by Jess Howe

Created on: March 16, 2009

Kelsa wanted her bridal veil to be the best in the land, and she'd have no bones about it. The thing was done, so she said. She'd trailed lodestone in the brook back of her house every month on the new moon since she was sixteen, and now four years later she'd caught the man, and now she wanted a marriage - a proper one.

He himself was a pleasant sort, named Sebastian. He'd been a tramp, by choice, for four years - which his bride to be thought a very important sign because of the timing. Sebastian had never had a job of any real kind, but he liked to do odd jobs for folks and he was good at them. He'd been in the Peace Corps for a while working in New Orleans - but he wasn't in the Corps officially; he just wandered in one day when they needed help and they didn't deny him. He'd likewise worked in St. Louis in a food pantry on the east side of the city where the poor folks live, and they hadn't denied him work either. But he rarely worked for money, or if he did nobody knew where he kept it. He was short and stocky, muscular in the right places from doing so much manual labor, and he liked to sing all the time.

Kelsa was figuring that she'd never marry, when she met Sebastian coming up the road one day in March. Like all teenage girls, she thought she'd be all alone whenever she wound up single. That was entirely the girl's fault in this case, since whenever Kelsa dated someone she became clingy after the fourth date. Called the poor guy all the time, at four in the morning sometimes, and wanted him over to her house constantly. She would have made it worse if she didn't herself have a small job working at McDonald's. But the instant the girl got home, she rushed to the phone to leave whoever she was dating twenty messages. Young men in Topeka tried their best to stay away.

"Howdy," she said to him at their first meeting, batting her eyes. Compulsive, the parents called her and tried to keep the girl on a short leash. But Kelsa had just got off of work that evening and she was sitting outside doodling in a sketchbook. She was yet again drawing the man she'd marry. So "howdy" it was, soon followed by "would you like to come in and have a rest?"

That'd been six months before this. Six months was all it took the manipulative girl to get the stranger to ask her to wed. So now she wanted a veil. She figured she deserved it; Sebastian had traveled so much, so he'd told her, and she figured he must be rich from doing that. He must be famous. So she'd wrangled him into

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