I spun around. My mother was standing in the corner of the room. But she wasn’t in Alaska.
She was right there, standing in the shadows of our bedroom in South Carolina.
Except, she didn’t look like my mother anymore.
She looked stretched—taller, thinner, her limbs elongated like the shadows of a pine tree at sunset.
“Mom? How are you here? You’re supposed to be in the bush,” I stammered, backing away toward the frosted Tyler.
“I never left,” she whispered, her voice sounding like grinding glaciers.
“The ‘mom’ you talk to on the phone is just a memory I left behind.
Up there, in the silence, something found me.
Something that doesn’t like to be alone.”
She stepped into the light. Her feet didn’t touch the floor; they hovered an inch above the carpet.
“Tyler couldn’t wake up because I was harvesting his dreams to build our bridge.
To bring you home. The wages are good, Annie… but the cost is your warmth.”
I realized then why Tyler had been so tired.
He wasn’t lazy; he was being drained.
Every time he “overslept,” he was being pulled closer to that frozen wilderness my mother had become a part of.
The “amazing offer” wasn’t a job—it was an invitation to join a hive of spirits that lived in the permafrost.
The walls of our apartment began to crack.
Through the peeling wallpaper, I didn’t see wood or insulation.
I saw endless, blindingly white snow and the dark, jagged peaks of the Brooks Range.
The apartment was dissolving, merging with a location 4,000 miles away.
“It’s time to go,” my mother said, reaching out a hand that was now made of pure, jagged ice.
I looked at Tyler.
The frost was climbing up his neck, sealing his lips shut.
He opened his eyes for one second—they were the same milky white as my reflection’s.
He wasn’t scared anymore. He was just… gone.
The police in South Carolina found the apartment empty three days later.
There was no sign of a struggle, no missing luggage, and no fingerprints.
The only thing they found unusual was the temperature.
Despite it being a 95°F July day, the interior of the apartment was a consistent, inexplicable -40°C.
On the kitchen table sat a single, frozen polar bear carved from bone.
Somewhere in the deep, roadless interior of Alaska, two new figures wander the snow.
They don’t need food, they don’t need sleep, and they never miss an alarm.
They are part of the silence now, waiting for the next relative to call home.
