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A quote: “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” ~~ Andy Warhol
I’ll start with a story …
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The special elevator to the club was only for the hotel’s special guests. All eyes turned to her entrance and she thrilled at watching heads bowed together and behind-the-hands whispers.
How delicious! She floated the night on gin rickeys, cigarettes and jazz.
She’d awaken late afternoon, not remembering the night before or how she got back. But her maid would enter with a luncheon tray and a new dress and the evening would start again.
And again. And again.
Zach and Chelsea bolted up in bed together.
“Did you hear?” “Yes! It’s true!”
They both reached for their cell phones.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Dupin says: I was besotted the moment I saw her, silhouetted in the smoky haze of the speakeasy. She danced alone to the music of the band, showing the lithe moves of a dancer, or some dark cat of the jungle.
Naturally, I came up and joined her in dance, smiled as we looked into each other’s eyes, as we spun around the dance floor, as we found our way out back, away from prying eyes.
Our lips found each other’s, passions rising, hands moving, groping. Her lips traced my cheek, my neck. Her fangs pierced my flesh. I was gone.
Navig8r says: Uncle Jimmy loved to tell us stories about life during prohibition. He had been a piano player in the speakeasies. She was way out of his league, but he had loved her from afar. He never married, and kept the old photo his whole life.
As the family gathered around his bedside, I managed to find a scroll for the old player piano and get it threaded. Miraculously, it still worked. We couldn’t see her, but from the glow in his eyes, we knew she was there. From the movement of his lips and his smile, she remembered him too.
“Only a coward uses a bow.”
The warrior’s words circled his mind every time he stood on that rise. He hefted the bow and nocked an arrow and prepared to pull back and aim. The captain had not yet given the order, the invaders were not yet within range.
“Only a coward…”
He felt sweat bead on his forehead, and between his shoulder blades. They were closer, their war-cries louder.
“…uses a bow.”
A coward he may be, but that bow and those arrows lengthened his life while shortening theirs. Another few moments, and they would save him yet again.
Over the years I’d played a lot of otome games, and I’d gotten quite adept at clearing the paths to the various capture targets, even the hidden ones who didn’t appear unless you did all the others perfectly. However, this one was proving a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated.
Part of the problem was the setting. Most of the games I’d played were either contemporary or set in magical worlds of the imagination. This one was a historical, supposedly based on the Roaring Twenties in Chicago, back on Old Earth. However, it had just enough anachronism stew to bother me, without attaining the charm of an actual dieselpunk ‘verse.
Take for instance the cabaret dancer at the speakeasy, who was supposed to be the protagonist’s chief rival for the hearts of the four major capture targets. At first glance her outfit looked period, until you realized she was wearing go-go boots that wouldn’t come into fashion for four more decades.
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