Fun Monday-A Love Story

Well, well, well, Woodland mama is hosting Fun Monday this week, and she's given us a very interesting assignment. It goes like this:

Write the beginning of an unusual love story (not a real one). I only want the first paragraph. You can add an illustration or a picture to spice it up if you are really daring.

This is an assignment I can sink my teeth into. I love a good love story. Not those sappy romances with heaving bosoms, ripped peasant blouses and swashbuckling heroes. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I went through a Barbara Cartland phase in about seventh grade, hiding paperbacks behind my propped up social studies book and reading victorian page after page during class. That phase passed when I discovered a box of my mom's old books and spent a summer secretly working my way through more adult material like Peyton Place and Valley of The Dolls. THAT was an eye opening summer. I still like a trashy Jackie Collins read every now and then, but these days I really like a more complex love story, something with depth, something kind of gritty, something more...hmmm...real. Humor doesn't hurt either. So after some thought, here ya' go Woodland mama, the beginning of something complex and something real with a hint of love.

Chapter 1

"So this is America," Karina thought as she slowly stepped out of the airport and onto the busy sidewalk. She lifted her weathered face to the sky and shaded her eyes from the bright sun. It was one of those autumn days when summer lingers a little too long, making the sky a vivid blue and the air crisp and clean. The kind of day that always sent Reenie's mind swimming back to the fall of 1944 and her unexpected rescue from the the Gross Roben camp in the Polish woods. As was her habit, she concentrated hard enough and long enough until she pushed aside the horrible snapshots of the camp until she was left with just the face of a handsome American soldier, a soldier who had changed her life with one brief moment, the soldier she had come to the United States to find forty years later.

I will resist the urge to break the rules and write more than one paragraph, but oh how I could go on and on. I'll pacify myself by reading everyone else's prose. Come on! Follow me over to Woodland mama's for more.