Creative writing short story - Important Day

Omer Sireci
Ms. Cristen Martin
Creative writing short story
4/29/2013

Important Day

It was a very good day, the white of the snow brilliant against the cloudless sky. The sun was warm on her face and the air icy in her nose and throat. Marianne removed her sunglasses and, squinting against the glare, felt in her bag for the binoculars. Holding them to her eyes she could see it was Kerem.
Kerem's girlfriend Marianna watched as he moved effortlessly down the mountainside, turning first this way, then that, carving sweeping curves in the pristine snow. It made her think of a swallow dipping and swooping in a summer evening sky. She smiled to herself.
A deep crack rent the air. Then another. The sound echoed around the valley. She felt rather than heard a deep rumbling. With the binoculars still held to her eyes, she looked from side to side. A blur of snow, trees and sky swerved back and forth.
Her heart pounding, she dropped the binoculars, and her eyes, watering now in the cold bright light, were drawn to movement at the top of the pass. She could see the mass of snow, it's outer edges, darker with tumbling debris, spreading downwards and outwards. Frantically she sought out Kerem. She saw him, now no more than a small orange peck just reaching the tree line. The avalanche was gathering pace, the outskirts billowing like sheets in the wind. She tried to cry out but there was no air in her lungs. He disappeared. Marianne watched as, moments later, the whiteness swallowed the trees.

You establish a very evocative setting, with the bright winter's day, it sort of feels static, you can really feel a bareness, an emptiness...but i don't like "the white of the snow..." I think you mean looking at snow from a distance, and seeing the cut between the super clear white and the super clear blue of the cloudless sky, but you can clean that image up, it makes me feel like you're trying to put us below a mountain rising up into the sky, and receding into it...that is actually very interesting and compelling if so, an interesting change in perspective, but im not sure that's what you're trying, but perhaps you are...there's a spaceless feeling...YOU CHANGE her name from Marriane to Marriana, fix that...great description of his run though, like the swallow thing, very concise but still evocative...I love the use of "rent"...i had to sift my way through the dictionary to find out what it meant..."She felt rather..." is a terrible sentence, fix that...

all in all this is a very interesting piece, kind of kafkaesque...perhaps a bit more expansion...also, you go from a good ambiguity (is it an avalanche or a gunshot) to no fun, because then you just admit its an avalanche, maybe just describe the avalanche, leave it for us to decide...maybe just describe him tumbling down in the snow, or her watching him...

the perspective of a lover watching her lover being snatched up all helpless like that, breathtaking, but the language fails at the most important times, you don't expand where you should to really engulf me...

The weak title and the opening five words of your story do you no favours. 'It was a very good day' - how do we know that? It's your job to show us rather than tell us. Do you mean 'good' as in good weather, or well-behaved, or successful, or a day when the writer felt better than usual? It's so ambiguous that it's better not mentioning the quality of the day at all.

I love the image of a skier mirroring the movement of a swallow.

There are one or two places where this could be tightened more:

Marianne removed her sunglasses and, squinting against the glare, felt in her bag for the binoculars. Holding them to her eyes she could see it was Kerem.
You have already established we're seeing things from Marianne's viewpoint - and that she's observing Kerem - so we don't need Kerem's girlfriend Marianna watched. . . again. It's as if you're suddenly describing a new character.

And here:

Her heart pounding, she dropped the binoculars, and her eyes, watering now in the cold bright light, were drawn to movement at the top of the pass.
Did she drop her eyes? That's how it looks on first reading. Maybe split the sentence in two so it's clearer.

But overall you describe the drama of the scene well enough. I'm just wondering whether there is more to follow.

H

I don`t like the title first of all. It doesn`t catch attention. The same problem happens with the beginning. However I like the ending of this fragment.