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| Lavender harvest |
The first bit of fiction to share with you since the writing camp I attended in July 2015, with Gail Anderson-Dargatz.
Once upon a time, there was a maiden named Dorothea. She came from a family that was not wealthy, but was hard-working and lived comfortably. When she was very young, she had had a charming prettiness, but as she grew to be a young woman, her mother saw that her beauty was radiant and felt that Dorothea was in danger and so convinced her that she was unlovely and unlovable. Each day that Dorothea looked in the mirror, she heard her mother's words, and her reflection changed so that her hair lost its silky curl and became dull, her skin flaked with dryness and had no colour, and her eyes became cold and hard. In time, she herself said the words, "I am unlovely and unlovable," and looked in the mirror to see hair like broomstraw, skin rough and patchy and eyes that pierced the soul.
