth left in his cheek when I reach out to touch it. And yet, I smooth his hair. I free a stray crumb from his stubble. I pull his jacket closed and lay my scarf over the middle of him, where the coyotes sated their hunger. I try to keep him safe in his end.
I talk to him, tell him everything I could not say in life. That I didn’t hate him. That I wish I’d visited more. That I’m angry, I’m scared, that I don’t know how to fix things without him. It is not the kind, almost-stranger that I speak to.
I don’t know how long I have been with him when my sister arrives. Her hand on my shoulder returns me to the morning. My knuckles are stiff with cold. I look up at her face, an echo of mine, the cheeks red, the eyes bright with things unshed. She says something I cannot hear. Again, she says it. She is calling me, pleading. Jay, she says, and my name echoes through the morning, sounding far too human.
Rachael (they/them) is a neurodivergent Pākehā (settler) writer from Aotearoa, New Zealand, currently living and working in Tiohti:áke, Montreal. Their poetry has appeared in Overcomm and LBRNTH, among others, and has been shortlisted for the Malahat New Horizons Award. Their fiction has received the Fence Reader’s Choice fellowship to the International Literary Seminars in Kenya and been longlisted for the Masters Review Anthology and the CBC Short Story Prize. They are currently completing their master’s degree at Concordia University.
Photo by Buddy Photography.