Excerpt: HAROLD 2008 (Working Title)

Gail Harlowe pulled herself out of the snow bank, into which her sleigh had disappeared mere moments earlier. She felt more stupid than hurt -- though she wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t hurt as well.

Gail paused, letting the sensations of her body come into focus, pushing out of her mind for just a moment the humiliation of the situation in order to determine whether she was in pain anywhere. She could feel her cold feet, the snow having worked its way down her boots. She could feel the sweat drops crawling down her back, sending signals of cold from her overheated skin. Her knees were feeling a little shaky at the realization of the danger she’d managed to avoid -- or was it a consequence of the adrenaline that washed over her upon impact? She could feel the cold breeze blowing on her face, her scarf now lost, presumably in the snow bank. The feeling of the cool breeze was refreshing against the only skin she had exposed to the outside air.

Nothing more serious than some mild discomfort in the foot area, then, and some general warmth inside the down-lined snow suit. No, she wasn’t hurt.

Gail then turned to look at the scene of the accident. Her sleigh was in there, somewhere, buried in the drift on the bank of the frozen stream. Buried deep. Very deep. Not even a hint of chartreuse to be seen.

Great.

Gail had spent most of the fall restoring this beautiful old sleigh. She saw it, a run-down old wreck, on her walk home one saturday from her trip into town. The thing was old rotting wood, rusting runners and hardware, little remaining peeling paint and a story to tell. She’d gotten up the courage, finally, to ask the owner of the house about it, and was thrilled when the elderly gentlemen told her she could take it away free of charge.

She’d then spent most of her free time for the next three months, on weekends and evenings, stripping the paint, rust and layers of time off the old wood and metal, replacing the wooden boards that needed replacing, which turned out to be most of them, and restoring the sleigh back into its original splendor. She’d been careful to get as exact a match as she could for each piece of hardware, for the nails, the bolts and screws, all the knobs and slides. Her attention to detail was exact.

Well, except for the color. She made the sleigh chartreuse.

Chartreuse, after all, was Gail Harlowe’s signature color. It simply had to be chartreuse.

And now Gail’s chartreuse restored sleigh was buried in an avalanche of snow on a frozen creek bank down the hill of her house.

“I told you you can’t steer a sleigh.”