“The Blanketing Snow” in Shotgun Honey

Shotgun Honey has published my very short story “The Blanketing Snow”—a story which first appeared in the anthology One Paycheck Away (Main Street Rag Press, 2003) and that I’m glad has now found second life online. Here’s the opening paragraphs of the story:

After midnight, the snow began to fall more heavily—puffs of white wonder, glistening in the bright, night sky.

Lying awake in the bed beside him, she couldn’t see the snow, but she could imagine it clinging fast to the roof, burrowing into the shingles’ cracks, weighing down the tender branches of the sapling just off the front steps, smothering the yard. The weatherman on the news had promised six to nine inches by morning, nine to twelve by early afternoon, and the drifts, she knew, would be even deeper in the woods surrounding the house. No, she couldn’t see the snow, but from the cold air straining through the caulking around the windowsills, she felt certain it was falling faster and that the wind had grown more brisk. Their home was no longer tight.

I originally wrote this story as an exercise for a class with Angela Davis-Gardner at N.C. State University. The assignment was to rework a classic fairy tale, and I don’t think anyone who reads it will have any trouble figuring out which fairy tale, at least by the story’s end.

I’ll admit I’d mostly forgotten this story until I was looking for something short and seasonal to read at the recent Noir on the Air program hosted by Ed Aymar and Pam Stack (I was the final reader of the bunch). I hope that listeners there and now readers at Shotgun Honey will appreciate the story as much I enjoyed rediscovering it myself. It’s an odd feeling rereading something you’d written many years before—almost like it came from another person—and I’m glad that this one held up a little over that time.

Read “The Blanketing Snow” here.

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