Response to Lauren Barkley's "Winter's Chill"

            “Winter’s Chill” is a story about Mr. Smart, a funeral home director, and his wife.  There are multiple undertones throughout the story that Mrs. Smart has been cheating on Mr. Smart.  With their relationship on thin ice, Mr. Smart takes a job where he must travel up a treacherous and freezing mountain.  He subsequently crashes, leaving his wife with her sorrow.

            The first thing that I noticed about the story was how illogical Mr. Smart’s job is.  I’d be hard pressed to believe that a funeral home director does his job, the jobs of a coroner, and fills in for the city morgue all at once.  This to me was a huge problem in the story.  There were a lot of plot holes and I had a difficult time understanding the character’s reasoning for their actions.  I also thought that the whole cheating ideas could have been played up a bit more.  To me, there is not a big enough conflict in the story to understand the distress of the characters. 

            There were a lot of elements to the dialogue that I felt really worked.  For instance, when Mr. and Mrs. Smart are speaking, the reader gets a sense that they are detached.  I would have liked to see a scene where they had a conversation about their relationship or some sort of fact that we see their marriage falling apart.  In adding more to the story, I feel like we could see a much stronger character connection between the two main characters.  There seems to be too much telling instead of showing in the story.  Some dramatization could be useful to help solve this problem.  Overall, I did enjoy the story.  I think if the writer fleshes out the plot and expands her character horizons, then this will read as a great story.