vignettes

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
lover

Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term.

Comments

[marycatelli]

The library, thought Ava, could stand a little more organization. She found the book that Isabella had directed her to, but not before she had skipped over a dozen tomes about the adventures of lovers in the countryside, replete with bandits and wolves. Which there might have been more of, in history. It was the way the books never noticed the sowing and harvest, the lambing and shearing, the orchards ripening, the fishing, the cheese-making and butter churning, that made her mother warn her that she would need a good steward if she read those and had a country house.

[marycatelli]

She forced her breath out. She did not have a lover who would come and rescue her, but then, she would have not a child to support while she awaited her rescue.
And she would not pack three ballgowns to use if the master of the house held a ball. The ones where anyone could attend were country balls indeed.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

As Connor Westin climbed out of the car to pump gas, the PA system in the truck stop's gas station started playing "Lovin' Every Minute of It" by Loverboy. Damn if that didn't take him straight back to his senior year in high school, back in Stockton, California.

He'd been looking forward to starting a degree in criminal justice, then heading off to law school and probably becoming a corporate lawyer. He'd never imagined that the end of the Cold War was not a permanent peace, that in four years war would blow up in the Middle East, and would end with the destruction of historic cities and the reduction of a major world religion to a fragmented remnant. Or that he would enter Officer Candidate School and spend the next five years as an ordnance officer on one after another carrier in Med and the Gulf.

And now, two decades later, he was part of a war on his own home soil, a war fought not with massed armies, but in the shadows, in desperate missions like this one. It had its roots in the Cold War, in the secret human biotechnology experiments the US had undertaken in response to intel about what the Soviets were doing. But how much of the change in attitudes toward people like him had its roots in the Energy Wars, especially the later part when it became as much a war of religion as a secular war over access to oil.

[marycatelli]

Ah, memories

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

As the process of repairing the damage to the Soviet moonbase wore on, Shelly realized she needed to be careful. The Soviets were a lot more straitlaced than Americans, and a lot more about "separate spheres" in their view of proper relations between the sexes. The last thing she needed was to have them to think that she and one of the male astronauts were lovers.

Or worse, that she might be available as a lover. That Georgian guy, Tsiklauri, was the hot-blooded sort and had certainly acted interested. Only the difference between their cultures had enabled her to pretend she hadn't even noticed he was making a pass.

As a commissioned officer of the United States Air Force and a holder of a security clearance, Shelly could not afford even the appearance of a liaison with a foreign national. Not Welly or any of the other astronauts from allied nations, and certainly not a Soviet cosmonaut.

[marycatelli]

Very true

[marycatelli]

"There have got to be better ways to meet a lover."
She snorted. "Many, many. Dozens. Scores. But to stage a ball, or a tourney, that would have opened her up to Prince Henry, or King Henry now. He is too dangerous to her and to her kingdom. But -- " She spread her hands. "They had to try to stop me. Because I had evaded their attempt to keep me in the dark. It does not matter what the effect of my gift was, they had to show me that I could not undo what they did without me."

[marycatelli]

A pair of lovers would be most unhappy to find her already here, she thought, miserably. Then the shadows fell over her, and she looked up to see the two men. One was the knight, Sir Guillaume, towering over his companion and looking down at her, his face grim and shadowed.

[marycatelli]

"Once upon a time," said the woman, "there were three brothers, and the youngest, Esben, was thought to be nothing. He would sit by the fire and get all covered with ashes, and so they called him Ashlad."
Marcus pulled back. That ashlad would win the heart of a princess.