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marycatelli ([personal profile] marycatelli) wrote2025-02-02 11:43 am
Entry tags:

vignettes

This week's prompt is:
dry 🌵

Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.

[identity profile] starshipcat.livejournal.com 2025-02-02 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)
The other girls had gotten to talking about their home towns, which had given Lisa Fox a fascinating view of the post-Soviet Russian Empire beyond St. Petersburg. Finally they all turned to her.

When Lisa explained about growing up on a winery that had been in the family for over a century, Marta raised her eyebrows. "I thought your country prohibited alcohol less than a century ago."

Lisa considered how to explain her twice-great grandparents' method for saving the vineyards. "True. The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages, which includes wine. However, the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, and given that a number of Christian denominations, including the Orthodox churches, require actual wine in Communion, my ancestors were able to shift to making sacramental wine and selling it under special permit to parishes and congregations across the country."

No, best not to mention how they also sold fresh grapes, or shipped bricks of pressed raisins with a "warning" of what the recipient must not do in order to avoid fermentation. Russians had a strange relationship with the law, and Lisa could never tell when such a story would get sly admiration for having put one past the authorities, or shock and disgust at such blatant scofflaws.