THE RED CARNATION

(at least three paragraphs, but what the heck!)

Caspyladrella had won.  As Bregeeta turned to stone, her bouquet of red

carnations dropped one by one from her rigid fingers until only one

remained...one lone red carnation that refused to fall.  Prince Smythe the

Good came later, when the evening shadows lengthened across the path

of the One Hundred Fountains.

Mochreedo, his faithful attendant, had told him of the granitizing of his

love, yet still he came, his yearning eyes needing to see it for themselves

'ere they could believe the truth of it. At the bottom of the last long

staircase leading to the lower terrace of the garden he found her. He

stopped...stunned at the sight.  With dragging steps he came closer.

One arm was lifted toward him, as though she had known he would

yet come, as though she still ached for the warmth of his touch. As his

eyes brimmed with tears, he saw the blurred form of something red in

her hand. Had a cardinal come, perching briefly?  He came closer,

seeing it to be a flower of some sort, brilliantly red in the setting rays

of the sun. How...why? It was perfect, still fresh, still crisp, though

held between fingers that no more could grasp its stem.  He wanted

to take it into his own hand, to smell its fragrance, feel its soft reality.

But something in him hesitated. It was all that she had now which

was soft and he recoiled at the the thought of removing that from

her. So...he left it there, returning to his high-gilded chamber to wait.

Before a fortnight had passed, Prince Smythe the Good had been

joined in his castle by no less than fourteen OTHER princes, all of

whom carried about their persons in one place or another a bright

red carnation taken from the granite hand of their intended. Caspy-

ladrella had been BUSY for sure!!  As the princes ate lobster and

stuffed mushrooms together each morning, they became friends.

Eating lobster and stuffed mushrooms for breakfast week in and

week out tends to do that to princes, one finds. By the second

month, so many carnationized princes had arrived at Smythe

the Good's castle, that as he looked about his tennis courts at their

multitudiness, a sudden thought struck his brain. Well, actually, it

was a tennis ball lobbed carelessly by Prince Hector the Hairy.

But as soon as Smythe had regained consciousness, he

decreed a decree that all the princes should cast off their tennis

balls and unite into a single organization of officially carnationized

princes to be known as the FRATERNITY OF THE RED

CARNATION.

"What a marvelously conceptualized concept!" agreed Prince Philip the

Pale.  As one, they cast down their tennis balls, and sprinting back to

the castle, drank the rest of the ale and climbed several greased poles

just for the heck of it and to be more like the fraternities they read about

in police reports.

Caspyladrella, howsomever, was angry. She did not at all like the

conceptualized concept of princes united thusly into anything

resembling a fraternity, and so she went quickly about the land,

ungranitizing all the formerly granitized ladies who immediately

dashed to the castle.  The princes, immersed in a flow of ale and

grease, were not able, right off the bat, to comprehend that their

fraternity had been, thusly, unfraternized, and it was not until they

were all back at their respective castles and were being told it was

time to take out the garbage, dear, that they even knew what had

happened. The ending to the story, as you can now plainly see,

was happy and NOT sad...or would be, as soon as the lawn

was mowed.

Jo Anzalone

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