Home | Contest | Write A Book | Write Ebooks For Cash | Be A Travel Writer | Write Children's Books Write For Newspapers | Write An Ezine | Write A Blog | Writing Skills & Tips | Novel Writing Software Please take a moment to bookmark this site and join our free hot tips list. Read & Rate Our Writing Contest Entries! See what other people have written, and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. This is an opportunity to view a wide variety of short stories and see what kind of original material is being submitted to us on a daily basis. After you rate an entry, you will be randomly redirected to another entry to rate. You may read and rate as many entries as you wish! The user-rating system is simply a fun way for writers to receive a public opinion of their work, and does not affect the judging for the cash prizes. If you wish to enter the contest, you may enter for free here. Rate This Contest Entry: Contest: June 30th, 2005 Author: Annie Doggette It snowed the day she heard the news. Not a blizzard, not something to really remember, save for the news that accompanied it. Any weather would be memorable, then. Even when it was a normal occurrence. And in Washington snow was the norm. But she had left her home state after a year, sick of attempting to act the same, sick of seeing the pity eating her family alive. Left it all, in search of a place that never saw snow, because that was freedom. Snow trapped memories, became a blanket that smothered, that revealed the dead…or the dying. And that was how long ago, Christine? Eighteen years, or nineteen? Things had changed, since then. She had remarried; had moved, moved, and moved again. One daughter had started a family of her own; another still tried to attain an education. And she—she had lost out. And now it was snowing. She sighed, turning from her place at the window. Chilled fingers warmed on the coffee mug clasped between them; they tingled as the heat seeped through, but she ignored it, as she ignored the voice whispering, getting old, Chrissy, and maudlin. There were things to do in case electricity went out; she knew that. But the energy, the desire, to act had deserted her. Maybe it was Hailey, too. With her granddaughter finally asleep, Christine hesitated to disturb her. The baby was too fussy, too stimulated when visiting—and it made her job of babysitting from nine to six o’clock tiresome. So, she stared, she walked, she studied the house that her family had owned for over five years, and suddenly it seemed isolated. The ornaments she had agonized over—at Pier One, at malls, even Wal-Mart—were too new. They had no history, no stories of their own. The wallpaper—humming birds and flowers, so mundane—curled away from the walls. How could she not have noticed? Even cracks, she thought, running her fingers along the split that started beneath the crown molding down to the linoleum. Arnold is going to fix this. When he came home in two—three?—weeks. Christine would tell him, she decided, that their house was falling apart at the seams. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, she imagined saying, and they couldn’t keep it from falling down? Really, money meant nothing, now. Did she sound like her mother? Ooooo, don’t scare me. A smiled tugged at her lips; the first since this winter system moved in, and she let it grow until it stretched her lips into a rictus of humor. The hand trailed away from the wall and traveled her mouth, feeling the contours so ridiculously shaped. Only one other time had a smile felt so frightening to her. She had been in a morgue, the flurries melting on her coat as the mortician led her to the viewing room, asked her to please identify the body. She had. No tears, she recalled, no vomit, no screams, just yes and that horrible smile as her eyes took in the rest of her husband, who had on women’s panties and whose toenails were painted a brilliant pink. Her dare, which he had carried out, neither of them thinking that he would never come home, neither knowing that a mortician would be the first to see the results of her challenge. She blinked, found the tightness in her face smoothed by her fingers. Found that her traitor’s feet had drifted back to the sitting-room windows. That was what she had lost when she remarried some seven years after the accident. She had lost the ability to have an intimate relationship. Had, indeed, settled for less so that her children could have more. No silly games with Arnold, no jokes, no laughs without reason. Just—snow. people have rated it so far. is the current average. |
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