A Nor'easter and Strappy Spring Sandals

Sara removed her glasses and through her nose, drew in a deliberately long breath. Exhaling slowly, her eyes were distracted from the computer screen to the bay window of her home office.

Large, heavy snowflakes dropped straight down outside the window and tall, skinny pines swayed back and forth lightly in the developing wind. Her dad would call it the start of a classic Nor'easter.

It did not matter what was going on outside, Sara was preoccupied with getting the last of her short story written before today's midnight deadline. Keeping her eye on the $500 prize, Sara had a good feeling her contest entry was going to be the winner this time.

"When I come back in my next life, I want to be you," Sara said to her cat, Crunch. Crunch was the size of a small dog and he slept tucked up in a ball in the bookcase next to Sara's desk.

Searching the Word program thesaurus for a precise word, Sara said to the cat, "Do you want to hear my masterpiece-prize-winning-I'm-buying-new-strappy-Spring-sandals story Crunch?"

A toothy yawn and total-body stretch from Crunch seemed like a yes, so Sara read her story aloud. She was not shy about calling attention to certain passages she felt were quite exciting by overemphasizing them as she read. Crunch, was not quite as impressed and went back to sleep again before Sara got to the third page of her story.

So busy reading and writing her masterpiece, Sara lost track of the snow falling outside the window. Reality quickly took hold, though, when the wind abruptly erupted out of the Northeast, distributing the now thick curtain of heavy wet snow at a crazy angle across the expanse of the back yard.

Leaving her desk to stretch and turn some lights on, Sara wracked her brain for the perfecting ending to her story. While she waited for water to boil to make hot chocolate, she stared out the kitchen window.

Watching a lone squirrel make a final effort to gather seed from the feeder plagued by the pressure of mounting snow and the onset of darkness, Sara mumbled, "Gotta give you an "A" for trying," as the squirrel scampered off to his squirrel home unfulfilled.

Grabbing a handful of dreadful store-bought oatmeal cookies, Sara settled back in at her desk. Sipping the ridiculously expensive gourmet hot chocolate, which was a lavish Christmas gift, she gave herself; Sara pondered the idea of letting Lily die, for shock value, at the end of the contest story.

"Crunch...would Lily's death be over-the-top to an editor...or...would the editor judging the contest think I am an uninhibited writer who dares to render pain and emotion and not happiness in the end?" Sara ignored Crunch, who was blissfully making yippy little cat sounds in his deep state of feline slumber.

Feeling confident in classifying herself as a progressive writer, Sara furiously typed into existence Lily's heartbreaking and untimely death. For good measure, though, she threw in something the editor could take away from the story; a daughter no one knew about until Lily's funeral.

Sara now energized and pleased with herself that she did not hesitate to kill off Lily's character, typed in the final words and hollered, "Oh, yeah baby...mama's gettin some new shoes!" One second after she gave the victory shout...the electricity went off and she sat in total darkness in front of a dead computer screen.

Within the excruciating silence of the house, Sara was once again, acutely aware of the sound of the Nor'easter raging outside. The power outage lasted for two days. During that time, Sara agonized over hot spring sandals, Lily's death and a writing contest she knows in her heart, she would have won.

This is an AC short story Assignment based on winter!