All Write, Already!

I spent some years in Vienna before I returned to my family home in Schmaltzberg. University life suited me wonderfully, and there was a shop girl there named Alexandra who captured my heart with her first words to me.

It was a fine day in the late spring of 1865, and I was reading in the Wiener Tageblatt about the shockingly public murder of the American prime minister. A shadow obscured my view of the page, and I looked up in irritation which quickly metamorphosed into awe. The woman standing before me had easily the most stunning eyes I'd ever seen, a smile to match, and she was looking at me.

"You want cream for your Kaffee, ja?" It was obvious: she was head-over-heels for me as well, and all I had to do was make her see that. I bade her sit with me, but she refused, claiming that the owner of the Kaffeehaus would sack her. So I sat at the same table again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that one. I was determined to wear down her resistance, and I felt that I was making real progress...right up until the moment that my father's death brought me back to Schmaltzberg.

So I lived the life of a business manager for my family's farm, and soon became too busy to seek out love. I thought often of Alexandra, and what might have been, but I knew that my reality was far more quotidian than that fantasy.

When the researcher and his staff moved into the manor house, one of his assistants was a beautiful young woman. I saw her across the town Marktplatz one afternoon when I was visiting the counting house, and decided that I would work to win her affections.

Sadly, rumors began to circulate about the things that went on in the manor -- horrible tales of desecration and blasphemous "experiments." When proof arrived in the town of the true nature of what the doctor was doing there, the fires of our passion were stoked and we rushed to the manor -- more a castle, now that I think about it -- in the middle of the night to demand justice.

This is how I find myself carrying a pitchfork in one hand, and in the other...a torch.

[Okay, so I'm a literalist. Sue me.]