Lauren Barkley "Winter's Chill"

This was a story that focused on a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smart, coming up against some relational stress. The root of their disease appears to be related to the rather haphazard way in which they met in a bar one night and is accentuated by a mysterious text of affection on Mrs. Smart’s phone. On the night Mr. Smart sees this text, he is called away to pick up a body from the mountain even though the weather is inhospitable. What is interesting about this story is that we get two perspectives: Mr. Smart’s in the beginning and Mrs. Smarts right at the end. From these two accounts I gathered that Mr. Smart was upset by his wife’s alleged infidelity and did not feel like he knew who she was anymore. Mrs. Smart’s account is significantly more limited, but she appears to want to repair their relationship especially after she sees how upset the text on her phone makes him. While the characters’ wants are vaguely outlined, I found myself wanting more by the end especially from Mrs. Smart’s point of view. I think if we as readers knew more about what each character really wanted out of this relationship, then the ending and preceding action would be much more impactful.

            There were moments throughout this piece that I really enjoyed. A good example is on page 3 where Mr. Smart sums up how he and Mrs. Smart became a couple. This description is concise and gets to the heart of the basis of the Smarts’ relationship, something which is both essential for the story and enjoyable for the reader. What I thought detracted from the story was some the unbelievable aspects of Mr. Smart’s profession. For beginners, it seems unlikely that a funeral home director would be in charge of gathering dead bodies and that he would take them to the funeral home instead of the morgue. In addition, I did not understand why it was so essential for Mr. Smart to leave right in the middle of terrible weather to go pick up a dead body that is not going anywhere. I would suggest either changing his profession and restructuring the circumstances that call him away or simple reworking the entire situation altogether. I would also like to emphasize that I liked the perspective shift halfway through the story, but I wanted more insight into Mrs. Smart’s character. We get a lot of Mr. Smart, but only a little dose of the Mrs. With some revision, I think this story can have a lot of things going for it.