Parades?

(blink)

Um...

OK. An odd interpretation, but the only thing that springs to mind at first, although this is giving me another idea:

Place de la Bastille, 14 July 1789

The girl, with dirty face and dirty feet, watches the people go by.

She's young, and rather simple. At first, the shouting and the noise catches and amuses her; so many people, with shovels and pickaxes and guns! She recognises a few as she peers out into the street: there is the baker from Rue Jacques Couer, shaking a plump fist, shouting. A bit later in the stream of people she sees Madame Beziers, who keeps an inn in the Passage du Cheval Blanc.

After a while, the great prison begins to crumble and the parade grows bloody and portentous.

You can face the dragons within, and you are not Bluebeard's wife

That is such a cool line.

You can face the dragons within, and you are not Bluebeard's wife

That is such a cool line.

Thank you!

Errrr....are people not loving the parade? I could change the topic -- should I?

No, don't change it! I'm mulling.

are people not loving the parade? I could change the topic -- should I?

No, mistress. Making it harder just makes us respect you more.

Or something. Nothing wrong with a difficult topic. Theme. Challenge thing.

What Bev said. Having to work a little makes you a better writer.

Having to work a little makes you a better writer.

What? Crap. I thought drinking a lot made you a better writer.

I thought drinking a lot made you a better writer

Ah, you subscribe to the Irish/Hemingway School of Writing.

Okay. As a valentine to Susan W.'s writing endeavor:

Antigone in Wellington's Army

M'Morran went to parade fully arrayed, with his weapon loaded. The village in Portugal was a league away from anything else: disease had been running wild through the assembled regiment, so it was broken up by company into the countryside. Lieutenant Dickinson had spent the winter talking only to himself and to the Sergeant, and the Sergeant was not much of a conversationalist.

M'Morran went to parade in his Highland red, fresh from an excursion with his village girl. Word was that she would be following, when they set forth back into Spain come warm weather. It was March, and the hares were sure to be mad somewhere, and Lieutenant Dickinson had been watching that girl for a long, long time.

M'Morran went to his execution smartly, with beatific calm. The Sergeant kept the company in order, because no replacement had been assigned for Lieutenant Dickinson.They used the same tree to hang M'Morran and to lash up his body as a warning to the soldiers. The villagers watched from a distance.

The girl tried to cut down the body, later, but someone had posted guards. The Highlanders did not march away till late Spring, and M'Morran was hard to recognize.

Wow, Nutty, that gave me a chill!

And for my entry, here's an epilogue to my novel that may or may not ever be, because while I know that Jack and Anna attempt to emigrate to Canada in 1813, I haven't yet decided if the ship they're on is captured by the Americans, forcing them to winter in Boston, with various circumstances uniting to make them decide to stay. It all depends on the little boy in this vignette--with a name like Arthur Horatio Arrington Wilcox, he must have a story of his own, but he hasn't told me what it is yet, so I don't know if he needs to be Canadian or American.

---------------------------------------

Boston, July 4, 1814

“So-jers! So-jers!” The little boy wanted to join the parade, and did his best to fling himself out of his father’s one whole arm. The surrounding crowd smiled indulgently upon him, and indeed upon his whole family—a handsome, thriving child, and surely the father must’ve been a soldier himself before he lost the arm, so tall and lean and proud he was. And the mother, too, a rare beauty and so heavily pregnant that not a few worried the firing of the guns and cannon in praise of Liberty might startle her into delivering right there in the street.

“What do you think?” Anna asked.

“That it’s strange to even think of settling here, under the circumstances. And yet. I doubt we’d find a finer farm in Canada, and it wouldn’t be such a journey for you and the new one.” Jack settled the squirming Arthur more firmly on his hip.

“Well. It wouldn’t be the first strange path fate ever set out for us.”