"The Cold Outside"

Happy Halloween!
"The Cold Outside"
by John Burnside

Rating: 8.3


Short story, written in the first person, about Bill Harley, a truck driver in Scotland, who is dying of cancer. The narrator was not surprised by the return of his cancer. He was upset for his daughter Caroline, and bothered about how his wife, Sall would take it.

I nodded, but I didn’t move. The door was still open, just enough that I could smell the cold outside, and I heard the dog barking—farther away now, it seemed, at the darker end of the road that ran past our house and into the hills, past the golden lights of farms and dairies and narrow sheep runs through the gorse, where snow was probably beginning to form—real snow this time, not the cold sleet I’d driven through in the woods where I met the boy. For a split second—no more—I wanted to get back in the rig and drive on, up into the darkness, into the origin of the approaching blizzard, just to be alone out there, the way that boy had been alone in the woods. Then, with Sall watching me curiously, and perhaps fearfully, I let go of that thought and went through to the living room, where the curtains were already drawn and the night was nothing more than a story to be told by a warm fire, with the radio humming quietly in the background, so that the world felt familiar and more or less happy, like the future that seemed possible when you didn’t think about dying, or the pastel-colored maps in a childhood atlas that you couldn’t help but go on trusting, even when you knew that they no longer meant what they said. ♦