cathyallheart

Word limit: 300 words or more

Word list:
Lark
Tattered
Identity
Undermine
Idealism
Forward
Keep
Solstice
Jealousy
Prince ss

Plus, you can replace any one word from the list with "sluggish" (bonus points for using all 11!)

I'm going to give 2 weeks to work on this, so lets say Dec 1st as the deadline.

marg

Yippee... and you kept the optional Prince(ss)

cathyallheart

sorry i just copy and pasted so i have my mom's mastake!

midnightpoet

The song of a lark as it flits through the tree tops meets my ears. I close my eyes, basking in the music of nature; breathing in the fresh fall air. I can smell the chill of winter coming. I open my eyes back up, looking back at where my tattered fingernail holds my place on the page of the novel I’m reading. The only thing that smells better than the crisp fall air is old pages in a well-loved novel. I lose myself once more in the story.

It’s like my identity is wrapped up in these pages. I am the characters and the story is my own. I do not acknowledge reality. These pages are more real than the people I meet every day. The only reality is me and the lark and the air and my book. Anything else would undermine my world. I know who I am and where I am; it just happens to change every time I pick up a new book.

I hear people mutter about me sometimes. They call me crazy. Some try to be nice and refer to it as “idealism”, saying I’m just a free spirit. They believe that I’m crazy too. What do they know?

I think it’s crazy to move forward – to keep putting one foot in front of the other – on this path of “reality”; blindly accepting what you’re told is normal and acceptable. They’re crazy because they can’t understand that my world is just as real as theirs. Fantasy isn’t just in a writer’s imagination; it’s not just for a solstice when you’re feeling superstitious. These novels are real, and they’re written for me, and they’re written about me.

I sense you’re jealousy – you wish you could have stories written for you and about you. Maybe you’re too sane. Maybe not. Try. Let go of what you’re told is acceptable and let yourself be a hero, a princess, a sea captain, or a criminal. Shake off the sluggish feelings caused by the doldrums of real life, pick up a book and become the story. It was written for you. It was written about you.

This is your life.

midnightpoet

I'm sorry for my recent absence, guys. I started college and it has taken all my time and energy. When I'm not busy my brain is too tired to think straight, let alone think write. Had a wonderfully relaxing Thanksgiving break spent in a lake house surrounded by foliage and wildlife and freedom. Thought I'd pop in and say hello and try to write a little something before it's back to the madness on Monday. Please don't consider me for torch-passing...it's the last three weeks of the semester and I have finals and projects and all that fun stuff. Hopefully I'll be back over winter break. Keep writing, you wonderfully witty wordsmiths!

midnightpoet

ugh - proofreading fail. 4th sentence, remove the second "back". All better.

Rebel_Sun

Left foot forward...bring the right up...both feet together...pause for effect...right foot forward...keep in time with the music. It was really second nature at this point, having practiced so often with her handmaid, so Tatiana's mind began to wander a bit. Her mother would truly have loved this. She would have swooned at the grandeur, the dresses, the flowers, the whole spectacle. It would have been the topic of countless retellings around her now lonely dinner table. Sadly, she was working less than a five-minute walk from the cathedral where her youngest daughter was now slowly making her way down the aisle...and she would never know it had happened.

The regally sluggish pace continued in time with the triumphal music. Along the sides she saw some other girls her age. She caught glimpses of awe, hope, jealousy and boredom depending upon whom her eyes alighted. These "friends" all thought they were privy to what was going on today, but, in truth, none of them knew the most important and damning secret of the day. Only Tatiana and her handmaid knew that, and both knew better than to expand that particular circle.

Halfway down the aisle, but she was far away within herself...funny where the mind takes you, she thought. Just two months ago, she had been idly working on a hem in her father's garment shop when the princess and her escort graced their door. Both her father and mother were out running various errands and it had fallen to Tatiana to mind the shop. Never before had she seen the princess at such close quarters, and what she saw could have been a reflection...but one with perfectly coiffed hair and silken finery rather than the tattered homespun and limp tresses that were her own. The princess, to her credit, had recognized the same underlying similarities, and a few days later, in answer to a private summons, Tatiana found herself propositioned with should have been an innocent scheme.

Three quarters of the way to the front now, and her thoughts continued in the same vein. A normal girl, she ironically thought, would be thinking of the rest of the days festivities, ceremonies and especially about the exigencies and expectations of the coming night. The court astrologers and advisers had proclaimed that today, the day of the summer solstice, would be a most auspicious day for the occasion, and, so far, all had gone perfectly. Would that she could say the same for the plan the princess had had.

It began as a kind of game, really...a lark. Tatiana would be sent for, ostensibly to do some mending work for the princess, and the two would trade identities for a few hours. Afterwards they would giggle and laugh as they recounted the adventures they had lived in each other's shoes. Their own lives seemed a little less ordinary through the eyes of another, and they soon started to educate each other in order to better play their parts when swapping lives. They took only one of the handmaids into their confidence and it was through her that they contacted each other. Twelve times they had stepped into their roles, the last one for a whole 18 hours including an overnight stay. It was deliciously wrong, and they both truly enjoyed the breaks from their respective realities...that is, until the thirteenth time.

Ten more steps, a few shared words and a kiss, and two days from now, I'll be on my way to a far off place, with the worries of the last ten days behind me. Ten days ago...what a personal hell that had been. The princess was late in returning and as the degree of her absence increased, so too Tatiana's stress. It was almost 24 hours past the appointed timer when word came that the tailor's daughter had been trampled to death by a coach and four on market street. Both Tatiana and the handmaid blanched as they heard the news...first at the thought of their mutual loss and then as they mentally ran through the likely consequences of their subterfuge. Ideally, they should have immediately gone to the royal family and thrown themselves on their mercy, but reality told them that idealism of that sort was likely to see them confined in the dungeons or sent to the headsman, if not both. The two co-conspirators talked it over during the following night and decided that there was only one option left to them...to continue in their deception. So, for the last ten days, Tatiana had done everything possible to become the princess in every way that she could, though she often broke down in tears over the life and family that she had effectively lost. Others had noticed. Determined not to be undermined by her feelings of guilt, loss or frustration, she redoubled her efforts, and if people talked, she thought (with an inward grimace at the choice of words), then, given the impending ceremonies, it was understandable if she wasn't really feeling herself.

Committed to her chosen course, she ascended the last few veiled steps to the altar, knelt and joined hands with the man she was soon to know better than any other, and leapt headlong into the unknown.

Rebel_Sun

Sorry it was so long...it kept growing on me.

cathyallheart

I'm extending the deadline to the 15. hopefuly on the 16 i will be able to pass the torch. thanks!

randylynne

“Just look at her. How can she manage to keep up her idealism after what he did?” The whisper comes out a touch too loud, as the late hour quieted other conversation in the room. I can’t help but glance over at the woman spoken of. She dances about the room on her tiptoes, and long experience tells me that she is softly singing in a voice that could rival any lark. Her smile brightens anything it lands on.

I shrink further into my corner. I don’t deserve to feel her smile on me again. Not that she would ever grace me with a smile if she knew I was here. This store was her love, her dream. It was everything she worked for, and everything I had tried, in my foolish jealousy and pride, to undermine. I could never forget her tears the last time I saw her, when she finally realized the depth of my betrayal. She was Cinderella, innocently dressed for the ball, then ripped to tatters by those who should have loved her best. I should have loved her best.

Fortunately, my Cinderella was strong. She didn’t need a fairy godmother to magic up a new identity. She picked up the remains that I had left her with, moved forward on her own, and she built her dream again. This time, without me, it would keep. I knew I did not deserve forgiveness, but still I could not stay away. And so I am here in this corner of her bookstore, gently nursing a celebratory drink, and watching from the shadows as she dances her way through the crowd—all here to celebrate the achievement of a dream.

She has prepared the room for the winter solstice, her favorite time of year. Ribbons and mistletoe adorn every doorway; sparkling snowflakes hang from the ceiling. I watch her spin and twirl, but my breath catches and my blood turns sluggish when her white dress flows in just the right way to reveal a distinctly rounded belly. No. Had my foolishness extended so far? I didn’t know! I would never! I groan at new evidence of the life I threw away, the life I want so desperately to return to.

Her happy dance stalls. She has noticed me—the darkness passing over her face lets me know that much. She brings a hand to her lips, while the other protectively moves to her belly. My eyes lower in shame and the rest of me follows, bowing in awe at the strong woman before me. She has done so much, suffered so much at my hands. Could she ever forgive me? I don’t deserve it, but how I want it. How I want her. And…our child?

I feel a delicate hand land on my head, familiar fingers ruffle my hair. I sob, “Princess?”

chelydra

Carl Gustav Jung and Doctor Siegmund Freud would each have been an oddity but the pair of them were passing strange indeed.
One remarked on a lark, trembling on a limb in the gathering dark, the other let his long soft fingertips caress the elm bark, as they trudged along in their tattered trousers through the slush and sleet of the Clark University campus in Worcester, Massachusetts in the winter of 1911, sometimes, caught up an idea, pirouetting around in circles and even crying out in joy, but more often, heads lowered in their felt hats, whiskers itching in the cold, marching onwards, muttering now and then. Gutteral Germanic theories sprouted and struggled and withered and died. The self-aggrandizing, imperious, ever-more self-conscious identity of the bourgeois European male, which both gentlemen in retrospect epitomized in rather different ways, had undermined the very selfhood of all others within and beyond the human species; and yet such were the delusions of the prevailing philosophy that the whole world seemed to have risen onto a great plateau of eternal peace and prosperity, hauled up despite its dead weight and stubborn resistence, onto a plane of enlightenment, rationality, morality, science, after so many centuries of always climbing higher, always progressing forward, overcoming ancient superstitions and the madness of religious and nationalistic warfare to settle into this new age of civilized refinement. It seemed that the natural leaders of humanity need only keep resolutely to the path of progress, and all would be well, and would remain so forever. What even these two profound thinkers could not know, as they made their way from their afternoon lectures to the dining hall, was that something in the dissonant conjunction of triumphant materialism, regarding the stuff of the universe, even living organisms and humanity itself, as inert matter to be manipulated for economic purposes, and an equally confident idealism—regarding the human spirit as transcendant and invincible (even as it was shrunken and flattened in the deadening routines of industry) had ignited a dangerous malignancy at the heart of western civilization. That innocent Midsummer Night’s Dream of perpetual sunlight (as we now see the optimism of the Edwardian age, in America known as the Progressive Era) was in fact the darkest moment of all, a bone-chilling winter solstice marking the end of the harvest and the coming of horrendous hardship, hopelessness, and a holocaust beyond any medieval imaginings of Hell. The incipient jealously between the Master and his chief Apprentice was not yet overt in Worcester. What crystal ball could have shown the ghastly berayal to come, when this rabbinical, rumpled old gray-bearded monarch would flee for his life, and his handsome Prince (SS-certified Aryan, unlike the other psychoanalytic pioneers), would succeed in selling his own version of Freud’s ideas to the Third Reich. Progress there may be in human history, but if so our ascent is sluggish indeed.

Anyone curious to know more find a nice (and more factual) account of the visit to Clark U at http://chronicle.com/article/Freuds-Visit-to-Clark-U/48424/

chelydra

I guess that was a real conversation-stopper, huh? sorry...

Qsilv

.......pfft... forget those sorry's, you guys. Trust me, you’re all being sorry for totally the wrong things!
Let me tell you what you SHOULD be sorry about!

This whole thread! Resurrecting ThinkWrite here! Here? After TD so gently shooed us, lured us, into the supposedly humane trap of a whole OTHER website?

C’mon, just envision the work they put into it, setting out a lovely trail of parched corn leading to an entire meadow of field corn and sunflowers, planted carefully for the deer, right about the time of the spring solstice, to encourage the critters to feed there, knowing they won’t stick to browsing a wood lot but hoping they’ll be so content with the corn they won’t hike the 4 miles back to forage in your carefully manicured rose garden.

However, if there’s one thing deer aren’t, it’s sluggish. Four miles? A mere morning jaunt. But we humans? Tsk… 4 keystrokes is too much. Or maybe it’s that our TD identity gets lost over there. Somehow it feels far away!

There, see? Something worthy of contrition!

Seriously, for me anyway, finding this is like sneaking up into the grandparents' attic just for a quick lark when you know darn well you’re supposed to be working on real-life responsible business. And you suddenly notice a tattered old trunk –with your aunt’s seal on it (the one you’ve hidden a burning jealousy of your whole life for having been gorgeous as a princess while your own mom managed to pass down to you the merest tawdry genetic relics ) …and indeed, it turns out to be a treasure box to poke through! That does it. Worse than a few stolen moments of nostalgia, such a discovery is guaranteed to undermine any shreds of idealism that lingered whispering into your subtly pointed ears…

Chel... I'm amiss in not thanking you for the link forward to that splendid article! THANK you!
[I'm not even going to pester you about the @#$ paragraph breaks (those non-existent ones that cause your words to keep raining down in a solid torrent vs being offered in teacups...)]

; >

ladyhwin

Hi there Qsilv I take full responsibility for moving ThinkWrite back over here... and it was with TD's approval too. As much as I loved the other site, and I applaud TD for giving it to us... it simply was not working well and ThinkWrite was dying....
Enjoy!

@cathyallheart - I plan to be back with a tale or two before the deadline! final exams this week, you know

ladyhwin

and by the way... great job everyone! I've enjoyed the stories, just haven't been in much to say anything...

marg

hmm.. .. if I get any chance at all, I'm going to try and work 'tawdry genetic relics' and 'subtly pointed ears' into a submission...

..but Qsilv, I think you should contribute something, rather than just subverting Cathy's challenge.. c'mon.. you can do it ..

Login

I think she just did, marg.

marg

Doh.. how did I miss that !

Qsilv

LOL.... too subtle?

350 words, not including the pfft,..

Now I'm hoping I didn't hurt Lady's feelings or Cathy's either!!! jeeeez...

ladyhwin

No feelings hurt, Qsilv... I'm glad to see you here!!