Jennifer Shaw

Happy New Year! I hope yours is off to a smooth start.

For this first post of 2026, I decided to share my practice scene from December.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m focusing especially on scene structure, writing one complete scene per month as an exercise to strengthen my skills in this fundamental unit of storytelling. These scenes are usually academic exercises separate from any of my works-in-progress (WIPs), but this one surprised me.

It has developed into something longer, and I’m still drafting it.

It’s become a Christmas ghost story, a piece of slow-burn American gothic. If it turns out well, I hope to share the entire narrative during the holiday season at the end of this year.

For now, here’s the opening scene from this current WIP. I hope you enjoy the wintry setting and unsettling atmosphere.

***

Your mind will make of the world what it wants, Jamesy, his father had liked to say. Remember that, and you’ll retain more sense than half the folks around you.

These were the words James recalled that week before Christmas, 1900, when he noticed the odd tracks in the snow.

He was no longer a boy. Yet, when that first December powder coated the landscape, and the mounds on the fence posts looked like gumballs of white, he couldn’t help but scan the earth for animal tracks. Deer, he mostly observed, and turkeys, fox, mice, the occasional rabbit, and even black bears, if it was early enough in the season. Sometimes, the enormous cloven prints of a moose’s hooves. The larger animals’ tracks, straight or winding, formed clear, often intersecting paths that emerged from the forest to head up the western hill toward the underground spring. There, water could be found even when most of the earth’s surface froze. Or, they ran the reverse, the tracks moving downward into the dark mass of pine and fir.

These strides were even and logical, and James still enjoyed interpreting the beasts’ traffic, inferring all the various life that had traipsed across his dairy farm in the darkness of night or earliest glimmer of dawn. It remained his favorite thing about winter, and now, what with all that evidence of animation amid stagnation and death, it was one of the few things that prodded the ember in his chest.

But that sunny day, as he nudged open an icy, snow-packed gate with his boot and trod over the sparkling virgin ground along the south fence, the tracks that caught his eye were different.  

Strange imprints of two feet. They moved in from the forest in a single line as usual, but then that forward path ended. Running up against the fence, the prints became a kind of localized figure eight—circular, turning back on themselves repeatedly. Evidence of pacing, a lack of direction. A tread, seemingly, of confusion or hesitation, before ceasing altogether.

 He walked around the prints, examining their strange strides, careful to keep his own steps away from them lest he confuse them with his own. He observed no evidence of the tracks’ further progress. Not under the fence or through the gate toward the farmhouse or barn or even back toward the tree line. As if whoever had been there just vanished. Or rose straight into the sky.

He closed his eyes. Opened them.

Nothing changed.

“Jesum,” he murmured.  

The vaguely kidney-shaped tracks were much longer than any animal print, curling inward beneath each big toe. Human boots, from the looks of them, though half James’s size. And they just disappeared.

One of the little Houghton girls from his neighbor’s farm? Sometimes they dragged their sleds all the way over here to go down his hill. But where were the marks from the sleds’ runners? Where were Suzy’s or Lily’s prints homeward?

Why would they come from the woods?

James gazed at that edge of wilderness, draped in pristine white. Beneath that snowy top, he knew how the branches, saplings, and weeds tangled together, thick and suffocating, against a backdrop of dense shadow.  

A memory emerged, and a phantom finger ran up his spine.

“No, not in my experience,” the former owner of the property had told James in all seriousness when James asked wryly if the old house he was purchasing was haunted. “But this here is an odd piece of land; that’s the thing might give you pause. We hear strange sounds from the woods sometimes, like howling, or wailing. A girl, it sounds like. Folks have disappeared in there over the years too. One was never found…”

Now, James lifted a gloveless hand to rub the back of his neck.

He could go back to the house for his shotgun. He could follow the trail in reverse, into the trees to see where the prints led. Sometimes, vagrants camping out in the wild stole things from neighboring properties. That was rare, though, and only happened in the warmer months.

Squatting down, James studied a single print. It yielded no insight, remaining silent and secretive in the snow, which glimmered all around him like a million microdiamonds. The temperature was comfortable, just under freezing. At a familiar sound, he looked up to watch a single massive crow flap overhead, its throaty caws low and tranquil as it carved a path through the blue air, the whir of its black wings audible.

Straightening up, James turned his back on the prints. He went back through the gate, closed it, and headed toward the barn where there was always more to do. He had concerns more practical and pressing than this. His livestock needed him.

His father’s words echoed inside his head.

The mind makes of the world what it wants.

This time of year, dismal memories often fueled his imagination. What good would come from feeding ghoulish thoughts?

One of the little Houghtons, he resolved. And surely, there was some reasonable explanation for why the girl’s tracks looked the way they did.

He would not make anything morbid out of this.

He tried to ignore the tightness in his gut.

He would not let this warp a bright winter’s day.

Coward, he thought to himself, heading into the dung-fragrant barn.  

***

Thanks for reading!

What, if anything, do you find creepy or uncanny about the wintertime? Feel free to leave a comment.

I hope everyone stays healthy, and I’ll be back with another post later this month.

XOXO,

Jenn