I recently applied to and was accepted into the graduate program at the Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College. I am specifically headed to the Oxford campus in London this summer.

At any rate, this is a very short story I used as a writing sample for my application. Your critiques are appreciated.

A Snow Falls

It feels just like getting a tooth pulled. A little pressure and a few tugs here and there and before you were aware, it’s all over. That’s what she’s telling herself anyway.

It’s impossible to think about it in any clear and direct way. It must be the anesthesia, but what’s happening to her is simply a fog in the background of some weird still life painting of her on the operating table; a doctor up to his elbows in her womb, and a nurse standing nearby smugly guarding her womanhood as snows falls behind a large plate-glass window.

She feels like a visitor at some modern museum who is both repulsed and intrigued by the painting in front of her. As she leans in to examine some of the details, a guard calmly, but quickly moves to her and ask her to step—that hurts.

From a dark corner of the room comes a sharp twinge of pain and the painting consumes and envelopes her until she’s back there in the operating room with its caustic blinding light and miasma of smells from cleaning fluids to the warm musk of her vagina. She can’t remember if she cleaned herself before coming to the clinic this morning. She had no idea how to apologize to the doctor even if—god, there it is again.

This time there is no rushing in through the scene, she is there and she searches the bald spot on the doctor’s head for clues as to whether something is wrong. She knows that the nurse’s face is mostly obscured and that her eyes are simply blank crevasses in which a deep darkness glints.

She tries to ask a question about what may be the problem just as the doctor rolls his chair back and looks up with a smile of success tempered by knowing he has to do this 12 more times today. She knows that look. It’s the same one her employees give her every time she asks them for “an update.” Everyone in the office knows that “an update” is less a casual affair and more like a witch’s trial straight out of Salem.

The smug nurse moves into the work zone between her legs. The knowing glance makes her think that she should feel something more than she does. Before she can even start to manufacture some emotion, her legs are out of the harnesses and she is being told to get dressed again. A few parting words about follow-up visits chase her out the door and back into the gently falling snowstorm.

Hustling past the protestors, their chants are no different than they were on the way in. She only catches the full brunt of a few of the epithets and she wonders if these people have jobs. She imagines one of them walking in and sitting down at a table surrounded by children and telling them that there’s no food for them tonight but that two women were turned away from the abortion clinic. The only response is a muffled sob and the shuffling of feet out of the kitchen.

There is just time enough for lunch before heading back to the office. She heads for a place just around the corner because they have a really good turkey Reuben for only three bucks. He used to always tell her that a Reuben was a poor man’s sandwich and that she should order something else.

Unwrapping the sandwich, she notices that it seems larger today; there’s twice the meat maybe. Glimmer from a passing truck and she watches as it continues down the street and around the corner. She’s been seeing these trucks for a new bottled water company lately. He had talked about them as competition even though he only sold beer and wine.

She looks back to her lunch and the sight of the perfect parabolic bite taken out of the grilled rye bread is blurred by tears welling in her eyes. In seconds, she is bawling uncontrollably, yet silently. Her sobs are now rocking her body, threatening to throw her off the stool. She still can’t decide what she’s crying about, but this doesn’t stop the sobbing.

She senses the people around her beginning to stare and murmur. Sandwich in hand, she bolts for the door. There are people in this deli that she knows, that he works with. Hopefully, they’ll figure she missed her Paxil or something.

As the sun hits her face, she looks up and realizes what happened this morning. She absent-mindedly takes a bite of the Reuben she’s still holding and when the sauerkraut hits the back of her throat, she retches violently. Heaving, the blood rushes to her head and makes her slightly dizzy. It’s at this moment that she is back in the museum, in another gallery, staring at a painting in Technicolor brightness. A woman is gasping for hair as a bewildered taxi driver wonders why she just vomited newly eaten Reuben all over the side of his yellow-and-black. The painter has captured the moment using only primary colors, yet a bright whiteness permeates everything. She’s never seen anyone paint snow that well.

Stars appear at the edge of her vision and she falls to her knees. Air is finally returning to her shriveling lungs, so she seizes the chance to run again. This time, she heads for her apartment.

She makes the three blocks quickly, despite slipping several times in the snow, and only feels slightly guilty for not apologizing to the people she ran into on the way there. How many times had she been run into without so much as a glance? Multitasking, she dials the office while waiting for the elevator to make the 34-story trip up to her apartment. The receptionist feigns an understanding and apologetic manner, but the message will be delivered to her boss void of these jealous undertones.

Despite the cloying warmth of her apartment, her head clears and the uncontrollable crying fades away. Nothing like that episode has ever happened to her before. Sitting on the couch, she visualizes all the strands of possibilities stretched out before her and as she fumbles through finding one to latch on to, the door buzzes.

Robotically, she presses the button and it’s his voice. Through the speaker comes a primary note of flirtation followed by pleading which degrades into begging and cajoling. Wordlessly, she presses the button to let him.

She cracks the door for him as she has done many times before. She’s in the kitchen when she hears him slide past the door and into the room. She can feel him taking up the space in the living room. As soon he enters it, nothing else has mass, nothing has volume, he is the sole physical entity in the room, and that’s what she always loved and hated about him.
He peeks around the door jamb into the kitchen. The look on his face is weary, hopeful, and full of destruction. Snow lays in soft flakes on his hair and shoulders. He’s an actor and she wonders which of these looks is the fake one this time. She feels like she should hug him, just fall into his arms as a pile of sullied flesh and a fountain of tears, but she won’t do that. He knows better, too, and he stands expecting words, lots of words.

The first ones come slowly, and then like the rock fall they saw on that trip to Aspen, each word knocks another loose until there is a rain of words. Some are pebbles and do little, but the boulders are there as well careening back and forth—accusatory, apologetic, and only half-meant.

Conclusions are never reached in arguments, discussions, like this. It’s an airing of grievances, not a trial. When they both wear down, having eaten the meal she prepared, the inevitability of the next question sits like a black hole in the corner of the room. It sucks in and destroys anything and everything until it’s addressed head on like the cataclysmic scene in some late-night sci-fi film.

As his lips part and she sees the tiny quark of spinning cosmos at the back of his throat, she thinks back to moment she told him she was pregnant. It wasn’t like the commercials at all. She stood there with the faint scent of urine wafting off the test watching this man dissolve into a ball of energy, light and fury. He stayed gone for 6 weeks, during which, her decision was made, without consultation and winter came on with piles of clean, white snow.

Then it’s there, the black hole inverts on itself as his mouth closes. Like a nebula of stars, the question hangs ripe with the promise of the universe.

“Will you marry me?”

The taste of regurgitated Reuben fills the back of her mouth. She wasn’t expecting that…at all. “Please let me comeback,” “Don’t you still love me,” or even “Why didn’t you ask me first,” but not that. Clearly, he was a Carl Sagan to her Stephen Hawking when it came to recognizing features of the heavens. Choking back her bile, she demurs to say no in as nice a way possible when your voice is cracking. He expects the answer and looks as though he wants to take back the question anyway.

The conversation tumbles to lighter topics; his previous blunder hanging between them like a veil of falling snow. He opens the bottle of wine he brought and she notices the bottle smells of roses, though he brought none in. With a little liquid lubrication, she begins to know him again. He seems as unsure and tender as he did the first day she met him. The weeks of resentment, the morning of despair drift away.

On the fourth glass of wine, she finds herself back in the museum, only this time the painting on the wall is unfinished. Only sketches and a few brushstrokes hang promisingly in the middle of a large canvas. She feels the cool weight of a brush in her hand, but he laughs and the scene rushes back into the darkness at the corner of her living room.

They are tired and settle into the bed together without words, without touching. She feels his body heat radiating across the chasm between them. There are no ropes, no ladders laid down as bridges, no harnesses, and no one “on belay.” She falls asleep with only one picture in her mind. This time, there’s no museum, no fancy fade effects, just a pure, natural mental image of him and her and a faceless baby.