15 May Leftovers

Part I

The Grieves homestead sat at the base of a glacial valley where the tree line dipped and staggered in crooked, snow-heavy steps. It had been Wendell’s for twenty years, and Marianne’s for fifteen. The structure was nothing special—a two-story A-frame flanked by a tool shed, a buried propane tank, and the woodshed they replenished together every September. But the land… the land had been chosen with a particular kind of silence in mind. Not the kind you get in city basements or hotel rooms with double-glazed windows. The real kind. The kind that presses itself into your bones and won’t leave, even when you ask it nicely.

They liked it that way—no neighbors, and no phone lines. No interruptions or intrusions.

Unfortunately, it also meant that no help was coming.

By the time the first storm rolled down the ridge that winter, they were already stocked: root vegetables wrapped in burlap, meat sealed in waxed paper and plastic, broth and lard frozen solid in mason jars. Wendell had rotated the solar batteries twice already. The generator worked fine, though they seldom used it. And in the center of it all, like some old shrine, sat the black cast-iron stew pot that had belonged to Marianne’s grandmother—a big-bellied antique with lion feet and a soot-slick lid. It never left the stovetop. Wendell sometimes joked it was her real husband.

“Not funny,” she’d said, every single time. “That pot fed three generations before me. It knows things.”

He always chuckled and nodded and let the silence hang, pretending not to wonder what she meant by that.

* * * * * *

On the day she died, they had been arguing over the ham hocks.

“Too much salt,” she’d said. “You know your heart’s not what it used to be.”

“I didn’t salt it,” Wendell replied. “You salted it last fall. It’s been in the freezer ever since.”

“Well then, the pot likes it that way. We’ll blame it.”

He rolled his eyes and tried to hide the smile, and she’d whacked his arm with a dish towel before going down to the cellar for more parsnips. That was the last thing she ever said.

Wendell heard the fall but didn’t react right away. It was a strange sound—a thud like that of a duffle bag being dropped. He called down once, but received no answer. Then again, louder. His legs didn’t want to move, but he made them, carrying the flashlight and their last working lantern.

He found her at the bottom of the cellar stairs, one arm twisted beneath her, eyes open and glassy. Blood had bloomed behind her skull and spread like ink into the packed dirt. Her fingers twitched once before going still.

Wendell stood there for a long time, the lantern in his left hand painting her features with a fluttering orange glow. He didn’t call for help. Didn’t run. Didn’t scream.

There was no point. The radio was down. The phone had never worked up there. And even if the weather hadn’t already dropped three feet of snow between them and the nearest ranger outpost, no one was coming for days.

He went back up the stairs, picked up the dish towel, and folded it neatly beside the sink.

* * * * * *

He didn’t bury her. Couldn’t, really. The ground outside had gone rigid, sealed with ice and dry-packed snow. He wasn’t strong enough to cut through it, and the shed only had a post-hole digger. So he wrapped her in a blue tarp, the kind they used to cover the woodpile, and dragged her gently to the far end of the basement, where it stayed coldest. The meat freezer was already full. The storm would keep her.

He built a fire. He sat in silence for hours. When his stomach finally reminded him of the time, he rose on autopilot, ladled some broth from the tin by the stove, and lit the gas under the stew pot. It clanked softly as it heated, then began to hum with a slow, oily burble.

He spoke to her as it warmed.

“I used the beef we set aside in October,” he said. “The one with the good marbling. You said to save it for a special occasion.”

Outside, the wind made the windows complain.

“I don’t know if this counts, but… I think you’d forgive me for that.”

The pot let out a little hiss. Just moisture escaping. Just steam.

He poured in the broth, added carrots, bay leaf, garlic, and half a dried onion. It smelled just like her version—so close he felt his chest tighten. Her favorite wooden spoon, the one with the worn-down handle and the dark stripe from too many burns, sat waiting by the cutting board. He used it like a ritual.

* * * * * *

That night, he sat at their table and ate two full bowls.

The taste was right. Uncannily right. But it wasn’t just the seasoning—it was the memory. Something about the mouthfeel, the slow unfolding of flavor at the back of his tongue, the way it lingered just beneath the nasal cavity… it felt like her. As though a part of her was sitting there across from him, watching, approving.

He even looked once. Just a glance over the rim of his bowl. And of course, no one was there.

He chuckled without humor, set down the spoon, and poured himself the last of their blackberry wine. The bottle had dust on it, but the cork had held.

“To your stew,” he said aloud, raising the glass.

The house creaked in the wind.

* * * * * *

Days passed. Or weeks. The storm never really broke—it just sagged and pressed in heavier. The world outside the windows went gray, then white, then gray again. Wendell kept the fire alive. Kept cooking. Kept speaking to her, especially when the pot was bubbling.

He didn’t know why he kept using it. Habit, maybe. Or superstition. Or maybe it was because the meals always came out better when he used it. The vegetables softened just right. The meat practically fell apart on the tongue.

He stopped trying to vary the recipes after a while. Always the same stew. Always the same bowl.

He caught himself speaking to her in second-person again. He’d read somewhere that was a sign of complicated grief. But that’s what they were—complicated. And grief didn’t stop him from being hungry.

The meat was still holding up okay. Still a few sealed cuts in the bottom freezer. Enough to stretch.

But the day he pulled out a package he couldn’t remember wrapping, something shifted.

It was labeled in her handwriting. Thick black marker. No date.

Just: “SAVE FOR SPRING – HIGH FAT.”

He turned it over in his hands. The wrap was intact. The seal had held. It looked like meat. Dark red. Marbled. Dense.

It smelled sweet.

He stared at it for a while before placing it on the counter.

Then he turned to the pot, already heating, and said, “You sure about this one?”

A gust of wind made the stovepipe moan. The pot burbled softly, just as it always did.

He unwrapped the cut. Didn’t look too closely.

Added garlic. Thyme. A splash of vinegar. A little tallow for depth.

And stirred.

* * * * * *

That night, the stew tasted incredible.

He wept over the bowl. Not because he missed her. Not even because he knew something was wrong.

But because it felt—for just a moment—like she had returned.

Part II

The pot had weight, and not just in pounds.

Wendell felt it every time he lifted the lid—like it resisted, just slightly, as though it had something to say before being opened. It was subtle. Mechanical, even. Easy to rationalize. But he started noticing it after the fifth stew in a row. Something about the timing, how it never boiled too fast or too slow, how the seasoning always seemed perfectly distributed no matter how distracted he was during prep. It made him think of those old folk tales Marianne liked to recite when they sat by the fire—about witches who cooked memory into soup, about pots that remembered the souls they’d fed.

He hadn’t believed in that kind of thing. Still didn’t. But he didn’t mock her for it, either. That had always been part of their agreement. She could call the pot an heirloom with a soul, and he could call it cast iron and leave it at that. But now she was gone, and the damn thing still hummed at him like it had something left to finish.

He told himself it was grief.

Then he found the recipe.

* * * * * *

It had been tucked inside an old recipe binder beneath the flour sack drawer. He’d opened it searching for lentils. What he found instead was an envelope sealed with dried wax—Marianne’s seal, the one she used for handmade cards and canning labels. It was shaped like a fern frond.

The envelope bore no name. No date.

Inside were four things:

1. A single sheet of thick, yellowed paper.
2. A sprig of what looked like dried sage, but sweeter-smelling.
3. A tiny photo—black and white, grainy, of an unfamiliar woman stirring a pot in what looked like a cabin much like theirs.
4. A handwritten note on lined paper, titled: “Memory Stew.”

Wendell sat at the table and read the recipe twice.

It started off innocent enough—root vegetables, salt, marrow-rich cuts, water from the spring. But the farther he got, the more cryptic it became.

“The pot remembers if you feed it in order.
The broth takes the shape of the one who loved you most.
If you speak aloud while stirring, she will listen.
If you eat alone, she will return.”

The last line was scratched in ink that had bled through the page:

“But beware—she may come hungry.”

Wendell didn’t laugh. He didn’t blink. He just folded the paper and set it beside the photo, careful not to smudge the dried leaves still clinging to the envelope.

He’d heard her say the phrase “Memory Stew” once before. Years ago. A joke between her and her niece, Ellie, when Ellie came to visit and brought takeout.

He had thought it was nonsense then.

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

* * * * * *

The next stew came together differently. Not rushed, not ritualistic, just… careful.

He followed the recipe to the letter, except for the final line. He didn’t speak out loud while stirring. Not at first.

The meat that day came from a package labeled “ELK-21,” which should’ve meant late-season meat from the year before. It had been sealed well, but he didn’t remember the kill. And when he cut it open, the scent that greeted him was wrong. Not spoiled. Not rancid. But familiar in a way that made his throat tighten.

He used it anyway.

The pot hissed as the cubes of meat met the fat. The garlic joined soon after. Then carrots. Then potato.

Wendell stood at the stove and stirred, the wooden spoon whispering against the iron in soft concentric motions.

“If you speak aloud while stirring, she will listen…”

He thought about it. Felt stupid. Said nothing.

Then, halfway through his second turn around the pot, the words slipped out like someone else had thought them for him.

“I miss you.”

The broth trembled. Just a ripple. Could’ve been the wind in the chimney.

He stirred once more.

“I wish you were here to taste this.”

The wind stopped.

For one second, maybe two, he heard a sigh from the corner of the room, the soft, tired exhale of someone settling into a chair after a long day.

He looked over his shoulder.

Nothing. Just the old rocking chair beside the stove. Still as stone.

* * * * * *

That night, he dreamt of her.

Not the memory-version his mind had served up in recent nights—soft-focus, incomplete, stitched together from old photographs and better days. No, this was her. Clear. Grounded. More detailed than his mind had any right to remember.

She was in the kitchen, barefoot in her sleep pants, stirring the pot while humming the same lullaby her grandmother used to sing. Something in Romanian. He didn’t know the words, but he knew the tune.

He reached for her. Could feel the warmth of her skin.

She turned and kissed his cheek.

“Salt,” she said. “Needs more salt.”

When he woke, the stew was already bubbling on the stove.

* * * * * *

The next few days bled together. He cooked, he stirred, he spoke aloud.

Sometimes it was just memories—her old sayings, stories she liked to tell, things she used to mutter while dicing onions. But other times, the words felt like they weren’t entirely his. As though someone else were threading thoughts into his mouth mid-sentence.

He’d catch himself saying things he didn’t mean to—like calling the pot “dear,” or whispering “there you are” when lifting the lid.

He didn’t stop. Couldn’t.

Each time he tasted the stew, her voice grew clearer.

She asked questions now. Simple ones.

“Do you remember the garden?” “Have you checked the pantry yet?” “Did you sleep last night?”

And one evening, as he sat on the couch with the bowl in his lap, her voice asked:

“Will you let me stay?”

Wendell froze.

He didn’t answer. But he didn’t throw the bowl away, either.

* * * * * *

The pot never burned. Not once.

Even when he left it untended for hours. Even when the fire ran too hot. The contents never scorched, never boiled over.

And the stew… it evolved. Became richer. More nuanced. As though the pot were adjusting the flavor for him personally. Some nights it had a sweetness he couldn’t trace. Other times it had a tang of vinegar or wine, despite him not adding either.

He told himself he was using old ingredients.

He told himself the freezer was mislabeled.

He told himself he didn’t recognize the meat because she’d stored it, not him.

But one afternoon, digging through the lower shelf of the freezer, he found a small plastic package marked “FOR HIM – DO NOT OPEN UNTIL SPRING.”

It was wrapped in white butcher paper, and the handwriting was hers. The letters were rushed. Uneven.

Inside was a single cut of meat—pink-white, pale with fat and strangely lean in the middle. No bone. Just flesh.

He stood holding it for a long time.

When he brought it to the stove, the pot clinked softly as he set it down, as if in acknowledgement.

He added turnip. Parsley. Tallow. A dash of dried wine from the cupboard.

And stirred.

* * * * * *

That night, the stew was thicker.

He chewed more slowly. The broth was darker. The meat had a silkier texture. Not stringy like venison, or chewy like goat. It flaked apart like overcooked lamb—but it wasn’t lamb. He knew that much. He didn’t want to think about it too long.

As he ate, she spoke to him—not beside him, not around him—but from within.

“I never wanted to go. You know that, right?” “I didn’t plan for it to happen that way.” “I’m sorry.”

His eyes watered. From heat, maybe. Or something else.

He set down the spoon halfway through the bowl and listened.

The fireplace crackled behind him.

“It doesn’t have to end, Wendell.”

He said nothing.

“Just one more night. Just one more bowl.”

He looked at the pot.

It wasn’t boiling.

It was… waiting.

Part III

By the second week of the thaw, Wendell had stopped keeping track of the days.

The weather outside meant nothing. He went out only when the firewood ran low or the smell of the unshoveled outhouse became too much to bear. Otherwise, he kept to the house. The kitchen. The pot.

He’d developed new habits without realizing it. Stirring in figure-eights instead of circles. Speaking to the stew before tasting it. Sleeping in his armchair instead of their bed.

The chair was closer to the pot.

Closer to her.

He’d stopped thinking of it as madness.

Madness didn’t bring warmth. It didn’t whisper lullabies in the voice of your dead wife. Didn’t hum the same half-Romanian tune in perfect pitch each night as the stew came to boil.

Something had changed inside the house. He felt it in the walls, in the warping of light just after dusk, in the way her perfume bloomed at the top of the stairs before vanishing again.

The stew had become more than food. It was something else now—bridge, channel, sacrament. He didn’t have a word for it.

But he knew the rules.

If he stirred and spoke, she would listen.

If he ate alone, she would return.

And return she did.

* * * * * *

It started with scent. Her favorite lilac and white musk perfume, which she hadn’t worn in years—not since they’d gone fully off-grid. He caught it strongest while the stew was on and lingering faintly for hours after. He found himself holding onto it like a tether, standing still in the hallway just to breathe it in.

Then came the sounds. Floorboards creaking in patterns he recognized. The soft click of the kettle lid being placed beside the sink. The faint rustle of pages turning in the other room.

He tried, once, to follow the sound. Opened the bedroom door expecting silence, maybe his own echo.

Instead, the radio was playing. It shouldn’t have been—it hadn’t worked since the battery box died in November—but there it was. WEVV, their old public broadcast station out of Missoula. Faint, warped, grainy.

A voice was reading from Little House in the Big Woods, one of her favorites.

He didn’t change the dial. Just sat down and listened, bowl in hand.

The voice kept going.

* * * * * *

When she started answering his questions, he didn’t find it strange.

“Do you remember when you brought me here the first time?” he’d asked aloud one night.

“You tracked mud through the whole cabin,” came her reply, warm and amused, right behind his ear. “Then blamed it on the dog. We didn’t have a dog.”

“Thought maybe it’d spare me some scolding.”

“Didn’t work, did it?”

He laughed. Actually laughed.

It felt like a memory, but deeper. More immediate. Like the words weren’t just remembered, but shared. As though they were speaking from opposite ends of the same breath.

He found he could feel her smile sometimes.

Not see or hear it, but actually feel it—like warmth on his shoulder, similarly to the way her hand used to press his back when she leaned in to taste his cooking.

She touched him in dreams, too. Lightly, with intention.

And when she said his name, it didn’t echo the way dreams usually do.

It landed.

* * * * * *

The stew had grown richer.

Every night brought new depth to it—textures and layers he didn’t add, seasonings he didn’t own. Some nights it was savory and soft, others sharp with fermented tang. Once it had an anise-like flavor that turned his stomach and then left him crying like a child without knowing why.

He stopped using the pantry entirely. Whatever the stew needed, the pot seemed to find.

He’d wake from his chair to the scent of it cooking.

The fire still alive. The pot still bubbling.

He couldn’t remember cutting anything. Couldn’t remember adding wood. His arms and hands had the dull ache of recent use.

But the meals were always perfect.

* * * * * *

It was after one of these nights that he caught himself talking with his mouth full.

Not just talking—conversing.

She was telling him a story about her childhood, about a girl who used to bully her at Sunday school. Wendell responded without thinking, chewing slowly, nodding along.

Then he stopped.

His spoon hovered midair.

The stew was still hot, still steaming. The voice inside his head continued:

“She pulled my braids and told me Baba’s stew smelled like dirt. So I switched her communion wafer with a dried beet. Served her right.”

Wendell swallowed hard.

“Marianne?”

“Still here.”

He looked at the pot. Then at the bowl.

Then back at the chair across from him.

“Where… are you?”

“You know where.”

Her voice was still soft. Still hers. But it echoed now. Not in the house. In him.

The pressure behind his eyes. The murmuring along his spine. The flicker of memory that wasn’t his.

He could feel her in his chest, in his gut. In the corners of thought, where he usually kept silence.

The stew was no longer food.

It was her.

* * * * * *

He tried, once, not to eat it.

Tried to leave the pot cold, to go the day on bread and beans and melted snow. But by dusk, his hands were shaking. His tongue felt too large in his mouth. His joints ached as though he’d been left out in the cold.

Her voice whispered all day. Gently. Persistently.

“You’re hungry.” “Why are you doing this?” “I thought we wanted to be together.”

He ignored her and sat on the couch, wrapping himself in her old sweater.

But by nightfall, the smell of the stew—somehow hot and cooking even without flame—filled the kitchen again. The pot hissed softly. The lid clinked once.

He approached it like a man approaching the scene of his own execution.

“Did you do this?”

“You did. You always make the best meals.”

“No. No, I—”

“It’s alright. I know it’s hard. You can stop fighting. I’m not mad. I just want to be close.”

He lifted the lid.

Steam bloomed upward, sweet and fatty.

He wept as he ate.

* * * * * *

It happened during the second blackout.

The solar batteries had finally drained to nothing, and the wind had brought the power lines down in the valley days ago. He didn’t care. He’d stopped using the lights. The fire and the pot were all he needed.

He woke up on the kitchen floor, cold, cramping, and barefoot.

The stew was cooking.

A fresh cut of meat floated in the broth, pink at the edges, ivory in the center.

He didn’t remember cutting anything or lighting the stove.

His hands were trembling. His mouth dry.

He looked around the room. The freezer door was open, and the tarp from the basement was gone.

That’s when he noticed the footprints.

Wet, red-tinged prints led from the back stairs to the kitchen—wide and dragging, like something had been hauled across the floor. The tarp lay half-folded near the pantry door, darkened with fluids that had soaked into the grain.

The sharp smell of iron hung in the air.

Wendell dropped the spoon.

He followed the prints, slowly—not wanting to see, but unable to resist. Down the stairs, back into the cellar, he went.

The cold hit his lungs like broken glass.

He turned on the old battery-powered lantern. Its low light flickered, dimly illuminating his surroundings.

And he discovered what was left of her.

* * * * * *

The tarp had been unwrapped.

Inside, scattered like scraps from a butcher’s table, lay ribs, vertebrae, the clean scoop of her pelvis. Her skull—mostly intact—had been propped gently against the wall, her jaw still attached by a string of dried tissue.

Her left hand was missing. The right one clutched the edge of a stained recipe card.

Wendell stumbled backward, lantern shaking in his grip.

The floor beneath him was sticky.

It took every ounce of strength not to vomit.

He fell to his knees. Cried out. Something broke in his chest.

“You weren’t supposed to see me like this.”

Her voice came not from above, not from behind, but from within. Close. Inside his spine. Threaded between his ribs.

He clutched his head.

“God… Marianne, what have I done?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You missed me. I missed you, too.”

“This is wrong. This is sick.”

“You’re the one who started cooking. I just came home.”

“I ate you.”

Silence.

Then, gently, “Not all of me. I’m still here.”

He looked at the bones, then at his hands.

His palms were stained pink. Fingernails caked with blackened stew.

He had done this.

He had fed himself her memory, her essence—her flesh.

And he still wanted more.

“Don’t leave me again,” she said.

He closed his eyes and felt her press against him from the inside.

He didn’t know if it was possession or madness. Didn’t care anymore.

Either way… he wasn’t alone.

* * * * * *

The next day, the radio crackled.

“Sundown Ridge Station, come in. This is Mason Harrow at District Base. Anyone there?”

Wendell stared at it for a long time before lifting the receiver.

His voice sounded strange. Slightly higher. Smooth at the edges.

“This is Grieves. Cabin’s intact. Roads passable by foot.”

Static, then:

“Jesus, Wendell. You’re alive. We’ve got a team headed in today. You’ve got visitors.”

Wendell looked toward the stove.

The pot burbled softly.

He turned the radio off.

Behind his teeth, something smiled.

Part IV

The radio sat dead now.

He’d turned it off after speaking with Ranger Harrow and hadn’t touched it since. Once the signal died again in the storm’s wake, he didn’t bother to reestablish contact. What would he have said, anyway?

Come quickly. I’ve been eating my dead wife, and she’s started talking from inside my brain.

No. Better to wait.

Better to let things finish.

The pot was already simmering when he woke the next morning, despite the fire being little more than glowing embers. The smell crept upstairs before the light did—rich, meaty, laced with something floral and honey-sweet beneath the fat.

He knew what it meant. She was feeding herself now.

No more denial.

No more pretending the meat was old venison or mislabeled elk or something from before her death.

No more letting the pot speak for him.

He’d eaten her. Slowly. Reverently. Not in some monstrous frenzy, not in madness or malice—but one bowl at a time, telling himself it was memory. Communion. Nostalgia.

But now… now it was hunger.

And he couldn’t tell whose it was anymore.

* * * * * *

He stopped using mirrors.

Every time he saw his face, it looked different. Not dramatically—he wasn’t seeing someone else staring back. But the eyes sat wrong. The mouth moved too easily, too expressively. His shoulders curved in when he walked, like hers used to. His hands lingered on objects, fingertips pressing into cloth and wood like they were savoring textures.

He started humming.

Not consciously. The tune just leaked out of him, old Romanian verses Marianne used to whisper while kneading dough or grinding herbs. He didn’t know the lyrics. But his voice carried them all the same.

He stopped noticing when the transitions happened.

One moment he’d be seated by the fire, mind blank, watching the snow. The next he’d be stirring the pot, ladling stew, chewing softly while the warmth climbed up through his bones and into his skull.

Sometimes it was her doing the chewing.

He could feel it.

* * * * * *

He tried, once, to stop.

After finding what was left of her in the cellar, he’d sworn—genuinely sworn—to let the stew rot. To let the pot go cold. He unplugged the propane line. Boarded the stove shut with a crossbar of pine. Sat shaking in the bedroom for hours, starving, aching, wrapped in every blanket they owned.

The pain came first. Not just hunger, but withdrawal—limbs seizing, stomach twisting in dry spasms.

Then the voice.

“You’re hurting yourself.” “Don’t do this to us.” “You promised.”

“I didn’t promise anything,” he whispered into the dark.

“You didn’t have to. I know you. I am you now.”

That last part was said not aloud but through him—a thought not fully formed, an echo reverberating in his bones.

She was more than just present now. She was inhabiting. Migrating.

That night, he blacked out.

When he awoke, the kitchen was warm again.

The boards were gone.

The stove was lit.

And the pot was full.

* * * * * *

He found himself staring into the mirror above the sink a few mornings later, searching for some last fragment of who he used to be.

His mouth smiled without permission.

It wasn’t wide. Just a soft little tilt, the way she used to do when she was about to tell a lie.

He spoke.

“Don’t I look good, Wendell?”

His lips moved.

The voice was his.

But the tone, the cadence… hers.

He stepped back. Bumped into the counter.

“Stop it.”

No response.

“I said stop.”

Another smile.

“You’re scared,” she whispered through his throat. “That’s alright. I was scared too. But now we’re together.”

“This isn’t what I wanted.”

“It’s what I needed.”

He gripped the edge of the sink, knuckles white.

“You’re stealing me.”

“No. I’m finishing you.”

And the truth of it hit hard. She wasn’t killing him. She was overwriting. Erasing. Adopting his posture, his tone, his memories.

Each bowl had brought her closer. Each bite had hollowed him out.

He was nothing more than her transitional form now, her chrysalis.

And the shell was almost shed.

* * * * * *

Three days before the rangers arrived, Wendell walked into the basement for the last time.

Not because he hoped to bury her, or even to make peace—but because something was missing.

He had started to forget her voice, her true voice—the one from their life together. The one that said his name with warmth, that hummed while chopping carrots, that read the Almanac aloud by the fire. He remembered the inflection, but not the pitch.

He stood in the cellar beside her bones and realized he didn’t recognize the person they belonged to.

The hand had gone missing. The skull had been turned inward, and the jaw had been removed. And at the foot of the mess, the stew pot lid rested, clean and gleaming.

Not in the kitchen, or on the stove—but here.

He hadn’t brought it down, but all the same, it was waiting. He knelt beside it and touched the iron, and found it warm.

“You see now,” she said, inside his chest.

“Yes.”

“You understand,” she continued.

“I do,” he replied.

“Then you know what comes next.”

He did.

He lifted the lid. It hissed—not with heat, but with breath.

Her breath.

His breath.

The same breath.

* * * * * *

The rescue came sooner than expected.

Wendell—what remained of him—stood in the snow with one hand raised as the snowmobiles approached. His boots were wet, but he didn’t feel it. His fingers shook slightly, but not from cold.

Sgt. Harrow was the first to dismount.

“Jesus, Wendell,” he said, pulling off his goggles. “You look like hell.”

“I feel wonderful,” Wendell replied, and he meant it.

His voice was smooth and measured, his posture straight, his eyes calm. But the rest of the team saw what they needed to see: weeks of unwashed clothing, hollow cheeks, wild hair. A man surviving on the edge. They had no reason to suspect otherwise. Not yet.

Harrow clapped him on the back and guided him toward the snowmobile. “You’ll need a medic. Maybe a shrink. But you’re alive, man. You made it.”

Wendell smiled.

* * * * * *

The real horror came later, when they searched the cabin, found the cellar, and opened the freezer—and discovered the remains.

Some of the rangers vomited. Others went quiet.

It was unmistakable. Marianne had not only died in that house—she’d been dismantled in it. Methodically. Cooked and consumed.

The pot tested positive for human tissue. The notebooks—especially the Memory Stew recipe—matched her handwriting. And Wendell’s prints were on everything. Everything.

They arrested him at the field clinic, where he was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. He didn’t resist. Didn’t speak, either. Not for days.

When Dr. Lena Moreau finally got him to talk, it was slow going. He remembered nothing of the stew. Nothing of the cellar. He described long periods of “feeling watched,” of dreams that spilled into waking.

He said he had mourned his wife. Then he paused and corrected himself.

“I mourned our wife.”

Dr. Moreau wrote it off as trauma-induced identity fracture. Dissociative psychosis. Cannibalistic fugue.

But one night, as she packed her things after a long session, he spoke again, with the same smile, the same calm.

“She wanted to live.”

Dr. Moreau looked up from her bag. “I’m sorry?”

“She didn’t want to go. And I can’t blame her.” He leaned forward, resting his chin on one palm. “You should’ve tasted her stew.”

* * * * * *

The trial never happened.

Wendell was found unfit to stand on grounds of extreme psychological collapse. Committed indefinitely to a forensic psychiatric hospital in eastern Montana.

They gave him a cell with a window.

He asked for books, recipes, and paper to write on. He never raised his voice, never resisted medication. But the nurses talked behind closed doors about the way he walked—hips just slightly off-center, like he was wearing someone else’s bones.

How he touched his face too often, like he was still getting used to it.

How he’d stand at the sink for minutes at a time, just watching his reflection.

Smiling that same quiet smile.

One nurse swore he hummed lullabies in a language she didn’t recognize.

And once—just once—he whispered something from the mirror’s edge:

“I told him I’d stay.”

Part V

The name on the hospital intake form was Wendell James Grieves.

Male. Age fifty-eight. No known history of psychosis. Survivor of prolonged isolation during the 2024 Deep Freeze event in the Black Pine region. Suspected involvement in the death and cannibalization of his wife, Marianne Grieves.

The man who signed the form did so with a steady hand.

But the signature didn’t match the samples from five years earlier.

Not exactly.

The letters had… curves now. An almost cursive flourish in the G, a lean on the W that suggested someone used to writing grocery lists in loops and margins.

When the nurse asked if he was feeling alright, he smiled and said:

“I’m getting used to things.”

* * * * * *

Time passed differently inside the hospital.

There was structure, of course—meal times, headcounts, group therapy—but it all bled together like paint in warm water. The man in Room 11 adjusted quickly. Too quickly, some thought.

He adapted to the medications and reported no side effects. He exercised daily, participated, and spoke politely to the staff.

Too polite.

Not “crazy,” they whispered.

Off.

The way he watched people. The way he folded towels. The way he stared at the pot in the communal kitchen as though he was waiting for it to say something.

One morning, a staff member caught him pressing his cheek against the refrigerator door, whispering:

“Too cold for sour broth. You’ll curdle if you rush it.”

He looked up, blinking, and said, “Oh. Sorry. Habit.”

No one asked what he meant.

* * * * * *

In private sessions, Dr. Moreau tried to reach Wendell—what little was left of him. But every time she pushed, she met someone else.

The man in the chair knew things he shouldn’t. Recipes passed down from old-world kitchens, ones not published anywhere. He described herbs she couldn’t identify, rattled off Slavic phrases in perfect cadence. Once, he corrected her pronunciation of borscht and cited three regional variations by temperature and pickling length.

“I’m not Wendell,” he told her once. “I’m just what was left after Wendell was finished.”

She asked what that meant.

“I’m the one who made the stew.”

His eyes never left hers.

“But Wendell served it.”

* * * * * *

The remains of Marianne Grieves were buried in a shared grave near Blackwater Hollow. A memorial stone was erected with both their names. No family came to claim the body. No one wanted the pot. It sat for weeks in the evidence locker of the county sheriff’s department. Then, without explanation, the clerk on duty reported it missing.

There were no signs of forced entry. No video footage. Only an empty shelf.

The room smelled faintly of thyme for three days afterward.

* * * * * *

Back in Room 11, “Wendell” began keeping a journal. The staff found it one day, tucked neatly beneath his mattress.

It wasn’t filled with confessions or regrets. It was a cookbook, titled in careful handwriting: Things Worth Remembering.

Each page contained a memory. A moment. A taste. Every one of them began with, “I made this for you,” followed by a description of the occasion: a late autumn dinner, an anniversary, a night she’d had a bad dream. Each memory was tied to a dish, and each dish ended with the same line:

“You came back to me that night.”

The final page was blank, save for a single phrase at the bottom:

“But at what cost?”

* * * * * *

The months turned, seasonal staff rotating in and out, but “Wendell” remained. Still polite, still present. Still humming lullabies under his breath when he thought no one was listening. He never mentioned Marianne again, not by name. But during one particularly quiet session, Dr. Moreau asked him what he thought about redemption.

He looked at his hands—familiar now, though still slightly alien in the fingers, and said, “Redemption’s a stew you only get to make once.”

She asked him to explain. He looked up, smiled with someone else’s mouth, and said, “You have to start with love, and then ruin it.”

* * * * * *

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he dreams of himself.

Not Wendell.

Herself.

The way she used to be—taller, lighter, filled with laughter and wine. Dancing in the kitchen. Stirring the pot with her wooden spoon, flicking broth at Wendell when he teased her.

She misses that woman.

Misses the warmth of her own hands, the hair she could tie up in a knot, the voice that sounded like her grandmother’s when she said bedtime prayers.

Now all of that is behind glass and bone and other people’s voices.

A prison. One she built.

Wendell’s life is over, and hers… hers is a sentence.

But at least she’s breathing. At least she’s alive.

And for someone who once feared the quiet of the grave, that’s enough.

For now.