Freshman English Writing Assignment

Freshman English

Create a love story using our 15 most recent vocabulary words.  Make sure to create context-rich sentences and to underline each vocabulary word used.

**You should try!  Just grab the underlined vocab words and go to town!  It would be fun!  My story reminds me a little of Lorca's Blood Wedding, among other things, but it was fun to write despite the tired and well-word plot scenario.**

The sun rose watery and bleak behind a shroud of morning mist on her nuptial day.

She awoke not to a lover’s caress, not the lilting refrain of a lark on the verge, but to the grating voice of her obdurate mother-in-law-to-be below stairs barking orders for the big event.  The woman was both pugnacious and combative, and Rose closed her eyes, wishing that in doing so she might be able to blink the woman, the wedding, and the whole dreaded day away.

Reconciling herself to her fate, with a sigh, Rose slipped from the lamentably pristine bed linens and steeled herself for an event that was both inconceivable to her and unavoidable. 

She’d said yes when he’d asked.  She’d pledged her hand and given her word and today her sentencing would be carried out; at last, after months of meticulous planning and grandiose arrangements, today, at last, her fate would be sealed, her left ring finger shackled, her identity tied up and bound forever with the man who had proposed to her.

If only she could expunge the memories of another from her mind.  If only she could banish that smile from her heart as effectively as she’d banished him from her presence.

There had been no ambiguity in how coldly she’d dismissed him from her life, no mistaking her meaning.  She’d impugned his character, she’d been cruel, she’d been vile, and insult of insults, she’d chosen for her betrothed his rival, his blood adversary, the one man she knew he would never forgive her for.

Now Rose sat at the elegantly carved vanity with a heavy sigh.  She’d done what she’d felt she must.  To save his life and preserve her heart, she’d taken up the role of cruel mistress and she’d acted it to perfection.  But, as Rose arranged her tresses with a dexterity borne of years of practice, she perused her melancholy aspect in the glass and recognized that the actress behind the hardened mask was not impervious to heartbreak, even though she had been the one to turn him away.  It had been too late, his hooks too deeply embedded within the too-tender flesh and sinew of her heart and her soul for her to come out of it unscathed.

And she wondered, almost idly, rather detached and disinterested, how the wedding night would unfold.

With her affable but tepid fiancé she played the prude, feigning virginal modesty while he worshipped her with chaste idolatry from a safely comfortable distance.  Her sheets were pristine, and, as far as he knew, so was she.

With trembling fingers she fastened a fresh rosebud into her perfectly arranged chignon.  How it would stagger her mild-mannered betrothed to know the depth and ferocity of her wild passions.  How it would scandalize her blue-blooded bull-dog of a soon-to-be mother-in-law.

Rose allowed herself a bittersweet smile in the mirror as her cheeks washed over with high color.  Over her shoulder in the mirror stood the bed.  The bed where she’d fallen into his arms and fallen from grace and fallen in love.  The only man who she’d ever truly love, the one man she’d pushed away and would never know again.

Now that she was to descend into the too-cool spring garden and become another man’s wife.