Molly Whuppie 2

Morning crept up on the cabin from the forest that spread around it like the sea. The land was so flat, and the forest so wide, that the light seemed to leak from the trees to fill the world. At first it coloured the sky a cold grey, pinching out the stars, and then it lapped at the edge of the dark clearing that Molly’s father had hacked out of the woods in those first days of building the cabin. Slowly it poured on in, filling up the space between the living tree-trunks and the dead wood of the cabin’s walls, and, as it came, it revealed the hiding places of the shadows in their deep corners and their little ditches, and it brought the shadows with it, even through the window into the cabin itself.

Inside, Molly’s mother moved about busily. She stacked five used bowls at the end of the table; she laid out thread and a long needle; she fussed over the tiny glow in the embers of last night’s fire. She pulled back the curtain that hung between her and her daughters’ empty bed and paused to take in what little of their warmth and sleepy scent remained. It would soon fade, and later, much later, she would be able to begin to forget them. 

But for now, she would clean the five bowls that were stacked at the end of the table, and then pick up the needle and thread, and see which clothes needed mending, and all the while she would coax and care for the small flames struggling in the hearth, feeding them with continual gifts of tear-damp wood.

In the slowly brightening forest, the three girls followed their father’s tall, spare figure as he trod a path for them. The night had laid a crust on top of the snow and so, as he walked, he would raise one foot high, balancing for a second before the crust cracked under his weight and sent him plunging up to his knees in the freezing powder underneath. Lift, crack, plunge, lift, crack, plunge, he ploughed forward. Behind him, the girls had to stretch out their legs to follow in his footsteps. 

Their route was not a familiar one, but they had worked in the forest often with their father, and this morning they had eaten an unusually good breakfast – there had been hot porridge as well as a little coffee - and so the two older girls laughed, and pushed at one another when they fell occasionally in the deep snow. But Molly was quiet, and thought, “I wonder how it’s going to happen?”