Jacob Bay, at the family cabin with his aunt and cousins

"Jacob, you there?"

"Coming, Aunt Helena!"

Checking the hallway, it looked clear. Jacob's eyes rested back upon the sketchbook - Drawbook, whatever you called it -- on the bed. He hesitated. Was it real? he'd probably have asked himself.

If, that was, he hadn't already written down Aunt Helena's name in it. After he drew the circle, the words appeared right before his eyes. His pencil rolled under the desk. When it stopped against Purp the Teddy Bear the book had already flown across the room, colliding daintily against his pillow. With a little help from a probably more than twitchy hand.

His breaths were ghostly. He'd seen some things in his still sprouting lifetime. But that, well. That was rather surprising.

"They're..." Jacob rubbed his temples minutes later. Once again, splayed across his desk as he mumbled in disbelief at the floating words slipping in and out of the circle like a that of a magic 8 ball, sat the open, silent sketchbook. "...moving."

"Jacob!"

Jumping in his seat, the 18-year-old boy quickly shut the book closed and swiveled in his chair. "Hey Aunt Helena! I--er, there was just some homework I had to finish." He glanced at the book as if it was making hand signs behind him. It wasn't.

The pretty, sharp-eyed brunette woman tapping her foot by the door, however, didn't seem to notice. "Oh-ho. Really?"

Gulp. "Really!" he declared perhaps too energetically.

Pressing a finger against her chin, the woman looked up at him from a tilted angle. Aunt Helena liked to mess with him like this, he knew. It was hard to tell when she was serious sometimes, but she eventually answered it for him when, after one long second passed, the still fit, 40-or-something woman turned to leave, showing off her ever nice bottom confined behind her capris as she held onto the door. "Well, when you're ready get down here and help your cousin Cameron unpack. She gets cranky when she has to put effort into anything, you know."

And with that, she took off, leaving the door partially open. After a few more seconds, Jacob turned back in his chair. His pencil holder stared back at him.

It might have been odd to admit. But he always had a slight crush on her, that aunt of his. Ever since the day she helped teach him how to swim years before and his eyes constantly drifted to her droplet-littered bust. The amount of time those pair of humps spent in his later day-fantasies could've been criminal. Though if it counted any, she wasn't a blood relative -- that honor belonged to Uncle Jimmy, her 'big wingman'. He passed away from the 'ol cancer a few years back. It felt like such a long time ago now. Jacob barely knew him.

All that was really left of him was this cabin out in the mountains; a lodge left over as a family gift that they were free to share and come back to whenever they wanted. With the property now under Aunt Helena's name, she would often orchestrate bi-annual retreats to the place, though these days those instances were mostly relegated to exclusive Christmas gatherings that happened every other year or so. The deteriorating roads could become hazardous if the snow was coming down particularly hard and an accident or two had cast some anxiety over the notion of road-tripping the whole way up north just for a totaled vehicle.

Jacob, on the other hand, had gotten a direct invitation a few months earlier and of course, accepted it. It was worth taking a break from the dense smog of the valley down south every once in a while.

His eyes drifted back to the sketchbook. His eyes narrowing, his body leaned forward, studying the circle, the words within it, and his own slowly ballooning thoughts.

"How about a break..." he suddenly found himself picking his pencil back up. "...from reality?"

Around the dinner table, the group of four sat and ate in not quite silence. There was plenty to talk about, after all. The food tasted swell.

"So Jacob, used to the cold yet?" A chirpy, brown haired Madeline scooped some gravy onto her roast as she handed the side to Cameron.

"Eh," Jacob swallowed a whole wheat loaf and sipped his tea, shrugging at his slim cousin. "Could be worse. Besides. We used to come here all the time back in the day remember?"

"Mom," asked Cameron, flipping her dirty blonde strands out of sight, "when we going to the peak?"

"Probably Thursday."

"Hey Mom, it's not okay for Jacob to ask me to do his homework right?"

"No, Maddy, it's not."

Jacob looked around at the visitation of Aunt Helena's eyes before him. "What?"

As the rest of the night progressed, alongside discussion around topics such as other extended family, the local dance hall event, and skiing prospects, the plates were reduced to crumbs and peels of what was originally on them. After losing a rock paper scissors match Jacob was tasked to washing up and he tried to control his grumbling, but it was cold and maybe it was the altitude but he was feeling beat, too. When he was done he finally made it back to his room (one of about 6 in this particular housing) and collapsed onto the bed. The book remained atop his desk, untouched from the afternoon in which he wrote down Aunt Helena's name inside it, basking in the shadows of the trickling flakes of snow outside his window. His snoring drowned out the wind.