My Response To The Prompt

So this week, as you've probably noticed, we're doing something a little different here on The Melt-Ink Pot. Earlier in the week, we posted a prompt: "Late into the night, the snow fell and fell." We're posting our various responses to that prompt, just so we can see how many different directions one prompt can take us.

I have to confess that my response is a little longer than I expected. But the prompt seems to have landed in a part of my brain that grabbed it and ran, and so ... 7,500 words or so later, a story fell out.

Rather than cluttering up space here, I've posted it on one of my other blogs. But here's a teaser:

Christmas Wishes
by Sheila McClune

Late into the night, the snow fell and fell. Risa's aching hands clenched the steering wheel in a death grip. This is stupid, the nagging voice in her head told her for the thousandth time. Turn around. Go back. The voice got louder, grew strident as she approached another in-the-middle-of-nowhere exit. She turned up the iPod, patched into the radio with a makeshift cable, to try to drown it out.

That, too, was a bad choice. Bohemian Rhapsody ended, and the next song began. Three notes were all that had a chance to play before Risa mashed the skip button, but it was too late. The three notes had already stabbed their way into her heart. Their song. Her eyes flooded with tears...

A mile marker – 420, some idiotic portion of her mind noted – loomed in her headlights, straight ahead. Risa yelled a few words she'd never repeat in front of her mother and fought the urge to yank the steering wheel sharply to the left. Instead, she eased it to the left as gently as she could while still having a chance of not biffing the signpost.

The car almost-but-not-quite scraped the signpost and headed back toward the center of the northbound lanes of the interstate, but then the back end started to skid. She knew she was supposed to steer into the skid, but that would head her straight into the median, so she yanked the wheel back the other direction. The car fishtailed, then described a graceful three hundred and sixty degree turn...

(Read the rest here)