Snow Day
by Kathryn Kulpa
Kathryn Kulpa’s “Snow Day” is a runner up for the 2020 NO CONTEST. Read our interview with the author below the story.
Let’s say we spent the night together and woke up to a gift from the universe, that the sheets crackled and sparked and the air had the thin blue whiteness and silence of a snow day morning, cold and blankety, and I buried my cold nose in your warm scratchy neck, your neck was always warm, and let’s say we slipper-skated to the window and the window was cake-drizzled with snow, the window was soft-focus frosted, and let’s say we opened that window just to smell the whispered breath of snow, evanescent as eyelash kisses, both of us watching while outside the window cars slid across the parking lot, slow as glaciers, the squeal of brakes or spinning tires muffled by the snow, the holy snow that loved us so, that loved our love, because no work for me! No work for you! A whole day to be snowed in with you, snugly rug-wrapped in your blue bedroom where we only braved the trek to the kitchen to make coffee, those Viennese beans you loved, so black, so bitter, so perfectly me and you, and let’s say it was that day, only that day, and not the rest of our lives.
Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash fiction chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus). Her work was selected for the 2020 Best Microfiction anthology and has been nominated for Best Short Fiction. Her stories are published in Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, Superstition Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and other journals, and she is flash fiction editor for Cleaver magazine. Find her at kathrynkulpa.com or @KathrynKulpa.
An Interview with Kathryn Kulpa
This piece incorporates detail fantastically, while eluding the specific — how do you decide where to linger, and what to leave unsaid?
I really wanted to capture the physical details of the moment, the feel and sound and smell of the snow, an unexpected overnight snow that turns all of us into children just looking out the window at the wonder of it. I didn’t want to define the characters too specifically because I wanted the reader to put themselves in the story, to be that “you.”
The tone of this piece is carefully preserved until the very last line, when the tone effortlessly shifts course — how would you describe the interplay between these two tones, in relation to the mood of the piece as a whole?
This was the first story I wrote in the pandemic, during the shutdown, and that shift is integral to the tone of the story. I remember those days in March, trying to find something to compare it to, and I thought of when I was a kid and would wake up to a snow day and it just felt like a miracle, a gift—a sudden shakeup to the order of things—but you wouldn’t expect it to last more than a day or two. You wouldn’t expect to be snowed in forever.
Tell us a little bit about your writing process these days — has anything changed under quarantine? How have you found inspiration?
At first it seemed like I had so much time—time enough at last, like the guy in that Twilight Zone episode—but I was too scared to take advantage of it. The anxiety felt paralyzing. Then suddenly I was teaching all these online classes, and then I was back at work, and all that time I thought I had was gone. This is probably true for a lot of people. But I’ve found that taking workshops helps a lot, just to have a deadline and some structure. I need that now more than ever.
What have you been reading lately, and what writing have you been particularly struck by?
Well, I passed my Goodreads annual reading goal sometime in October, so I’m definitely doing more reading! Some new titles I’ve especially liked are The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry, and The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey. I’ve also been teaching flash fiction classes online, so doing a lot of reading for that—journals and collections—but sometimes I’ll just go for comfort reads, usually either children’s/YA or horror, books I’ve read before, several times, and so I don’t have to worry about how they’re going to turn out.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on currently — what’s been keeping you busy, or what you hope to make progress on soon?
Shortly before the present unpleasantness I took a novella-in-flash workshop where I began trying to put together some flash pieces I’d written about twin sisters trying to find each other after the apocalypse—and the way I’d envisioned that was kind of a soft apocalypse, not one cataclysmic event but a whole series of climate disasters and then a mysterious virus. Not surprisingly, I haven’t made too much progress on it since real life took over in the apocalypse department, but it is something I’d like to go back to if I can ever feel like I’m writing fiction again.
