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A quote: “We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.” ~~ Jeremy Irons
I’ll start with a story …
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“Oh child, what did you find? Bring it over to me, please.”
“Oh, my goodness! That one’s a sure favorite. One of my wedding photos. Don’t look so shocked, that really is me. What, you think your Meemaw was always an old lady? That Papaw and me just popped into being with all our wrinkles and gray hair, like, forever?”
“No, I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at myself. You see a picture of a beautiful lady in white with this impossibly big bouquet of outrageously blooming flowers and … What you don’t know is what those flowers did to me.”
“Yes, I said ‘did to me’. You want to hear the story?”
“Now see, before the wedding, as the bride – ME! – and my bridesmaids get ready, our photographer gets to start taking pictures for our memory album. He has me outside and hands me the bouquet. ‘Hold it up. Hold it this way’. He’s shooting, I’ve waving it around and OUCH! A bee nails me right over my eye!”
“Yes, hurt like dickens! And it fast became a big bump.”
“We put ice on it all the way to church. But the bump’s still there all the way to the altar. And through our vows, people are the ones buzzing. Papaw just looks at me with the kindest eyes, smiling love just for me. When time comes to kiss, he cups my face with both hands and gives me the sweetest part no bee could ever ruin.”
“Oh, don’t worry, child. I’m not sad. Just happy leaking. Now, run along. I’ll just hold this a little longer.”
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
When you’re settling a new world, there’s a first for everything.: first landing, first outpost, first actual settlement, first child born (or hatched, for the avian sophonts). But you really know when the place is becoming home when you get your first wedding.
Terry and Sylvie had been sweet on each other even before the idiots in Watts thought they could send the Kitties running like a bunch of cougars up in the mountains, and got the whole LA Basin scruffed and scattered to dozens of frontier worlds. Those two were lucky they were both sent here, because while the Kitties did try to keep families together, in the absence of a formal mating contract, they’d be considered strangers in the eye of Imperial law.
But once Terry and Sylvie realized they were both in the same system — Terry as a rockjack out in the inner asteroid belt, since he’d been studying mining engineering, and Sylvie as a cook at the local Learning Center — they started figuring out how to get back together. So it wasn’t just run down to Town Hall to register your mating contract and then find a cleric to do the religious part for you. They had to figure out how to get back together when one was in space and the other was on a planetary surface. and neither of them had full freedom of movement on account of having been scruffed.
Turned out the mining stations were always short of support staff, and Sylvie could get herself qualified to work the kitchens up there. But while they could’ve filed their mating contact up there, the station didn’t have a chaplain that either of them felt comfortable about performing the wedding for them. So Terry managed to wrangle a week’s leave to get down in our gravity well and have the ceremony done in a real church by a preacher.
It was supposed to be picture-perfect, although I don’t know how Sylvie managed to find enough white fabric suitable to make a wedding dress for herself when most other species in the Empire don’t need clothes, on account of having full-body fur or feathers. Maybe she picked up some old curtains somebody had brought with them, or managed to get time one one of the Kitties’ 3D printers, but she had herself a traditional wedding gown. Terry was wearing his blues with the corporate logo on them, closest thing he had to a suit.
Everything went great, right until the moment Sylvie was supposed to toss the bouquet — and what do you know but one of her high heels gets caught in a crack of the flagstones. She manages to keep from falling flat on her face, but instead of gracefully tossing it over her head to the girls behind her, she ends up with it right in her face.
Now we can laugh about it, but when it happened, I thought sure Sylvie was going to burst out in tears. Terry jumped right over to catch her, but after doing so much work in freefall — the Kitties’ grav-plane technology requires a certain volume to work in, and the rockjacks’ runabouts are too small — his reflexes were off and he came way too close to landing on his own butt, trying to keep from knocking her over when he realized he’d overbalanced.
It’s pretty much a microcosm of how our relations with the Kitties have gone. An initial good start, then a bunch of missteps, and finally things settle down and what was horrible at first is now funny.
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