What's Not To Love About Castles and Marriage Proposals?

I loved the flash fiction prompt this week; there was so much "scope for imagination," as my dear literary heroine, Anne Shirley, would put it. We were bidden to include somewhere in the piece a proposal of marriage, but to think outside the box. I was so excited about the prompt that I wrote two pieces. See below. :)

I'll start with my favorite:

Waking

What dreams may come to he who waits,
Baited upon the silvery string of moonlight’s beams—
The tryst with darkness and dawn
A sacred revel of dancing shadows and fancy flights,
A brief marriage between slumber and waking.

Here, he can play the knight who rides to the castle,
Who bows before king and country,
Who woos and wins fair maiden.
Here, he rides, tall, strong, to meet the enemy,
Who returns in triumph, the honored hero.

Here, the limp is merely a distant memory,
The withered hand but a legend, folklore, fireside chat over wine.
Here, no one sees the ragged strips of flesh that cover the side of his face,
That partially blind his right eye.

Here, he is no monster.
Here, he is loved.
Here, he is whole.
Here, he proposes marriage. 

But the dawn brings divorce.

Loved the concept of the marriage during that short slice of time when the deep slumber of night fades and morning wakefulness encroaches, when dreams are sometimes at their best . . . or worst, as the case may be.

Here's my second effort. I enjoyed writing this one as well, but had some struggles with grammar, after which my inner majorly critical perfectionist made me bump this piece down to second place (or last place, depending on how you want to look at it). :)

Castles of Air

I’d known her since that time I pasted mud across her face, when we made pies in the gutter and called them chocolate. Her pigtails morphed to ponytails, and then her hair swung low across her back. I proposed marriage to her in the apple orchard when we were nine.

She baked apple pies for the reception instead of the traditional wedding cake. We made plans, she and I, for the honeymoon—a trip to Europe, to walk the old ways through history as we tour the ancient architecture, visit graves and smile at the Beefeaters in London’s Tower.

Fate called her before her time, left me to walk alone, to finish the pages of this book we’d begun. The pictures blazed in full color until she went; now their edges are tinged with brown.

I went to Europe anyway, painting the chapters with washed-out colors, gripping my aching brush to render the unfinished stories, building castles in the air.

I love doing Flash Fiction each week; what a great way to keep the creative juices flowing as I wear thin with day after day of slogging through word counts in my ongoing novels. Anyone have a creative writing bent? Come check out the Flash Fiction group of which I'm a part. We'd love to have you!