Flash friday, self prompt, 15 minutes no edit in Flash Friday

I woke sweating. A few embers popped, dark red under a crust of black. It’s all I could see. Night. Oh. Yeah. North of White horse, winter. I bet on that one hole course on a twenty foot sailboat, took a bad slice off the boom. I won or maybe lost. It was a long time ago. I felt along the wall pulled back fleece over the window. White, everything outside was night-time white. Fuck. Fumbled for the flashlight, shook it until the batteries caught; a weak yellow glow. I picked a few medium pieces from the wood bin made a triangle over the embers and blew.

It was a long time ago.

This was maybe the third, maybe the fourth winter here, or just one really long one. The bark caught and through shadows into the room. Half a fifth of Chivas on the table. Someone had been nice enough to leave the cap off. Me, it was me. We haunt ourselves, this house, it’s haunted by me.

I can’t golf for a shit, but she couldn’t sail. I don’t even like Chivas.

I took out an elk before the real snow came this year, or last year, I don’t keep time the way … the way I used to. The first … year, I guess, … that I was here I made a kind of root cellar. I know men have killing meat and eating it for a hundred thousand years, but that doesn’t mean anything when you have to do it. I mean that’s not how we learned history. I know the church of England came about because a King wanted a divorce. I don’t know how Og the tribal chief kept meat from October from poisoning him in February.

I dug a root cellar in the dirt so I could keep the carcass frozen and the other predators from taking it. Maybe I should have left … a while ago. Thing is I haunt this house; it’s an obligation, and yeah, physically it’s easier for me to walk from the house than the house to walk away from me, but psychologically? That’s all on me. I know how to make it light enough in here not to spill any whiskey and I know that drinking whiskey is a way of telling time, not the best way, but it has it’s advantages.

A twenty foot sailboat really only needs a putter, maybe a sand wedge. I’m sure it was a stupid bet, I just can’t remember why anymore. I spent a part of last week imaging I had walked away from here, it always stopped when I found … someone. In some versions it was a beautiful woman, in others a bald old man. In all of them it stopped when I supposed to explain. It’s not like I’ve forgotten language, I just don’t know what to do with it.