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Today's author has asked to remain anonymous for one reason. They want an honest assessment of whether or not this beginning works. And it might be easier for you to do a tough critique if you don't have a name attached to the words. So let the constructive comments flow.

I highlighted the places the author slipped into present tense, and the formatting stayed when I posted here. Let me know if I missed any. I didn't do this to pound it in, but it demonstrates just how easy it is to switch tenses without realizing it.

Chapter 1

Did life perjure itself, or did I?

Lift, pull, sink. Up, up, up.

I raised one knee, and with a firm grip on my ski poles, I pushed and pulled my body up the snow-covered slope another foot—give or take—sinking into winter’s milk-colored landscape. A backpack loaded with granola, raw almonds, dried apricots, a bladder of water, and extra clothes drew my shoulders down toward the slope. Just 552 feet to go, I figured. I’d counted this journey up many times but this time was different.

I raised my other leg hoping to gain more elevation with each effort. Lift, pull, sink. An action I’d accepted as a child and grew to loathe as a teenage girl. Why did Father’s great-grandfather have to squat where a snowplow couldn’t go? Wasn’t there “squatable” land in on the valley floor available back then?

Lift . . . pull, sink. . . I stopped. This effort to gain more ground had failed. Why go on when taking air in and letting it out was the only productive action my body would allow?

The feathery snow floated and flailed from the flat daytime sky. The weather didn’t surprise me. January’s effects had left an imprint upon my soul, no different than the rest of Boundary Valley natives. It’s the longest month, whose horizon inches into and out of the darkness, hinting and hoping of spring—mud—warmth from the ruthless storms. What does surprise me, Ella Maureen Bybee, is that I’m here at all. [You slipped into present tense there, when everything else has been past.]

Twelve years had passed faster than the previous twenty before my exodus from the highlands of Northern Idaho. I had assumed I’d never ski up to this cabin again. Swore on everything I could name, high and low, you’d have to haul me up on a sled—dead—to return.

But I stood, barely, with goggles fixed against my face. Flurries whispered some-kind-of-nothings through the borrowed beanie that veiled the top of my ears. I’d returned with far different assumptions etched into my thoughts, and my heart. I knew better than to believe the frigid timbered walls could protect me from what lurked around the cabin, in the woods, buried with summer’s smoldering embers beneath the weighty winter snow. I knew that when I entered probable squalor and cold, normalcy had never existed.

NEVER.

Normal is an assumption at its best. And I’d discovered over the past year that assumptions could be the greatest falsehoods we believe—and we actually tell them to ourselves. [I like the paragraph up to this point. But the introspection goes on a little long.] But could humans help it? Could we resist the temptation to leave empty blanks between the spoken lines of others? Could our minds cease connecting one action to another? Could we stop drawing raw conclusions regarding the constant changes taking place before our eyes?

Could I?

Lift, pull, sink. Lift, pull, sink.

I had to return.

Up, up, up.

No choice, really. Well—I guess I did have a choice, or had another assumption clouded my now soggy mind?

A burn, deep within the fibers of my quads, my calves, tweaked what used to be customary. I’d once presumed this mode of transportation was typical for all mankind. This routine used to bring on bouts of sporadic laughter between my brother and me long before I knew about the truth assumptions tried to hide.

I continued up, up, with a pull here and there. Air raked against my diaphragm, expanding my alveoli now riddled with mold and loss stitching throughout my side. [I’d cut the last part. I don’t see how it fits in the sentence.]

I stopped. Hacked the discards from my past out of my lungs, and sipped on the water my body hungered for, all of the time. I took in another deep breath before woozy had its way with me. I didn’t want to need help now. To me, need turned into an overused word that had lost the core of its meaning amid a culture full of want. [I like the hints in this paragraph. A health problem, needing help. And that last sentence is really good.]

Ascending this slope was harder than it used to be. Until my forced migration back to the Rockies, I’d walked and breathed at ten feet, give or take, below the level where the brackish water stroked the mud and sand along the terrestrial borders of my existence. I live, or should say lived, in a two-story duplex five blocks off City Park. That actually makes it about sea level where I sleep—slept.

For over a decade, the cliffs, ice, and slopes at 8,200 feet had no longer caged me in. I’d mingled through the cobbled streets and high-rise buildings, all stayed by levees meant to protect, dank air that nourished my thirsty skin, and lakes and rivers full of the heartland’s mire trying to leave its dregs along the way.

I’d left the Deep South to return to the Rockies, no longer shied by the “Where ya at’s” and “How ya do’s?” freely shared by people of all makes, models, and shades of skin. Jazz brushed colors against my blank heart. Gumbo warmed the senses of my soul. The N’awlins’ hospitality I once took guard against, healed the gaps I tried to vainly hide.

I stopped the struggle for my ascent up Bybee Ridge. My toes tingled along each toenail that had pushed against my old, leather boots strapped tight across my feet. {No longer used to} [Be careful of overusing this type of thing. You’ve done a good job already of letting us know she’s been away for 12 years and has to readjust.] the mercury-dropping cold anymore. Nor the layers zipped, snapped and “Velcroed” all carefully positioned to not expose, rub, or fight against a joint that served a purpose—to get me where I needed to go—up—one more time.

Just one.

Monroe and Shirla knew I had come back to Boundary Canyon. And maybe Durk who worked Monroe’s dairy the night before this particular morning. I’d hoped my return hadn’t slithered off the tongues of those hungry for something other than “the weather, stock, and hay” down at The Valley Grill and Chill over Carla’s watered-down coffee brew. The last thing I wanted was uninvited company, or assumable words regarding what used to be—my life.

“You’re skin and bones.” Shirla’s first words to me in person in over a decade as she stood in her kitchen. [This sentence is over-specified. If that makes sense. Too many prepositional phrases strung together, which makes it choppy to read.] She worked eggs beneath her whisk over a gentle propane flame. “Skin and bones.”

The triplet [huh?] emphasis she’d placed on her personal description of me panged against the inside of my ribcage. I looked around to see if she talked to me. Monroe stood next to me munching on a steaming cinnamon roll. He chased it with more than a single gulp of raw milk. A growing belly hung over his belt fastened on the notch nearest the end of the leather strap that he’d probably hand tooled himself.

Nope, not him.

I looked down at my jeans. They struggled to hold onto my hips. I pulled them up higher, rising above my waist. I supposed she’s right. I’d hardly eaten since going five days without. [I like hints, but this seems too obscure.] In a single moment in time, my appetite had curdled amid wafts of putrid waste and the decay of flesh that had consumed the air.

I pushed up and inhaled, taking in flakes of snow that melted in the warmth of my mouth. I exhaled. The action-reaction tweaked the memory bred into the fibers of my legs, arms—body, really. The lowlands had eaten what remained of my flesh. Would the highlands gnaw on my bones?

Only one way to know. I pushed, up, up, up.

I stopped when I caught a glimpse of the cabin through my foggy pants for air. The perpetual hush of winter shivered through my ears. A silence never heard away from the falling snow. I surveyed the scene. Tree branches drooped from the trunk, burdened by winter’s cry. Perfect flurries chiseled by January’s biting air nestled around the pine needles peeking through the tiny holes for light, for air. The blanket of purity even teased me, deep. How deceiving this picture can be. Is it really worth a thousand words? I guess it depends on the voice that you believed—inside.

Where I once had called home sat in shambles on the slope. I expected nothing less, or should I say more. More from someone who I had come to realize possessed nothing more to offer. What I needed from him, he couldn’t give. {What I’d received? I’d rather give back.} [I don’t want to mess with your style or voice, but I’d rather see that as one sentence.] In fact, life delivered much more that I don’t desire than what I do, but why?

A tear welled up behind my eye, but the air was too frigid to let it course along my cheek, out of the warmth my body had generated. Too cold to stop and break down. It’s just too cold.

Brown shutters covered the windows. Snow—white down to gray—layered a good three feet upon the roof. Evidence that more than one winter storm had passed through the mountains since the longest season of life had started back on September first, I’m told. A half-stacked woodpile lines the front porch bordering both sides of the entrance. The other half lay scattered beneath a shroud of well-set snow. An axe handle peeked through a windblown hole.

I sighed.

The cabin would be cold.

Conflict is established. She needs to go home, but doesn’t want to. I like the potential in this beginning, but I think it needs to move a tad faster. I’m reluctant to make any further suggestions of where to cut. This is so different from my style, and I don’t want to interfere with voice.