A Fishing Cabin at the End of the World

The air always smells like salt here. It’s damp and cold, seeping through layers of clothes, rusting exposed metal, crusting the hard, craggy cliffs with gritty sea salt. The pull of the ocean is a lullabye to the boy, giving and taking in the impossibly strong tide, rushing back before crashing in again; it’s such a comfort, on the rare nights that the waves are quieter, he doesn’t sleep well. There isn’t another person that he knows of for miles—and he prefers it that way.

Every morning, he pulls on wool socks, a knit sweater, and his canvas overalls when he rolls out of bed. He treads across the age-worn floorboards into the kitchen, where he pushes aside the gingham curtains hanging over the sink. When he opens the window and draws in a deep, steadying breath, his lungs fill with the tangy sea-spray air, crisp and sharp from the chill. To keep it warm and dry inside, he closes the window back and starts the fire in the woodstove. Inside the cast iron door, glowing, crackling embers litter the dark bottom, stacking them with thin dried logs he keeps inside; it’s too damp outside to let them season, or else they’d be soft and moldy in just a few weeks.

Once he has the fire going, he digs through the cabinet for a can of baked beans, his favorite. He dumps them into a small pot so they can heat up, and he gets out another metal pot for coffee as the beans reach a bubbling simmer. When the grounds all sink to the bottom of the pot, he ladles the dark, steaming stuff into a chipped mug. There’s hardly a better breakfast in the morning than hot coffee and baked beans.

Before he goes outside, he grabs his knit cap, pulls on his hip waders, and picks up his tin bucket. There’s nothing worse than getting wet in the New England cold, and he drains the rest of the coffee in his mug before he heads outside and closes the front door behind himself.

He loves the sound of his footfalls on the pebbly sand outside. Waist-high seagrass ripples like an ocean itself all around the fishing cabin, coarse from the wind and the salt in the air. The sky is a pale shade of grey, and wisps of dark clouds rest low on the horizon, drifting over the tops of rugged cliffs. Rough-hewn mountains and rolling hills with sage-colored grass surround the bay, where the dark, roiling waves surge against the shore. The last best place on Earth, he thinks to himself every day, and a brief smile crosses his lips.

The first thing he does every morning is dig for clams. His eyes sweep the ground for the familiar circular indentions in the sand, where he’ll plant his rubber-booted foot right next to the tiny hole. If a tiny spurt of water comes up, or a sprinkle of sand tossed out, he’ll dig a few inches and his fingers will close around the smooth, ridged surface of a clam shell. They make a satisfying metallic thunk when he drops them in the tin bucket, and he doesn’t bother to brush the sand off his hands on his overalls, collecting clams as gulls shriek and argue overhead. When he reaches his benchmark, a rusty, corroded oil drum that’s half-buried in the sand, he turns around and heads back to the cabin.

He rinses off all the clams in seawater before putting them all in the bucket and going back inside. He stores them in the icebox, then washes his hands from water at the washbasin pump. Now it’s his favorite part of the day, and he’s anxious to get outside, where his skiff is beached on the rocky shore.

It’s a sleek wooden boat, about thirteen feet long with worn oars resting inside. The lettering on the side is red and faded, but still legible: The Rosibella. His father’s old skiff, now his, and he pushes it out into the foaming waves with his boots digging into the sand. Once he’s deeper out on the water, he’s able to shift his weight to keep stable on the rocking skiff, keeping the wooden oars drawn in. He opens the lid of the seat and pulls out his fishing net, untangling the thick cord of the handline with the careful, practiced hands of an expert.

He sits down and grabs the oars, pushing the boat farther out onto the water. He’s got callouses on his hands in all the right places, hardened knots and shiny swirls on his palms that have been there for years. He doesn’t often go farther than the crescent of the bay, out onto open water where the bigger fish are: sailfish, marlins, tuna, and sharks—Great Whites, makos, threshers, and sandbars, animals he rarely sees but it sends a shiver down his spine when he does. Nothing makes him turn the skiff around faster than a grey fin slicing through the ocean’s surface in the distance.

He casts the net out once he’s far enough and lets it sink. The water is rough, but through the whitecaps, he can see the silvery bodies of fish darting past the side of the boat. A few that he can’t identify slow down and swim in circles around the confines of the net. Slowly, he pulls the rope back in, and the edges of the net close in like a drawstring bag. Two dark fish with large fins thrash around when he pulls it out of the water, a pair of black sea basses.

He keeps fishing, because he likes to salt and dry the meat and eat it leftover. That’s what his lunch is most of the time, because it’s convenient to pull something out of the icebox and have it for a quick meal. He’s out on the water for at least two hours, and when he’s finished, he hauls a net full of sea basses, cunners, and flounder onto shore.

He drags the skiff back onto shore and guts the fish on the front porch. The blood cakes under his fingernails and silvery, paper-thin scales stick to his hands, and he works quickly and efficiently. It’s sometime in the afternoon when he goes back inside, where he hangs his waders up on the peg beside the front door. He heats up the coffee from that morning on the stove, and takes bitter, steaming sips as he settles down on the couch with a book.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. It’s a pretty leather-bound copy with dusty, aging pages, and he lights a fish oil lamp as the living room grows dim. It gives off a soft, smoky glow, not as bright as kerosene. The kerosene ran out months ago, and it made him realize that his supplies were dwindling. By the time he runs through his canned goods, he hopes he’ll be self-sufficient enough to live off the land without the convenience of prepackaged supplies.

He thumbs through the pages of the novel in the lamplight, sinking into the worn leather corner of the old couch. Wind whistles across the cliffs outside and the window panes rattle against the log walls, a steady rain pattering against the glass. A knot of anxiety tightens in his stomach when there’s a bad storm—he doesn’t know what he would do to fix a broken window. He keeps glancing up from the book at the worsening weather, listening to the creaking of the old house settling.

He’s never read the entire book before. It sat on the top shelf of his closet for years, where he would pick it up and start the first chapter over and over again, but the words seemed to swim across the page without being comprehended at all. Now he reads passages here and there, but mostly, he likes the illustrations; there are a few in each chapter and they’re beautiful, detailed scenes, the massive whale breaching the sea’s surface or a small, dingy room at an inn.

Something out of the corner of his eye catches his attention. A light outside, shaky and bobbing through the sideways rain, not flickering like an oil lamp. He stares at it for several moments, blinking and concentrating on it to see if it’s a figment of his imagination, but it doesn’t go away. Survivors?

It must be an electric lamp of some sort, an immeasurable rarity in this world, even for someone who lives off the grid like him. His breath hitches in his throat as he watches the light in the darkness. He can make out a single figure holding the light, maybe another one, but he can’t quite tell. He grabs his own fish oil lamp and goes to the front door, hesitating for a moment before opening it and stepping out onto the porch.

The rain is still coming down at an angle outside. His lamp doesn’t reach much in the darkness, but he can make out the two people for sure now. A man and a woman, they seem to be at first, but they come closer and he realizes that it’s a boy and girl. They’re somewhere around his own age, teenagers, and his heart is pounding like a staccato drumbeat against his ribcage. It’s been five or six months since he’s seen other people.

Cautiously, he steps off the front porch and into the rainy gloom. The girl is holding the lamp and she has long, dark hair that’s plastered to her face and her shoulders. She’s wearing what looks like a waterlogged wedding dress, a white, lacy gown with a torn, stained skirt. She has on a pair of lace-up combat boots and her face is pale in the harsh white light of the lamp, eyes wide in fear.

“Who are you?” she calls out in a hoarse voice. He doesn’t know why the question takes him aback at first.

He holds up the oil lamp to get a better look at their faces, and clears his throat.

“I’m Ronan,” he replies, and the sound of his own name feels foreign in his mouth. Ronan. There are days that pass in the cabin and it doesn’t even cross his mind. “Who are you?”

The boy standing beside the girl has his hands in his pockets, and the three of them stand there for a moment.

“I’m Eustace,” the boy says, and buries his face in his elbow as he coughs, a crackling, grating noise. He’s wearing a flannel shirt that’s completely soaked with water, and the collar is worn and threadbare. The girl thrusts out her hand to shake, and when Ronan takes it, her fingers are bony and trembling.

“My name’s Mavis,” she says, looking him in the eye. “Do you have anything to eat?”

He nods and ushers them inside, even though he knows how dangerous it is to invite in two strangers, people who could slit his throat and raid the cabin for supplies if they felt like it. But for some reason, he doesn’t think that’s what they’ll do.

He lights more oil lamps inside. Eustace and Mavis stand at the front door for a few moments, cold and shivering, dripping rainwater on the hardwood floor. Ronan keeps glancing over his shoulder at the two of them as he gets out dried fish from the icebox, and fixes each of them a glass of water from the pump.

“You can sit down at the table, if you’d like,” he says, and they do. “I’ll put on a pot of chowder, too.”

Eustace has another coughing fit, his shoulders shaking, his body bent over the kitchen table. Mavis lays a hand on his back. “We’d appreciate that, Ronan.”

The two of them look eerily like brother and sister, possibly even twins; Eustance’s dark, wet hair falls in his face like Mavis’s, and the two of them have the same color eyes, pale blue that almost looks silver.

Ronan digs a pot out of the cabinet and gets out what he needs for a clear broth chowder, throwing together the fish and the clams he got from that morning. “You can call me Roe.”

A tense, heavy silence falls on the kitchen. He invited them in for selfish reasons—to stave off the pressing loneliness he faces each day. Once he has the soup going, he puts on another pot of coffee and ladles three mugs full of it, and the two strangers at the table accept it gratefully as he sits down with them. He’s got a few paper bags of the grounds left and he doesn’t know how he’ll get more. His parents were coffee drinkers and now he is, too; when the power first went out, it was one of the first things he got at the mercantile in town. His parents had been living off the grid for years when everything went bad, but it still impacted every facet of their life on the rural, untouched coast of Maine.

“You seem to be doing pretty well by yourself,” Mavis says, her thin fingers wrapped around the tin mug of coffee. “I haven’t seen anybody thriving like this for years—most people don’t even have a home anymore. Eustace is my brother. All we do is drift around and stay wherever we can.”

Roe just nods. He doesn’t want to turn them down, but he doesn’t want them to ask if they can stay. From what he used to hear on the radio, the fishing cabin is one last little piece of paradise in a dying world. He doesn’t listen to the radio anymore because the battery died and there’s nothing more worth paying attention to anymore.

“You don’t seem much older than us,” Mavis says. “How old are you?”

“I’m fifteen,” he replies. “I’ll be sixteen in February.”

“We’re both sixteen. Are you the only person living here?”

He nods as he sips his coffee. “My parents are dead. They both had health problems, they needed prescription meds. Eventually all the pharmacies ran out, and… Yeah.”

Eustace grimaces in sympathy. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

One of the only things they used electricity for before the solar flare was their refrigerator, for the few items they kept cold. Once all the electricity went out and they died, Roe buried them on the hill behind the house and dragged every electrical appliance outside, leaving them all in a rusting pile far away from the cabin. He crawled onto the roof and ripped off the solar panels, put every generator he could find in the closet in his parents’ bedroom. That was about six months ago, and he’s hardly seen another living human being in that time.

The clear broth chowder would be better stewing in the pot on the stove for several hours, but Roe fills up two big bowls for Mavis and Eustace, and they don’t say a word as they eat every spoonful of the seafood soup. He finds an old tin of saltine crackers, and they eat the chowder with that, too. He doesn’t know how much he trusts them yet.

Enough to tell them they can stay the night, if they need to. Once Eustace is finished with his bowl, a violent cough racks through his body, and there’s blood on his lips.

The three of them all sleep in the living room that night; it’s closer to the woodstove in the kitchen and the weather’s been getting a lot colder. Roe drags his mattress from his bedroom into the living room for Mavis, he sleeps on the recliner, and Eustace sleeps on the couch. He collapses on the old leather couch with a wool blanket, but he keeps coughing, having a fit every few minutes.

Roe doesn’t sleep. He sits up in the recliner in the corner of the room, looking out the window and watching the strangers in his house. He’s longed to be with other people for so long, but now he doesn’t know what to do—or if it’s the safest thing to do. Eustace eventually settles to sleep and he’s quiet for a little bit, but Mavis sits up in bed with her knees hugged to her chest, still dressed in the damp white gown.

“You’ve been very kind to us,” she says, not looking Roe in the eye. Her voice is soft and trembling, but it shatters the tense silence like a broken window. He’s snapped out of a daze, and he shrugs, not knowing what to say at first.

“I… It’s fine. It’s nice having someone to talk to after so long.” He watches the drops outside race down the window in tiny streams. “It gets really quiet around here after a while.”

“I didn’t think there were any places like this left in the world,” she whispers, even quieter than normal. “It’s almost too good to be true. We’ve seen some horrible things.”

He doesn’t want to ask what, and hopes she doesn’t tell him; he keeps himself as sheltered from the rest of the world as possible, after hearing what horrors were happening everywhere else from the radio.

“We were staying with a group of travelers for a few weeks,” she continues. “Maybe a few months. We hunted, foraged, all of us making a group effort to keep ourselves fed. But then there was a drought, and all the animals started dying, and it was harder to collect things to eat. One of the members of our group died and the others started eating his body.”

Roe’s heart drops to the pit of his stomach, suddenly nauseous. Mavis wrings her hands anxiously.

“And then Eustace got sick when we decided to leave. He would get better, and then worse, and then better again, but that cough would always come back. It hasn’t been this bad before, and I think he’s been running a fever, but I can’t tell for sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Roe says very quietly. On the couch, Eustace is hardly breathing and his body is still.

“I really don’t know what I would do without him,” she says. “I’d just lose my mind. I love him too much.”

Roe wants her to stop talking, so he doesn’t say anything else. She eventually lies down to go to sleep, and he extinguishes the light of the oil lamp, but he drifts in and out of a half-sleep for the rest of the night.

The living room is bathed in a grey pre-dawn when he wakes up. Everything feels still, and the first thing he does is make sure Mavis and Eustace are still there. She’s lying on her side and her long, dark hair is fanned out over the pillow he gave her. Eustace is rolled over on his side, too, his back facing the living room. Roe watches him to see if his chest will rise and fall with a breath, but several minutes pass and the boy doesn’t move at all.

Roe gets up to check his pulse, and his body is cold to the touch.

He ignores his own horror and disgust and works quickly, wrapping the body in an old bedsheet and carrying him outside. He’s tall but thin, and once Roe gets off the front porch and heads up the hill, he has to drag the boy’s limp form through the tall, dew-wet grass. He goes back to the cabin and grabs a shovel leaning against the side of the house, and it takes him about two hours to dig the grave; he keeps looking up to see if Mavis is coming, but he doesn’t see any movement in the house through the windows.

It’s only a few feet deep, and he backhands sweat off his face as he packs dirt over the grave until it’s rock-hard. He glances up and he sees Mavis coming up the hill, holding the stained skirt of her dress so it doesn’t drag on the ground, pointless now.

When she sees that he has a shovel, she lets go of the skirt and her pale face contorts in gut-wrenching realization.

She falls to her knees sobbing. It’s all he can do to stand there composed, biting the inside of his cheek so hard he can taste blood. The wind whistles over the tops of the cliffs but her wailing is louder, and he stays with her for several minutes as rain starts to fall. When he drags the shovel back to the cabin, she’s quiet, but she stays by the grave with her legs folded beneath her. It doesn’t even have a grave marker.

He leaves the shovel leaning against the side of the house. Inside, he drags his mattress back to his bedroom and tidies up the living room, anything he can do to busy himself for a distraction. He pulls the blinds down so he doesn’t have to look at the hill.

The silence and the stillness are suffocating. He stays inside for the rest of the day, pacing around the different rooms, feeling like a stranger in his own house. When darkness falls outside, he lights the fish oil lamp and goes outside to check on Mavis.

She’s not by the grave, and he even checks the surrounding woods, wading through the tall grass to see if he’ll find her body. The full moon glows silver on the rocking waves in the bay, and he tramps back to the cabin and shrugs off his wet layers. When he lays down to go to sleep, all he does is stare at the clapboard ceiling for hours.

He tries to treat the next morning like everything’s normal; he heats up baked beans, drinks coffee, then pulls on his waders and goes outside. The Rosibella is beached on the shore, and he pushes her out into the water, not to fish but to get his mind off Mavis and Eustace. He lets the skiff drift on the waves once he’s out in the middle of the bay, knees pulled up to his chest as he sits on the wooden seat. Gulls circle overhead and smoke puffs from the chimney of the cabin back on the shore, and he draws in deep breaths of the cold, salty air, squinting at the grey sky.

Beyond the bay, a dark fin slices through the whitecaps like the blade of a knife. He grabs the wooden oars to start rowing back, but something in the water catches his eye, drifting right beneath the surface where there’s no shore and the waves crash against the black, rocky cliffs. A white skirt that floats like a wraith, and dread grips his heart with electric, icy fingers.

He glances over his shoulder and sees the fin again. Instead of retrieving the body, he rows to the shore as fast as he can, dragging the skiff onto the pebbled sand. A knot of guilt twists in his stomach, but he shuts the front door behind himself and doesn’t look back.

Several minutes later, he goes up to the curtains to shut them. For a split second, he sees two fins circling around the body in the water—but he closes the gingham cloth and tries to keep his breathing steady, in through his nose, out through his mouth. Bile rises in his throat and he holds onto the butcher block counter, hoping he doesn’t vomit. Things happen so quickly out here.

He spends paranoid days in the house. The wind is a scream, windows rattling in their panes being shaken by the restless dead. He’s never been scared of the dark before, but he keeps the oil lamps burning constantly. He only leaves the cabin when he has to, but even then, he has to work up the courage to go to different rooms. The images of their faces won’t leave his head.

He’s sitting by the window, staring at the bay out the glass. He needs more fish but he doesn’t want to go outside. There haven’t been sharks in the water for days, but he’s still scared to take the skiff out to fish, and limits himself to digging for clams when he’s comfortable enough.

Weeks pass the same way. Grass grows over the grave on the hill and it takes him a while, but he eventually goes out on The Rosibella to net fish again. As he stands in the swaying, rocking boat, he keeps watching over his shoulder, unable to fully relax like he used to. He’s worried he’ll be this way for the rest of his life.

His provisions dwindle as the months wear on, the weather growing colder, the rain turning to sleet and then a wintry mix—never a dry snowfall. He only drinks coffee once or twice a week now, and eats mostly what he fishes and finds off the land, saving the canned and dry goods for emergencies. Everything is for survival now, and the memory of the brother and sister follow him like a haunting ghost.

One evening, he’s boiling clams in a pot on the stove when he sees someone stumbling across the sandy shore in the dwindling daylight. A man in a tattered yellow raincoat, his footsteps weaving in and out of the water in an unsteady, limping gait. Roe watches him for a moment, then extinguishes the oil lamp on the counter. He makes sure the front door is locked and waits behind it so the man doesn’t see him if he comes up to the porch.

He closes his eyes and balls his hands into fists when the man knocks at the door, then tries the handle when no one answers. It’s quiet for a few minutes after that, and there’s no one outside when he peers out the window.

He lights the oil lamp again and the orange flame flickers dull behind the soot-stained glass cover. He sinks down at the kitchen table and buries his face in his hands, and each sob racks through his entire body, his shoulders shaking with the strain. The air always smells like death here.