Cary Marc Grossman

(Laughs) Yes, it was for my seventh grade English class. I had no idea that I wanted to be a writer until I was almost forty years old, but we were assigned to write a short, fictional story, and I wrote one about Jim Morrison's wife dreaming that he was still alive. She's not able to shake the feeling and one night she breaks into Pere Lachaise to visit his grave. When she gets there, she finds someone has erased the writing on the headstone. It ended with her hearing Morrison's voice behind her, telling her not to turn around.

Jeremy is a writer who lives in an isolated cottage, high in the mountains. Two horrendous experiences with marriage have resulted in his desire to remove himself from society, and he has equipped his home so that he has to go down into town only sporadically, to resupply his food stores. One winter, in the middle of a heavy blizzard, a girl shows up at his door, half-frozen. Her hands and feet are dangerously frostbitten, and he wonders how she survived the journey to his house on foot. There's no other shelter for eight miles and he has no idea why she would risk the exposure, or how she found his house. And though she makes it obvious, through hand gestures and facial expression, that she understands him, the girl won't speak. The roads are too frozen over for him to attempt going down into town to seek medical attention for her, so he has no choice but to let her stay for a while and tend to her wounds himself.
The girl stirs his curiosity. With her hands still in bandages, she begins drawing sketches. The sketches make Jeremy nervous because he recognizes them--they are replicas of sketches and paintings made by Jeremy's first love, a girl he knew in high school named Priscilla. Priscilla was a stirring and original artist, raped and murdered when she was eighteen years old. Jeremy never got over Priscilla's death, and this girl's sketches match Priscilla's work exactly. This, naturally, makes Jeremy quite upset. At the same time, Jeremy finds himself irresistibly drawn to her.