Short Story, Theme Prompt, Word Prompt

When Winter Came With Teeth

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Muse on Monday where David  
asks us to write a story about cold winter
as the antagonist. Also for FOWC With
Fandango and the  word “shivering”.
Here’s where the prompts took me.

Image by Me & Perplexity

The streetlights flickered like dying stars as the blizzard descended on Watermill with a fury no one had anticipated. Greg pressed his face against the frosted window of his grandparent’s old house, watching the world outside transform into something alien and hostile.

It had started innocently enough …. a weather advisory, nothing more. But within hours, winter had shown its true face. The snow didn’t fall so much as attack, horizontal sheets of white that scoured the paint from houses and bent ancient oaks until their spines cracked. Ice crept up power lines like crystalline serpents, squeezing until the town went dark, house by house by house.

“Greg, we need to leave,” Alicia said, though she knew her husband would tough it out.

“This house has weathered ninety-eight winters, honey. It’ll weather one more.”

But this wasn’t just winter. This was winter with intention, with malice. Alicia could feel it in the way the wind howled …. not random gusts but deliberate assaults, testing every weakness in the walls. The cold didn’t seep; it invaded, finding every gap, every crack, turning the air inside to frost.

By midnight, the power was gone. The furnace silent. Alicia was shivering even though wrapped in every blanket they owned. Greg fed the fireplace until his fingers were raw. Outside, he could hear the neighborhood succumbing …. the groan of aching roofs, the crash of falling branches, the desperate revving of car engines that would never turn over.

The blizzard pressed against the house like a living thing, patient and cruel. It piled snow against the doors until they wouldn’t open. It coated the windows in ice an inch thick, sealing them in. The temperature inside dropped degree by degree, winter’s cold fingers reaching through century-old walls.

Greg tossed another log on the flames. The fire was their only weapon now, their small defiance against the siege outside. He thought of the neighbors …. Harold and Frieda Templeton two houses down, the young couple across the street with their newborn. Were they fighting the same battle or had the savage winter already claimed them?

The night stretched on endlessly. Every hour was a negotiation with death, measuring their dwindling wood supply against the unforgiving cold. The wind screamed threats through every crack: surrender, submit, freeze.

But Greg fed the fire. And when dawn finally broke …. gray and bitter …. he and Alicia saw what winter had done to their little street. The landscape was unrecognizable, conquered.

Yet their fire still burned.

Greg put his arms around his shivering wife, wrapping her blankets even tighter. “My granddad always said that winter wins many battles but it’s never won the war.”

Outside, the blizzard raged on, furious that this one small house still held warmth, still held life. Alicia stared into the flames as Greg added another log, his jaw set with determination.

Winter could be cruel. Winter could be relentless. But winter, eventually, had to end.

And they would outlast it.

NAR©2026

This is “Winter”  by The Rolling Stones

Muse on Monday – February 2, 2026
FOWC With Fandango — Shivering

All text and graphics are copyright for Nancy Richy and are not to be used without permission. NAR©2017-present.

36 thoughts on “When Winter Came With Teeth”

    1. Thanks for your fabulous comments, David; I’m so pleased you enjoyed my story. We’ve been experiencing extreme weather lately and it’s been frigid here in NY. I based my story on that. Fortunately, we haven’t gotten any blizzards for a very long time. 🤞🏼

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    1. That’s one of the reasons we’ve never moved to The South. We suffer the snowstorms and the rare blizzard but there’s never any long-lasting, expansive damage. The same cannot be said for hurricanes. I’m glad you’ve weathered the storms, Jim, and wish you continued good luck. Thanks for reading.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. I live in Clermont which is centrally located between north and south and east and west. The hurricanes come in from either the east or west coasts and then they travel north. Clermont has one of the highest elevations in Florida, so we don’t get the flooding, and central Florida is usually spared catastrophic storm surge, because the storms have had time to weaken before reaching us.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

Tell me what you're thinking. 🖊️