George and Kristen were counselors at the Lake Wakona Christian Retreat. They’d met there several years before as campers and were eager to become reacquainted now that they were in high school.

Fortunately, George and Kristen would spend the rest of their lives together. Unfortunately, they were both killed that summer by the Lake Wakona chainsaw butcher.

Jane and Pedro met at the local dance hall. He was too shy to ask her to dance, so they chatted by the bar. Pedro was handsome and impeccably dressed, with his silk shirt and leather dance shoes and his hair slicked back in the latest fashion. Jane wore a long skirt and talked incessantly about her work with learning disabled orphans. They found they shared a passion for artistic endeavors and smoking cigarettes.

They were both married to other people, which was a shame because they fell in love with each other about five minutes into that first conversation.

He used to be a loving husband and father, a fact so known it was written on his tombstone. His wife knew every night as he was loving her. Once, he loved her so hard she hurt and asked him to love a little less.

Stephanie stopped his loving heart forever.

From Guest Contributor Emily Aledort

Jesper believed in one true love. He fell for his when he was still a boy, while picking mushrooms in the forest behind his home. He met a girl in a white dress and they played for several hours, so that by the time he returned home, Jesper’s father gave him a whipping for being late.

It was as if she were a ghost.

Steve and Hannah stepped off the cliff together.

“I never realized irony could be so deadly.”

The Daily Theme from Figment for Jan. 11, 2012
(Because today’s theme was completely inappropriate for a 100 word story.)

Frame story: Two people are in the midst of an intense moment—a break-in, a breakup, a breakdown. At the height of the dramatic action, one person illustrates a point by offering an anecdote about a similar situation. Delve briefly but deeply into that example, giving it as much richness as the framing narrative. Then return to your original story about the two characters. Don’t worry about neatly resolving their tale, but explore if the anecdote has changed the pair…

Brad saw her the first day of class and immediately fell in love. She was cool. She had tattoos on every part of her body. The tattoos made her an outcast as much as her attitude, but Brad loved her for both.

Brad loved her all the more. As he told his friends, “True love is not concerned with surface things.”

We wrestle with conviction. It’s twisting in our teeth, fighting for a life of its own, but we desperately want to own it for ourselves. We have no choice but to believe.

We fight for our own carefully crafted version of reality. Neither wants to be the first to admit the end of our love.

Jessica fell in love with the third clown from the end of the line. He had his face painted with a smile, suggesting he was frivolous but gallant. No sad clown for her. They had sex in the small tent where they kept the donkeys and goats and other uninteresting animals. It’s not how she imagined it would be, but the animals didn’t seem to notice, and she was in love. You can make anything romantic in the retelling when you’re talking to your grandchildren. The fact they drove him out of town with pitchforks only added to the romanticism.

Isabelle hated her new town. She hated her new school. She especially hated her plastic new classmates.

Isabelle soon discovered Lug’s secret. He was a neanderthal. Although interspecies reproduction was frowned upon, and they would produce no viable offspring, Isabelle didn’t care. She was in love.