Siberia

by Laura Williamson

I’d been married for 12 years before I understood why my dad used tell me about the Siberia Dilemma. This was the predicament you were supposed to be in if you fell into a lake in Siberia. Stay in, and you’d die in two minutes, get out and you’d freeze to death. Checkmate! Yeah, interesting, I thought, but so what? Three decades later, watching my husband sleeping as daylight approached, I knew for the first time what he was talking about: not water, not ice, not cold, but the impossible choice between staying and leaving.

6S

Laura Williamson is a Canadian writer and ski bum currently living in Lake Wanaka, New Zealand. Her stories, articles and poems have appeared in publications from Australia to New Jersey, and once, just once, Leonard Cohen smiled at her across a crowded café in Montreal.