"Winter's Chill" by Lauren B.

Lauren Barkley’s story, “Winter’s Chill” deals with two characters who do not exactly have a picture-perfect marriage. The story ends in tragedy when Mrs. Smart receives a phone call that her husband has been killed in a car crash while travelling to the mountains to retrieve a dead body on an icy winter night.

I fell in love with the characters in this story almost as soon as they entered the narrative picture. First, you have Mr. Smart, who is suspicious of his wife, and therefore always in a foul mood. Then, you have Mrs. Smart, who seems to be a woman with a promiscuous history, yet she truly does love Mr. Smart. Everything about the story and their relationship screams tragedy; it is like watching a marriage that is doomed to perpetual and irreparable despair. Even though this relationship is somewhat of a commonality, the way you introduced the characters gave them freshness, particularly in light of Mr. Smart’s job, a collector of bodies to be taken to funeral homes. I also thought it was a brilliant narrative strategy you used dividing the story into two points of view: the first part from Mr. Smart’s suspicious point of view and the second part from Mrs. Smart’s point of view.

I think there’s a lot more potential in this story than you have narrated. Mr. Smart’s character is developed perfectly; however, you do not give enough information about Mrs. Smart. In one sentence, you say that he has reason not to trust her. I found this surprising. I thought the story was headed in such a direction that would reveal Mrs. Smart as a completely innocent person (regardless of her past), showing how unfounded Mr. Smart’s suspicions were. Instead, you tell us that Mr. Smart has good reason for suspicion, but you do not offer any further explanation for this. That seems too inconsistent with the character I was expecting according to Mr. Smart’s set up. I like the way this doomed relationship ends in a chilly fatality, but I think the car crash scenario is too unoriginal. I believe you can make a more creative ending. The final thing I suggest is to drop the adverbs in the tag lines describing how the characters say things (i.e. “cautiously” and “irritably” on the first page).