Well, your synopsis more or less aligns with what I was trying to convey, so that’s something, I suppose. Incidentally, there was some conscious inspiration drawn from Harry Potter, though not the scene you mentioned (though that scene does move me more than perhaps any other in literature, so the comparison is welcome). The one I did draw from was the first time Harry saw the Mirror of Erised, with his parents at the front and the rest of his family stretching on interminably into the background. That the narrator’s mother had died before he remembered her is almost certainly inspired by that, though it wasn’t consciously written so.
I do see where you’re coming from on the “chill bite* sentence – the tone isn’t quite right at that point – the description is too concrete, or something similar, compared to the rest of it. Though, in saying that, it may be the first two sentences (which I also quite like) that don’t quite fit with what follows.
The “quick/quick” line is, yeah, probably a little weak (in construction, at least), but that kind of wordplay is super fun. It did feel out of place at the time of writing, though.
The seed of this piece was planted by the Alaska article a few months ago – I had some sort of vaguely Lovecraftian finding something in the snow plot bouncing around my mind – so this was definitely written by (and therefore to some extent for) someone with that sort of arctic fascination. The idea was somewhat that this is some sort of northern folktale, the sort of thing a primitive people would believe to be unmistakeably magical, but that modern thinking would take as simple hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation while he knew the path all along, or some similarly scientific explanation. That, of course, the former is actually more or less stated to be true probably says a great deal about my general sorrow at the sterility of the modern scientific outlook.
18-Jul-2013 01:21:49
