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Body Heat

By Mirri Glasson-Darling

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The river is moving too fast and Cassie knows it, but she crosses anyway. Icy water reaches her waist, a constant push at her knees. She leans into the hiking poles, inching sideways like a crab. Halfway across, her left foot goes into a hole. For a moment, Cassie fights, then—slow-motion—feels the river take her. She falls, flails, gulps, then her left hiking pole hits the bottom, the end of the pole smacking her sternum and pushing her up out of the water and onto the opposite shore with the current’s inertia, torso hissing cold with steam.

Cassie is stunned by her escape, painfully aware of her skeleton with all its small, aching parts rattling against themselves, from the vertebra in her neck to the moth-shaped scapula of her shoulder blades. She sneezes five times, a bright, color-shot mess. Patches of ice surround her, formed from the condensed moisture of the river into white trays of diamonds. As hypothermia sets in, Cassie strips down, gets the sleeping bag out of her dry-evac-sack, climbs in, and waits to get warm. She’s lost one hiking pole, the paper map she’d tucked into an outside pocket of her pack, her phone still has no service, the topo app can’t find itself, and she’s on 24% battery power. Less than an hour to sunset, but she’s still got her compass and eventually there will be a road if she keeps heading east, even if it is another fifteen miles of bushwhacking. She’s on the wrong side of the river to backtrack now either way. She should have known better. Cassie is from Virginia and works as a wilderness guide in Alaska: she knows when it is safe to cross a river and when it is not. This was not safe. One reckless turn here in West Virginia, a fall into icy water, and she’s lost. She feels a bit better, but still cold.

Cassie finds an okay spot near the riverbank and sets camp for the night in a den of nut-brown pine needles, black-barked trees circling in the orange, fading light. They have thin, poorly angled branches: not great for a bear-hang to protect her food. She searches for wood to make a fire, but everything is too wet. It’s been a chilly, rainy November. The only sound in the forest is the hiss of gas from her stove and an over-worked rush of flame. She’s just sat down to eat when she notices the half-shadow of a man watching her from the trees. Something unnerving about seeing a shape at twilight, the hour when everything comes out to feed.

The other hiker approaches with a friendly wave and Cassie relaxes—she finds how he’s dressed reassuring. The Appalachians are full of dirty kids in holey jeans with military backpacks or 80s wool sweaters, but this guy looks separate: out of space and time. She’s seen people like that out on trails, but only in bush Alaska—all wool, dark earthen colors and packs of homemade patchwork, cobbled together from other, older packs.

“I sure am glad to see you,” Cassie says. “Was starting to wonder if I was still on a trail.”

“Yeah,” he says, then laughs like she’s asked a question. “Been a while since I came through.”

His age is hard to pin down. Her age-ish? Early thirties? He doesn’t sound local, but for some reason Cassie feels like he should. “I’m Tenna” he says.

“Tenna short for Tennessee? Like the state and Tennessee Williams?”

Tenna smiles but doesn’t answer. His shirt sleeves are rolled, muscles in his forearms pronounced in a smooth diagonal line from wrist to elbow. Must be a rock climber. Cassie recognizes the body type, lean-muscled, every ribbon in his neck stretching. After years of dealing with outdoors people, Cassie knows the dangerous kind of strange from the others. Dangerous-strange is over-friendly, quick to overshare and equally quick to anger. Tenna’s kind of strange seems to come from isolation, the awkward jokes he tells her more a testament to fear of intrusion than anything. She likes him. He doesn’t ask questions when she mentions leaving Alaska to come back to Virginia and ‘take care of her parents and brother.’ He asks Jeremy’s age—twenty-seven—then leaves the subject alone.

Tenna offers to tie the knots on Cassie’s bear-hang and smiles as he throws the carabiner over the branch until the rope catches. She’s a bit annoyed by the help: maybe he likes the idea he’s coming to her rescue.

“You okay?” Tenna asks, tying off the rope with a half-hitch at the bottom of the tree. He offers her a flask. “We could try to build a fire.”

“Wood’s too wet,” Cassie says, wondering if he’ll try anyway. Men often like to double-check her, older clients sometimes displaying open skepticism when they first meet. She signs emails with just her initials, and once a client requested a change of guide when the company used her full name: Cassandra.

“Do you have a warm enough sleeping bag?” Tenna asks.

“Hope so. I fell in a river.”

“Do you need help staying warm? Want to share the tent?”

“Yeah. If you don’t mind.”

In her tent, Cassie changes clothes in front of Tenna. It’s not exactly an abnormal thing to do in front of someone on-trail—but she knows herself well enough to know what she’s working toward. She has been under a lot of stress lately taking care of her brother. She knows she might be a bit too sharp-featured to be considered conventionally attractive, but she’s spent her whole life outdoors and it shows in her body.

“Those bruises from the river?” he asks.

Cassie is impressed he can make out that kind of detail in the dark. He must have incredible eyesight. “Yeah.”

Whenever Cassie hooks up with people on trails, they’re always Tenna’s kind of strange. Backcountry types who don’t think of sex as ego so much as human comfort. A part of her toys with the idea. She loves the quiet, animal feel of meeting up in the wild, sleeping together, and parting ways. As if they are two giant cats on verging territories. When Tenna offers to hold her, she settles in with her back against his chest. He runs his hands along her arms and shoulders, trying to warm her up. He’s shockingly heavy for his size though and even the pressure of his hands hurt. It feels like rubbing up against a stone. Once she is warmer, they both turn away and soon, Cassie hears Tenna snoring.

She is far away from the route she told her brother and parents she would be on. She can almost feel the weight of morning light itching towards the glass doors of their kitchen, four hours’ drive back in her hometown of Roanoke. She’s supposed to be back by morning. But it felt so good to turn down that extra trail, to put her back to the sun and imagine she’s free and back in Alaska, a day between her and Jeremy and her parents, between the leaking air-mattress from her own indefinite visit—until he dies, the thing that no one will say.

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When Cassie wakes the next morning, Tenna and all his gear are gone. Her head and throat ache. Outside, the trees radiate mist, an unfamiliar halo of gray-white dust. She has a fever, and it’s a bad one. She needs energy, and fast, but there are only the leftovers from the meal last night, a couple granola bars and instant coffee. It takes so much effort to drag herself to the tree, to untie Tenna’s half-hitch knot and unwind the rope from the trunk. His absence bothers her—when two people are out like this, they generally stick together until they find a clear trail or differing opinions necessitate a split. How could she not wake up when he left?

Her phone is dead too: no way to tell the time or how long until sunset. While her dad calls the forest service this morning, her mom will probably drive Jeremey to chemo. Tonight, instead of Cassie, it will be her mother who tucks Jeremy’s gray throw-blanket around his waist which he insists he doesn’t want because God damnit, I’m a grown-ass man until he falls asleep, exhausted. It will be her mother who sits next to him and reads a shitty paperback novel, something soft and yielding with a simple-plot, emotionally low-stakes. Guy gets girl, bad guys lose, lost dog comes home. God saves the day and comes back safe from the war, maybe takes up gardening. And yet, a part of Cassie wonders if she’s abandoned them on purpose. There was such a sharp, glowing exhilaration in turning away down something that barely looked like a trail. The decision to cross a bad-looking river. The reckless joy in thinking fuck it, fuck me, fuck everything. I don’t care if it’s wrong. A dark, destructive impulse, selfish and digging. My life is mine. Unraveling the strings at her core until pieces of her begin to drop away.

Now, in front of Cassie is the seemingly never-ending task of pulling up her tent stakes and collecting them, one by one. How many guide-lines did she think she needed last night? Did she think there was a hurricane coming through? Even if Cassie were healthy, this would be a rough bushwhack. She has to keep the compass on its string around her neck so she can check her bearings, plodding up to each one, only to take the next. It feels like chasing the sun. Cassie falls twice. The scabs of ice sticking out of the ground crunch like broken glass and she’s making miserable time. Less than half a mile an hour. By her calculations, the road is still five miles ahead, but the sun is already going down, and Cassie’s too sick to go on at night. Pushing on will use up reserves of energy. If she pushes now, she’ll sweat hard and when she gets lost or has to stop the sweat will freeze. Never mind that when she hits the remote road it will be dark and Cassie will still need to hitchhike about seventeen miles back to the car, or a hospital. She barely has enough energy to get the tent up; head one massive, chilly ache. When the tent poles are in order and four basic stakes, Cassie says fuck it. No guide-lines, no bear-hang, she can’t do it, and there’s not enough food anyway. One tiny, anemic granola bar she’ll double bag. She crawls in and collapses. Cassie curls her body into a tight ball but her back and face are still freezing. She pulls the sleeping bag over her head. It’s hard to breathe. Hours of drooling and trying to peak out one side before she finally passes out.

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When Cassie wakes, something big is moving in the dark. It’s outside the tent, but Christ, it’s huge. It has to be a bear but the sound is too methodical. Her fever is spiking, tent a swirl of muddled, freezing black. The dark swells and contracts, ballooning out in churning circles.

“Cassie?” she hears a disembodied voice. A distant breath floating in darkness.

Something about Tenna’s voice doesn’t sound right. Coming up from the ground, a low, growling murmur. “Cassie, it’s Tenna. Won’t you let me in?”

Every hair on the back of her neck prickles, every ridge along her spine. Something about that line. That horror movie line.

“Are you cold, Cassie? Do you want to be warm?”

Her fingers are on the zipper. She doesn’t think she’s still asleep, never in a dream could she be this cold, but the fever makes it hard to tell if it is really a human being out there. The voice has to be real though. And if it isn’t a person, what else would it be? Does she really think there’s something in the woods, pretending to be Tenna, trying to get into the tent? Cassie gets the zipper halfway on her own and Tenna helps her from the outside. It’s so dark she can’t see him, but she knows him by his smell, feels an instant relief at his heat. The second he’s in the tent, she can’t help it—she’s on him. He’s so warm, the need to be close takes her in a rush. She clings to his body heat, a half-frozen animal afraid of drowning. The warmth is overwhelming. There is a blind, raging greediness in it as she clings to him. When Tenna asks if he can take off her clothes, it feels as if he’s inviting her to take off her skin as well. His body is so hearth-stone-hot, it’s like being held by a golem. But Cassie needs that heat, cannot breathe without it, cries out for him every second his flesh is separated from hers. She is trembling against the stony furnace of him, whimpering to the heat, praying to it. Tenna’s smell has changed—it now seems volcanic, inhuman. Granite cliffs baking in the desert sun, chalky limestone, old leaves crackling, a deep, hollow force holed up in the center of the earth. She still cannot see his face. Cassie sees stars through the canvas roof of the tent above them, their mirrored, clotted images rippling across Tenna’s shoulder blades. The stars on his skin and the stars in the sky spin together. She can’t hear him breathing. A horror in that realization: Cassie’s never been this close to someone without noticing their breath. Tenna’s teeth look incredibly long and white in the starlight, far whiter than the whites of his eyes, the white of the stars, the white of comets in veins of quartz running through dark rock.

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Cassie wakes alone again to find the world is very thin, like a ghost world. Rain pours over the tent. It sounds like she’s camped under a waterfall. She jerks feebly, too weak to properly shiver, sleeping bag hunched around her shoulders. Just a few more miles to the road, but she’s not sure in her present condition if she can even make it out of the tent to pee. There is a chance that Wilderness Rescue has a helicopter looking for her. The tree cover is thick, but her tent is bright orange. If she goes out in this state, isn’t found, and the rain keeps up, she’ll die later tonight. But if the rain lasts beyond today and they don’t see the tent, she has a better chance of surviving if she tries for the road now. The tent is so much warmer than outside though. Cassie can’t bring herself to leave. She falls back asleep.

In her first dream, she and Jeremy are hiking in Alaska and Tenna is their guide. He keeps insisting they must climb down a sheer cliff into fog. In the next, she is looking for Jeremy but finds Tenna waiting for her in a shed she once set on fire as a kid. They have sex up against the wall, charred splinters of ash flaking against her back. Each time Cassie wakes, she sticks her head out of the tent to dry-heave in the rain. She has nothing in her stomach to throw up. The water sounds like the static of an off-air radio station. When she isn’t asleep, she thinks of her dying brother. Teenage Jeremy, calling the old-fashioned stove burner a swirly-shell-shaped-asshole when he burned his hand while trying to mull wine. Adult Jeremy: his fragmented voice on the phone after she moved to Alaska in dropped phone calls. Have you… punched… any… grizzlies… yet? The guilty relief of the past two days turning down the wrong way on the wrong trail away from him and how it meant that extra day not having to take care of him and help her parents. She imagines his death as a person, hiding in the apartment. It looks like Tenna. Death is a dry, hot wind with white teeth. It is a curse, caught and bound, standing on the wrong side of a river deep in the mountains, waiting.

When Cassie wakes again, everything is black.

The rot-smell musk of a bear is not twenty feet away. She has no food, but the smell is horrible. Feces and woods and earth all mixed up yet deeply, pungently animal. Cassie holds her breath, trying to will the bear to pass. A twig snaps to her right. Tenna’s voice is so close it’s as if he’s bent down against the tent to speak directly into her ear.

“Don’t you want to be warm?”

For a moment, Cassie decides there was no voice. Then, in a rush of anger, she slides the zipper aside. Prepared to see nothing. Prepared to see a bear. Prepared, even, to see something horrible. Glowing eyes and teeth. Anything other than regular Tenna just sitting there. She moves away from the entrance and he follows her inside, then stops, just within the doorway. A distant, animal flare of light in his eyes from her headlamp. While everything about Tenna looks human down to the sense that Cassie is looking at someone when her eyes meet his, she now gets the sense that the someone behind them is not human. She tries to find a word to put to him but cannot.

“We’re almost done,” he tells her.

Cassie’s body floods with warmth at his touch. Abstractly, she knows she ought to shrink away from Tenna, but there’s nowhere else to go. The way the light from the headlamp glints on his eyes is the same way as it does on upturned leaves filled with dew at night. His presence feels as old as the mountain itself, yet she still has the impression they are the same age. Cassie wonders if maybe it’s because, whatever kind of predator Tenna is, he is still in his prime. She wonders if the illness he gave her is malicious or incidental. When she touches him, she can hear worms crawling in the dirt beneath the tent. She can hear the liquid rock of the earth’s tectonic plates, twisting at the mountains’ core. She can feel the whole breadth of the cold, empty valley stretching out in its dark map, an endless blue-black line laced with rivers. Her breath swells and contracts with the rhythm of the wind outside. In rhythm with Tenna’s.

That’s when the batteries in her headlamp give out. There’s a stretching feeling through her now, as if something is breaking, but that breaking is good—she is about to join with the rings of iron that churn in hot waves beneath the planet. Cassie can still remember the feeling of Jeremy’s heart between his shoulder blades when she last held him, but she cannot hold onto that memory. She no longer feels that Tenna is in the tent with her, so much as that she is becoming him. She loves the over-abundance of heat welling up inside her, this thing that she first mistook for fever, scouring, draining all the weak and grief-stricken parts of her into the mountains. She knows she hasn’t quite changed into what Tenna is—not yet—but she already resents that frail pulse of life still clinging to her throat, so thin and painfully alive.

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Host Commentary

Hi folks, this is Alasdair. Content warnings this week for cancer and bereavement. As always if this isn’t something you feel you can do this week, step away and we’ll catch you next time.

 

PseudoPod Episode 961

February 7th 2025

Body Heat by Mirri Glasson-Darling

Narrated by Lindz McLeod

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hi folks, welcome to PseudoPod, the weekly horror fiction podcast. This week’s story comes to us from Mirri Glasson-Darling and is a PseudoPod Original. Mirri Glasson-Darling lives and writes Glasgow, Scotland where she moved from Alaska. She has received a ‘Notable Essay’ in Best American Essays and a Fiction Award from Intro to Journals. Work of hers has appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Passages North and many other literary magazines. She is an avid solo backcountry hiker and mountaineer with a breadth of experience in Alaska, the Appalachians and Scottish Highlands. She loves all things Weird Fiction and is currently working on a horror novel.

 

Your narrator this week is Lindz McLeod. Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer and editor who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published by Apex, Catapult, Pseudopod, The Razor, and many more. Her work includes the short story collection TURDUCKEN (Bear Creek Press, 2022) and her debut novel BEAST (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). She is a full member of the SFWA, and can be found on twitter @lindzmcleod or her website www.lindzmcleod.co.uk

 

A quick note from Mirri Glasson-Darling: ‘Body Heat’ was inspired by a reoccurring dream during a 3-week solo expedition in the mountains.

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Trauma makes you clay. Everything changes, sometimes instantly, sometimes gradually and you change with it. You can fight it. We all do. But fighting it is like not thinking about a toothache. Refusing to engage with it is engaging with it. You’re being reshaped. Whether you control the process or endure it is one of the few things you control.

Running works for a while. Running can be taking time for you. It HAS to be taking time for you. Running is what you need it to be. In this case, it’s running into an actual wilderness rather than the increasingly blasted plain of imminent familial bereavement. Some folks run into debauchery, your vice of choice becoming your voice of choice, drowning out the truth for a while. As long as you’re not doing harm, because I choose to believe the Hippocratic oath applies to all of us, then you’re doing what you need to do. For me, it’s signal. Art. Culture. Media. For a while I would listen to something, read something else and be working on something else at the same time. Making and decorating my bomb shelter. Nowadays it’s mostly working with something else in the background. Right now it’s Doom & Gloom by The Rolling Stones because the youtube algorithm is Skynet with a sense of humour and avoidable adbreaks.

Nothing works forever but everything works for a while. There is no trick, no secret, for me beyond understanding that running buys you time and space and obligates you to use it. Use it to feel everything you need to feel and you will need to feel everything. Use it to choose, as best you can, what you want to be next. Use the perspective you’ve carved for yourself to understand who you are now, to honour the people you have left, the people you’ve lost and most of all, yourself. Because if you don’t take care of yourself then you will make an impossible situation infinitely harder and have even more work to do shaping yourself into what comes next and who you’re going to be. I’ve seen that happen. Not just in this exceptionally clear-eyed, brutally honest story but in my own family. That’s one of the places the horror is for me this week. The other is that this story, soaked in fever sweats and grief-driven terror, is one of the kindest stories dealing with this I’ve read. You’re going to be different. You’re going to be okay. Remember both those things. Even in the woods.

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Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

 

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Join us next week for ‘Haemorrhage’ by Cyrus Amelia Fisher, narrated by AJ Fitzwater and hosted by Kat with audio production by Chelsea. We’ll see you then but before we do, PseudoPod wants you to remember: “The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”