Your Winter Tale
Take the stage 🎤and craft me a scene
A holiday inspired prompt based teaching on scene where paid subscribers get a chance to show off what they’ve learned
Hi and welcome to Flight School:
Once again, the school savors another rush of subscribers to which I can only offer my deep thanks with hopes you’ll surf around this and other posts, read, comment, and most of all: try not to manage the content in a liner manner.
If you are dying for more about scene, hone in on that (see below). If you want to share, there are “Your Turn” prompts in nearly every post. If you want to start right here, today, on this post, and eventually surf backwards, that’s totally great.
Where you land is where you land. You’re never in the wrong place. Trust, I suppose I’m saying. Trust this brave new publishing model of Substack and you’ll be happier and less overwhelmed.
Scene
We’ve talked a lot about scene. (Here is the most recent, and going back further, here are other teachings should you want to look at them. Dec. 2 & May 8.)
Let’s see how the lesson settling in on you. To get us started, I will write one using as many ingredients as I can from the Recipe Card and invite you to write one, too, and share. And yes, I just wrote it, so please write something new.
Your last (or first) name goes before the words Winter Tale.
500 words total.
The story must have the word winter in it, include a location, a description of the people so the reader can see them, a few lines of dialogue, and a progression that takes us from one way of being at the beginning to another at the end.
Easy, right?
Lauck-Winter Tale:
I sit cross-legged in the corner of the grand living room. This is winter, 1968. Carson City, Nevada. At my back, the fir tree in the bay window is decorated with twinkle lights and tinsel and glass ornaments. Piles of gaily wrapped presents stack under and around the base.
I “think about my attitude” which is the instruction of Auntie Carol who is my father’s oldest sister, a devote Catholic, and mother to six. Carol is a woman of a thousand rules I don’t know, is quick to paddle a willful child and will wash out a cursing mouth so fast you’ll never see the bar of Dove coming until it’s too late.
“I don’t want to hear from you again,” Carol says now, muttering under her breath over whatever crime I committed which is a bafflement to me. A disrespectful look? A smart comment? Perhaps I was looking through the gifts under the tree?
I shift slightly, watching her in retreat. Full-figured, my aunt moves like a bulldog. Low to the ground. All chest.
I look at the walls before me, my hands in my lap. A five-year-old penitent being watched by her aunt while my father goes to the hospital to get my mother.
Lunch is served and then my cousins and brother are sent to play in the snow, their faraway voices pitching through the windows. The shadows of evening escort them back inside. Over dinner, Carol yells for them. Stop roughhousing. Finish your meal. Don’t spill. Finally, they go back up, and the house falls quiet again.
I’m forgotten, or maybe I no longer exist? And still I sit there, wondering.
The next morning, I wake prone under warm covers, my head on a pillow. I’m in bed next to my mother, and we’re in the family room with a desk and bookcases and easy chairs. My mother breathes deeply and her black lashes fan over the pearlescent circles under her closed eyes.
“Mama,” I say.
She opens her eyes, which are dark, almost black. Her dark hair is tumbled and messy over the white pillow. She is pale and as fragile as porcelain, yet still fine and lovely. She reaches a hand to me and tucks a bit of hair behind my ear.
“Why were you in the corner last night?” she asks, sleepy.
“Something about my attitude,” I say.
“Really,” she says and chuckles only it hurts her to laugh and she stops, studies my face.
She never yells like Auntie Carol. Never hits. My mother is too sick for all that, too weak. She’ll be dead by the time I’m seven, but for now is back and certainly delivered me from the corner. Who else? With this knowledge, I feel bad for whatever I did the day prior, want to promise I’ll try harder but she doesn’t seem to care.
“Merry Christmas,” she whispers, as if it’s a secret between us.
“Christmas?” I ask.
“Did you forget?” she asks.
Before I can say that I did, voices ring out overhead, echoes of my cousins calling “Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas,” and of Carol’s heavy steps down the hall toward them.
“Quiet,” she says. “For God’s sake, keep your voices down.”
Your Turn:
Get the Scene Recipe Card.
Title it Winter Tales with your last (or first) name before.
Stay at 500 words.
Include the word “winter”.
Describe the location.
Describe the people so the reader can see them.
Use a few lines of dialogue
Make sure there is a progression that takes the story from one way of being at the beginning to another at the end.
Good luck!
Ho, ho, ho, Jennifer
PS: This is an earlier than usual post and over the winter break with my family, I’ll be reading and commenting up a storm (to include questions…so get ready).
Warm holiday greetings to everyone.
Lori—Winter Tale 1963
On the Mojave winter is bad-ass cold. It seldom rains, never snows, but the wind howls like a wounded coyote and hits your skin like sandpaper gone rogue.
My room in Margie and Granville’s foster care in Trona, is small and square like a cell. Granville wakes me at dawn as usual. Once a guard at Alcatraz, he disciplines me like I’m a low-life prisoner.
“Get up you lazy bum.” His voice chills me to the bone.
I stick out a toe, reluctant to touch frigid linoleum the color of raw liver. I smell kerosine vapors from the heater down the hall and hear it ticking awake. The warmth will never reach my room, and it’s better to get up.
“Come on get up. Now.” Quieter than usual, but still demanding.
“Mffmft,” my answer muffled by my pillow. I open one eye and see his squat body framed in the doorway.
“I’ve got a surprise for you.” A cigarette dangles from his lips.
No surprise could top him telling me he had a surprise for me. Our screaming matches are legendary. Mr. Leonard next door had the nerve to come over only once to see if I was all right. Granville threatened to get his rifle if he didn’t get out of the yard.
He calls me an amazon, a slut, stupid, a pile of shit. I’m 17, so skinny my classmates call me Boney Maroney. I absorb his words like sucker punches to my gut and scream my hate. But today he has a surprise.
Maybe my mother isn’t really dead. What could be a better surprise than that?
I dance my bare feet across the floor, throw on clothes, and meet Granville in the kitchen, taking my place at the table.
“Look outside,” his gruffness replaced with wonder, “Isn’t it purdy?”
Covered in snow, the flat landscape really did surprise me. I’ve lived my whole life on the desert and never touched snow.
The closest I get is seeing Telescope Peak miles away in Death Valley out the kitchen window. I imagine the mountain snow as delicious as vanilla ice cream, the only food I ate for months, trying to starve myself. I ended up infuriating and disgracing Granville when a doctor accused him of negligence.
We go outside.
“We had lots of snow in Kansas when I was your age.” He laughs. His cheeks are pinched red by the cold. He shows me how to roll a snow ball. He tosses it and misses me.
We both laugh and toss snow around.
“Let’s get breakfast, kid.”
Ever since I tried to starve myself, he forces me eat a hearty breakfast before leaving for work. I use his insistence on eating as a way to irritate him, pushing the food around until he yells at me.
Today I’m invited to join him.
Today is the day I decide to eat breakfast every day, determined to gain weight before going out on my own. Today the snow, white as vanilla ice cream brings us together.
I couldn't get it down to 500 words and I tried. I'm admiring of Laura and Lori. I have much to learn.
Somers-Winter Tale
It was Dec 23rd. Almost 6 inches of snow lay on the ground. It was getting dark. With Christmas lights everywhere we could see, New Jersey seemed transformed into a beautiful version of herself. We all noticed it at the same time and were quiet, almost reverential. What was it about those Christmas fairy lights that made everything look magical? Cars were flying by on the NJ Turnpike, probably driving too fast for that much snow. Feathery white fanlike shapes were spewing from tires. The turnpike lights lit up the road in front of us like a winter wonderland. We passed shopping centers on our right. Stores were wrapped in red, green, blue, and white lights. One had a huge star on its roof. For a couple of moments, I felt profoundly happy.
My father had picked Jeff and me up at Newark Airport. Crowded, yes, but people seemed to be in a forgiving mood. Getting our luggage and out to Arrivals had gone smoothly. We were weary after the five and half hour flight from California. Travel always excited me. Like a small child, I clung to the belief that when I flew somewhere, the unhappy part of me would stay behind.
“I’m glad it worked out that I could pick you up,” Dad said. The subtext of which was, ‘you know your mom, I had to talk her into this.’ Though he hadn’t mentioned her, just being reminded that she was waiting in Princeton for our arrival, inundated me with emotions that I had trouble navigating. He was driving a brand-new Audi with leather seats, very unusual purchase for my father. He had a satisfied look. I suspected that having a car like this was something he had longed for a long time but was held back when reminded of the expense. I was in the passenger seat and Jeff was sprawled in the middle of the back seat; his legs so long that I had to pull myself up practically into the glove compartment.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you, Jeff. We’ve heard so much about you. You are also an east coast transplant, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir, well, I’m in the Navy, on Mare Island. I don’t know if I would have picked California to live but that’s how it’s worked out and I love it.”
How I wanted my parents to love Jeff. I wanted to be less of a disappointment to my mother. I thought, I hoped that when they met this wonderful man and realized he loved me, that maybe she would love me too.
We left the Turnpike and drove on Route 1. Soon we were on Nassau Street. The streetlights had diminished. Everything was quiet. My heart was beating loudly. I looked at my father to see if he could hear it. His half-smile was gone. He was chewing his bottom lip. I looked around at Jeff who had his eyes closed but wasn’t asleep. I felt myself go from a 25 year-old woman to a 10 year-old child in the time it took to pull up to our house on Scott Lane.
There, standing behind the front door screen, was the person I was most terrified of in the whole world. My mother.