Soup and Cardamom
The cabin wasn’t haunted, but it was old enough to feel like it remembered things.
It remembered the creak of boots over hardwood, the way laughter echoes sharper in the cold. It remembered eight women spilling into its silence like spilled sunlight—messy and loud and full of stories they hadn’t told each other yet. Or maybe had, a hundred times before.
I wasn’t the first one there, but I wasn’t the last, either. I wasn’t nervous, not exactly. But I was aware—in the way you are when you're joining a group with years of shared history that you don't have. They all went to high school together. Some even further back than that. I was the outsider, the +1 to a friendship that stretched wide and deep. Still, when the door opened, I was pulled into a hug before I could even finish knocking. Just like that, I was in.
Technically, I was also in a virtual holiday party for work. Laptop glowing, camera off, smile pasted on while my coworkers toasted each other over pixelated wine. I sat on the cabin floor with a plate of soup and grilled cheese that tasted like someone had reached into their childhood and pulled dinner out. Elise had cooked—like she always does, apparently. I filed that away. Useful things to know when you’re the new one.
There was a puzzle next. A beast of a thing. One of those puzzles made by people who don’t like other people. The pieces were tiny and the image was a mess of warped faces and literary references. The kind of thing that sends you into either madness or hysterics. For us, it was both. At some point, someone asked where the “tiny penguin with the monocle” was and I lost it. Like full, doubled-over laughter. That’s when I knew it was real. You don’t belly-laugh with people unless something’s cracked open.
Ivy showed up the next morning—tight smile, soft eyes. You could tell she’d cried before walking in, leaving her baby for the first time. But we didn’t say anything about that. We just handed her pancakes like it was a peace offering and made space on the couch. She eased into it, slowly, like someone learning how to breathe again.
Nadia brewed chai, and suddenly the whole cabin smelled like cardamom and something warmer I didn’t have a name for. We lounged like cats in sun patches. The conversation drifted easily—somewhere between deeply unhinged and oddly profound.
Before we ever made it out for the walk, the car came.
It pulled into the gravel driveway slow, like it was casing the place. We watched through the window as someone inside raised a phone and started taking photos of our parked cars. No knock. No wave. Just snapshots and reverse lights. It was weird. Just weird enough to set our nerves on edge. We told the cabin owner. Made a note of the car. Looked out the window a little more often after that. It never came back. Still, it lingered, but nothing ever came of it.
Eventually, we walked the mountain loop.
The mountain loop wasn’t steep, just quiet. A hush-path wrapped in fallen leaves and long shadows. We broke into clusters without planning to—two by two, then three, then splitting and rejoining like lazy braids. We talked about nothing and everything: exes, family, whether we believed in ghosts. We paused to take a photo—one of those timer-on-the-road photos where someone sprints into place and hopes they look normal. (I didn’t. But the light was good.)
Later that afternoon, we pulled out canvases and paints and turned the cabin into a kind of accidental art studio. We played a game: five minutes on your canvas, then pass it left. It started wholesome. And then, like everything that weekend, it unraveled into delightful chaos.
One canvas bloomed into a sun goddess wrapped in petals. Another was a mountain scene that turned slightly… haunted. Someone filled theirs with hidden Mickeys like a Disney conspiracy theory. One had stick figures performing what could only be interpreted as ritual sacrifice. Another ended up with a snake winding its way up something green and uncertain. I wasn’t sure what it meant. I liked that about it.
Later, there was a movie playing no one really watched. There were s’mores that mostly became goo and ash. The hot tub was a lie—lukewarm disappointment—but we got in anyway, bodies squished together, half-laughing, half-complaining. At some point, most of the girls peeled off to bed, hair wet and skin puckered.
But I stayed up with Claire and June.
We migrated back inside, curled up under throw blankets that smelled like cedar and old detergent. That’s when the talk got real. The kind that’s too quiet for daytime. We talked about what it means to want different things than you used to. How life doesn’t pivot in grand epiphanies, just small, strange nudges. How everything keeps changing, even when it’s good. How nothing ever really feels done.
By morning, the spell had broken.
The bags were packed. The leftover soup sealed into mismatched Tupperware. We took one last group photo on the porch, hair frizzy, eyes squinting into the light. The goodbye was fast—maybe on purpose. Some things are better left hanging in the air.
I drove home with the windows down, paint still drying in the backseat, and the mountain loop somewhere behind me—already feeling like a story I wouldn’t know how to explain.
