The Argument

Two people are arguing--a man and a woman. They don't have to be a couple. Each is convinced he or she is right. You, as the writer, do not want to know who is right, but you will have exquisite sympathy for both points of view, both sides of the argument. Give us enough background and history, but try to stay in the moment as much as possible. Choose an accidental arbitrator. This narrator knows and likes both these people well, but doesn't and can't favor one over the other.
(from prompt #44 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

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"The Crowd Kiss" by hipposrunsuperfast

The full room, swollen with the scents and sounds of too many people, nonetheless invited private conversations. The worst place to be if you don’t want anyone to hear you is the place where there’s nothing else to hear. Near me a little girl told her father that sometimes dogs are brown, and somewhere behind me a man decided outloud and seemingly to himself that he’d like an egg salad sandwich for lunch, even though they are never satisfying, but that’s why he’d have chips as well. I don’t mean to eavesdrop, most people don’t, and if I’d had a companion I’d be absorbed with them, and not others. When I heard her voice I knew it immediately, and I was about to shout her name when I heard the edge in it.

“What are you trying to say then, that bodies are public property? Like a tree? Like a ROCK? So you have as much right to look at a woman’s ass as at a fucking rock, is that correct? I’m sorry, babe, maybe I’m confused, but honestly you sound like an asshole.”

“I never said it’s the same to look at a girl’s ass as a rock. Well, it depends on the ass actually, if the girl worked out a lot…Babe I’m kidding. Calm down. All I said was you can’t blame me if we are out in public and I see things. You look too.”

“I look at men’s asses all the time, yep. Sometimes I buy magazines just to stare at a naked man’s ass, you know. That’s what girls do, they just go look at men’s bodies for the sheer pleasure of it, all the time. Oh my God, I can’t even look at you you are so stupid. You don’t even get it, you don’t even have any idea what its like. ”

“Don’t be mean. You don’t have to attack me just because you’re insecure. What don’t I get? Tell me. I definitely don’t get what made you get so pissy in three fucking seconds. We are IN PUBLIC.”

“Don’t be mean? How am I being mean? I am not being mean! I am trying to explain that it’s a really asshole thing to say that it’s totally okay to stare at another woman’s tits when you are IN PUBLIC with your GIRLFRIEND right next to you, dammit. But obviously I guess I am a bitch for that, and anyway anything I say has nothing to do with respect or maybe the fact that you see nothing wrong with objectifying women, but clearly it all comes down to me being insecure. And jealous. So I guess nothing that I say even matters.”

“Holy shit. You have called me an asshole like ten times. You have. And you are attacking me. You are. Can we just be done now? I love you, you are beautiful, all of that, I respect women as equal to a man, except for certain things, and I’m sorry you caught me looking at another woman’s boobs, okay? But you have to admit they were pretty much on display.”

I looked over to see if she was seething or laughing, as it could have gone either way with her. But then I made eye contact and immediately felt my forehead growing warm with embarrassment. I could not hide how much I’d heard, it was written all over my face. He gave me a sheepish nod, and turned with her to head out the door. Just behind them, a beautiful woman nursing her baby on her functionally engorged breast stood with an expression of amusment that I could only admire from afar.

Control

If you are a man, write a short scen from the POV of a woman totally dominated by a boyfriend or husband who has a long history of controlling this woman. If you are a woman, write a short scene from the POV of this same man. In either case, avoid an eruption of physical violence and build a logical, reasonable set of explanations for the character's awful or humiliated behavior, no matter what you yourself feel about this character's behavior.
(from prompt #43 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"Amber Fireworks" by wanathan101


A rat scurried under the fire pit and found itself trapped between the heat overhead and the surrounding threat of the people standing and talking around the fire. I watched the rat pace under the metal pit before darting for the garden wall, bravely going between the high heeled feet of our neighbor and nearly brushing her foot without her noticing. From where I stood I could see the pattern of the party, people gathered in groups and moving predictably. I watched Susie laughing, looking to me from time to time, nursing a glass of Chardonnay while she listened to her best college friend tell a nauseating story about her children. Susie and Gina had been far too attached to each other in school, calling each other sisters and developing their own language of codes; entire discussions could take place in my presence without me knowing, back in the day. It tested my patience for years, explaining to Susie how toxic Gina is; eventually Gina revealed herself to Susie, revealed how obsessed with Susie she’d been. Now that Gina had moved back to town and had her kids to obsess over instead, I’d allowed Susie to talk to her occasionally, but within reason. Given the option, Susie and Gina would never leave each other’s side, they’d fill each others ears with the nonsense of their mutual language, and where would that leave me? Out in the cold is where, with examples of their collected stupidity pouring out of my mouth but never quite making it in their ears.

Susie had always gathered people around her, I found myself drawn to her during a party just like this years ago. She was animated, her hands flickering around her while she imitated a professor. She was radiant, even in the night, and I felt warmer standing by her. But just as nice as it was near her, it was awful away from her, awful being crowded out by her gaggle of girlfriends and shoved aside by the healthy dose of male “friends” hanging on her, too. Just my luck, the one girl that’s actually decent, actually worth spending time with, and then just as I was knotting the noose of self-pity around my neck she came and loosened it, loosened it all up. She poked fun at me, poked me in the ribs and told me to relax—my wife, standing there with perfect posture and with her hair pulled back like Grace Kelly. Just like I like it, just like she knows I like it. She’s my wife, not a girl at a college bonfire, and all the same, there she is, keeping warm while I have to navigate through a sea of worthless work associates just to talk to my own damn wife. Let me stand out on the fringe of my own party, in my own backyard, watching rats scurry, and if I didn’t know better I’d think she was enjoying herself, enjoying the attention. Yes, she enjoys seeing me pace and sweat, swinging her Chardonnay around and laughing so much that she throws back her head. Careless drunk, like a little girl away from her parents, seeing what she can get away with, and I’m right here.

“How much have you had to drink?” I ask her. Not that it matters, it was too much. Gina rolls her eyes and murmurs something, and Susie snuggles up to her like it’s a conspiracy.

“She’s an adult, at her own home, does it matter?” Gina tells me. Did I ask Gina a question? I did not. Do I want Gina to shut her mouth? I do. Do I think a hearty slap across that mouth would help shut it? I know it would, but Gina is not my wife, nor my problem.

“Susie, honey, party’s over. Time for bed, the mess can wait.” Susie looks over at Gina and all I can see is the back of her head, Susie’s blonde curls resting on her neck after falling out of place from the crown of her head where the rest of the strands have been twisted into place. I’d helped pin them, in the places she couldn’t see.

The party is hushed now, looking sideways at our triangle to see the domestic squabble, and I can feel my place now. Pretty blonde and her strong best friend and then me, this mean man they don’t understand. Leave her alone, they think. I pace, threatened by the crushing opinion of the crowd and by the threat that if I leave her alone, I’ll be alone, I’ll lose her warmth and she won’t even notice if I don’t make some noise.

A scream from across the yard saves me, and everyone turns to see the rat’s tail whipping a woman’s ankle before darting under cover again.

Invisible Woman

Write a short scene in which a woman becomes invisible, briefly, for no explained reason. I leave it up to you what she will observe in her state of lucidity and transparency: her boyfriend's or husband's or male friend's life, a short scene of men without women, or a scene of another woman and her man (innocent or not). No one can see or hear her. She is not a ghost, and at the end of your narrative return her to her fully fleshed out self, again with no explanations. In other words, don't worry too much about the problems of imperceptibility. Just jump into the story and follow its political, rather than science fiction, consequences.
(from prompt #42 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"The Gym" by combust


When she looked sideways at the mirror, she saw an empty seat where she should have seen herself sitting. The handle she held dropped and the weight swung down from the pivot point; in the middle of arm extensions, she glanced to her left to examine her tricep and saw nothing but suspended equipment. The gym remained the same, there were rows of women running in place above her, and men spotting each other in bench presses among the free weights. But in the mirror, the seat she occupied looked available. Testing this, she again extended herself, felt the dull strain in her upper arm, saw the weight lift and the handle rise and then drop with a clang that no one else seemed to hear.

She stood up, looked down, saw her own shoes tied tightly, felt up and confirmed a swinging ponytail on her head. The mirror reflected nothing. She walked up to a man laying on his back and lifted her shirt, jumped up and down, and waited. No reaction, just a grunt while he hefted up a bar stacked with more weight than she contained. She did a little shimmy and almost cried that he didn’t stop, gaping in wonderment at her naked breasts. He just kept lifting weight for the sake of it, completely ignoring her.

“I am invisible.” She didn’t say it out loud, she kept her thoughts in her head, and she sat, dazed, at the foot of the man in front of her.

She felt free and a little ecstatic; like someone had given her a superpower in the middle of the night and while part of her felt irritated at being disturbed, every other part of her delighted in the possibilities of what to do when no one can see.

She explored the idea of pranks; she considered mischief like a foreign language. She stepped on the scale behind a woman weighing herself, gave her a fright. She pulled the pin on a man bracing himself for a shoulder press and watched his face display surprise, then embarrassment, then cool recovery in a moment. The treadmills tempted her but she resisted ruining anyone’s stride, and instead she turned all the televisions to Spanish cartoons and laughed by herself at the few people this confused.

She wandered to the gym’s front desk and put herself up for free membership for the next year. Then thinking further she gave herself back credit for all the years she’d been a member, in addition to free membership going forward. It felt very bad and she surprised herself by doing it anyway.

In the locker room, she looked in the mirror out of habit. Realizing this habit sobered her up, she felt lonely without a reflection and lost, though she could still feel her hair pulled back and see her shoes laced. Things tied to her, around her, proved her existence but it scared her to not recognize herself among the images of women changing in the room. She watched women in the mirror, glancing at themselves or pausing and staring and pulling and prodding themselves, but her philosophizing was interrupted by her name.

Instead of herself she saw friend Emily balancing a cell phone on her shoulder while using both her hands to tie her shoes. With a thrill she realized she could hear Emily talk about her, she could hear what someone thought of her. But the words coming out of Emily sounded like they were describing someone else, someone awful. So she left Emily to frown at her reflection, she left the locker room and rushed towards the door of the gym, rushing towards somewhere without strangers or mirrors.

At the door she stopped, holding the handle, bracing herself for the rest of the world and the people in it who couldn’t see her. She gathered her strength and reached out and nearly fell forward through the open door, being held open for her by a man staring down at her chest.

Doubling Up

Write two paragraph-long character sketches of two people you know well. Wait a day, then write another long paragraph sketch that takes elements from the two people you know to create a third, fictional character. The key here is to use the two pieces of writing, not the two people you've written about. Fit together two paragraphs of prose into one character sketch, making sense of the combination somehow.

(from prompt #40 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"Laugh" by sflovestory



She isn't the heroine of a novel written in first person. The novel she imagines for herself uses a lot of adverbs: she laughs flirtatiously, she gazes directly. She sits quietly and responds promptly; she is never too absorbed in a task, always just absorbed enough to keep from being bored.

With a polite and quiet base level, her political opinions are unexpected: she cares (passionately) about ideals, she is liberal, she is knowledgable. She reads the CNN website and follows certain stories: Nancy Grace stories about child abduction as well as political stories about bills up, scandals, injustices. She worries. She is afraid of men, of being alone, of change. She is not afraid of her own power. She wants to be a social care worker and her family amuses her, with their antics and Mexicanness, her nieces and nephews running around and nearly knocking over her abuelita. She dates but with a wary eye, she isn't seduced by a sweet talker. Sex doesn't alarm her, but she respects it, its place, and allows it. She always notices attractive men and points them out. She sleeps with stuffed animals. She likes shopping websites, shoes, and romantic comedies.

She has a certain neutralness, and could be called generic if you didnt look closer. She has a big smile and luxurious hair. She has broad shoulders and breasts that spill out, as if she is unaware of their existence. She smiles (widely) and giggles about dogs, about slips of the tongue, about innocent mistakes, about the behavior of animals and the characteristics of people working with animals. She is enthusiastic and expects this enthusiasm to be met by those around her. She gets confused by things outside her norm, and she doesn't like to be asked to adapt. She eats rich foods and warms her bread. She worries about her weight.

She knows she is a good friend. Her friends describe her as she sees herself: she laughs flirtatiously, she gazes directly. Anyone could write her story, but she doesn't know who would.

Face Recognition

Write a short scene in which the ability to recognize faces is crucial to the outcome of the scene (it doesn't have to be correct face recognition--it could be mistaken face recognition). How do you describe a face? This is one of the most difficult tasks fiction writers encounter--describing something so ineffable that we nevertheless know instinctually so well. How do you describe a sudden understanding of anything, let alone a face?
(from prompt #37 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"David Alexander" by Alex Barth


Before anyone sees him, he sees their kneecaps. He studies how calves and thighs bind together, how veins run and bulge blue, he watches joints bend and muscles twitch and flex. He looks at all these knees and other parts of people with his own knees tucked up under his chin, hugging his legs and rocking slightly. His mom is shopping for clothes, for girl clothes, and she doesn’t know it but he snuck away to a round clothing carousel and hid behind a curtain of women’s coats. It’s past coat season, and no one yet has rifled through his observatory cave.

He waits for his mom and plots how he’ll greet her when she comes by, when he hears her shoes hurrying after she’s noticed he’s missing: he’ll pull the coats open and yell “Boo!” and she’ll jump back with her hand on her heart and say “You scared me! I was looking everywhere for you!” While he waits he pretends he is a spy watching everyone. He pretends he is a fox that is too smart for anyone to find. He pretends he is an orphan, and then he hopes his mom comes by soon so he can grab her legs and surprise her and then play a new game.

He sits rocking and resting his head on his knees. The legs he sees passing by march around like alien soldiers with faces but no features, just blank discs that pause and bend, different legs but with the same bald, expressionless knees. The longer he waits the more he wants to see her. When she wears socks she lets him pick them out, funny ones with stripes or little dogs, but today she’s wearing sandals, just like everyone else.

When he gets scared, when people ask him questions he doesn’t understand or when they stare at him too much, sometimes he holds her legs and hides behind them, with his face at the bend behind her kneecaps. When he does that, when he tucks his face away, she’ll smooth his hair and lets him hide for as long as needs. Right now though, he doesn’t want to hide.

He crawls out and there are women of all ages occupying themselves with price tags and sizes. He stares at all the different faces without shying, and studies how every feature, noses and cheekbones and eyebrows and lips, bind together and still aren’t everything. He studies how lips stretch and purse and pucker and spread into thoughts or smiles without saying words, eyes flick and follow and give as much light as they take in, and he watches all this to find one face. She is bent, searching knee-high among the shoppers. Before she sees him, he sees her face.

Wilderness

Put two characters you already know from your own fiction in a wilderness of some sort. It could be a desert or a big foreign city where the characters don't speak the language. Do not explain to us why these characters have landed in this wilderness. Stick to one POV. Slowly describe the other character, which does not want to be seen but which leave a handful of traces. The idea of this exercise is a little like Absent, to help you to make a human recognizable even from the things she left behind on purpose and by accident.
(from prompt #35 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"Untitled" by Zenat El3ain


The kindergartners sitting in a semi semi-circle looked to him like Dante’s unfinished inferno. They didn’t even have all their teeth. He grinded his and looked around for Lucy. He could hear her, making uncouth remarks into the speaker of a Blackberry—a sound he found soothing after being presented with something like a song by a creature that was nearly human, but smaller and without shame. He tried to insist that he would not, in fact, enjoy an encore of noises about stars that twinkle, but he and Lucy’s ardent wishes were drowned out by an outburst so loud and off key he could only wonder what they were. He felt lost, and he wanted her to finish yelling into her phone. He went to find her. She waved him off with a manicured hand and a panicked look in her eye, pleading with someone on another line. He stood with his hand in his pocket, appraising her, her posture and her starched collar, and he liked the lines, enough to almost forget about his almost circle of hell waiting for him.

Meanwhile he took her clutch, a status symbol with intersecting semi-circles, and pawed through for something dulling. Pain meds, anti-anxiety, maybe something really good. Maybe she’d even have some candy he could throw to the pack of five year olds, Ted understood that they liked candy and that it could be used to shut them up. Her purse, while compact, held a great deal, usually anything he needed, but the best it held today were black ear buds strung by wire to connect to a slim rectangle. With relief he plugged his ears and walked back into the den of din, now with a different tone. It was almost like a music video, if Ted had ever chosen to use his time to watch one, but since he hadn’t he thought it quite an original experience, to see wild things moving about as if to the music he was hearing. A little one sat on the floor and for a moment she had an expression like Lucy, but maybe it was just her eyes. She sat still, even as the others had abandoned the attempt to be herded into shape and were now all doing some activity that may have been a war over territory or a game of tag. She seemed detached from the group, and soon enough she went and collected two dolls and sat back down in the same spot. With Lucy’s soundtrack filling his ears, he watched the little girl march her dolls down a straight line in the pattern of the fabric. At best it was a weird experience.

He stood in the room without anything to lean against, and the kindergartners ran circles around him, weaving in and out without regard for how uncomfortable it made him. One of them ran snot-nosed first into his leg, leaving a shiny knot of phlegm, and ran off again before he could figure out which one it was. He wondered if Lucy could see him, if she was sympathetic or disgusted or amused. The little girl with Lucy’s eyes had a face that managed to convey all three, even though she wasn’t looking at him. Ted found this fitting, considering the crime.

Ted and Lucy first appeared in The Ironist.

Goodness

Imagine a character who is kind, whose every act is based on the notion that other people need help, and who rarely thinks of himself first. This should be a person of great empathy. The character walks into a room and notices immediately the other person in the room who most wants something—a drink, the last cookie on the tray, help remembering a movie character’s name. It would be very tempting to punish this good person in your exercise. Don't punish the character. Don't make a big deal of this goodness, either. Let readers follow this agent of kindness through a handful of encounters. Give as little background information about this character as you can without sacrificing our natural need to know something about this Good Samaritan.
(from prompt #33 in The 3AM Epiphany)

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"Open it!" by Anders Ljungberg


The body slumped street side against a car’s front wheel looked dead. His legs stretched out on the road and his head had lolled to one shoulder, like a rag doll. She almost missed him, driving past, the idea to stop and confirm the existence of a possibly dead body laying in the road was delayed. So as an afterthought, almost a whim, she put her car into reverse and drove back to the dark part of the road, flashing her brights on the body’s face and honking her horn. Even though the body didn’t flinch, didn’t give any sign of life, death seemed abstract to her. She left the car in park with her warning lights flashing and walked in front of the body, bent down, and tried to feel for a pulse. She didn’t know what a pulse felt like, but she thought there might be one, and in the meantime she slapped his face and yelled “Hey!” so close it was like she was shouting up his nostrils. He woke up groggy, eyes unfocused, and she realized she now had to deal with this, which was awful. She wanted to go home and lay curled like a shrimp in her bed with the TV on, she didn’t want to think. And here now, she had to think about what to do with this sour-breathed, but breathing, body.

Mid-way through her struggle to lift the still basically dead-weight of a drunken 22 year old frat boy, a door opened and light came on. She yelled out “Is this your car?” and the door-opener came out and said that it wasn’t. He stepped down and walked over to the two, and within a minute he and the girl had the body, now slurring speech that sounded like “birdie” or maybe “buddy,” hanging off each shoulder. They dumped Birdie/Buddy on the safer-than-the-street sidewalk. She thought it might be a good idea to look through the drunk guy’s pockets for a phone or a license, and asked the boy what he thought. He encouraged her to do so, and then, when her hand recoiled as soon as it touched Birdie/Buddy’s wet, soiled jeans, did so himself. Birdie/Buddy batted away the male hand, but the boy who opened the door persisted. He pulled out a wallet just as Birdie/Buddy sprung to life, flailing about and putting a great deal of effort into a limp punch that landed in the air near the girl’s head. The boy who had opened the door put his hands on the wild ones of Birdie/Buddy and held them into submission. The girl’s hands fluttered too, through the punched air, and so with a glance back, the boy said “You did a good deed by stopping, you should be proud. But you look tired, go home and don’t give this anymore thought.”

She nodded without hiding her relief. Alone with Birdie, the door-opener looked through the wallet. Three ones, a condom, and a local driver’s license. He went back inside his house for some water bottles—dropping one off by his girlfriend—and some cash. By the time the cab came, Birdie had passed out again with the water bottle crushed in his hand. The cab driver received an extra ten, in case there were any more accidents on the way, and Birdie never know his wallet had been removed when he woke up face down on his driveway the next morning. The boy who opened the door closed it now behind him, and was there in the bed just as girlfriend turned and reached for him.

The Ironist

In 500 words, create an observer of events outside her own direct experience, someone who knows more than she lets on, jokes with us (the readers) but who also indirectly reveals a complex reading of the events she is describing. M. H. Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, says "...in Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was." The dissembler or ironist or trickster is a wiseass, a clown perhaps, a teller of tall tales.
(from prompt #10 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:

Lucy wears thick lip gloss and designer heels. Ted wears a smirk and Italian loafers. Lucy twirls a pretty curl and stares at her reflection, and Ted rests his hand in his pocket and watches Lucy. Her mother designs clothes, and the daughter, dressed in wealth and raised accordingly, to be seen as desirable, grew up spoiled. His father purchases and develops buildings, and the son, raised in wealth and dressed accordingly, in anything seen as desirable, grew up spoiled. Spoiled means ruined, and it happens to children like it happens to food: when left out too long, unattended. What happens is that no one wants something spoiled, and they are thrown out as rubbish. The difference between children and food, of course, is that children have thoughts and feelings. Both food and children can be equally unaware of their own spoiled state. And everyone everywhere grows up thinking the way they are is the way everyone is, until suddenly something changes, and it becomes clear that no one is normal.

Lucy looks like a prize, and she even comes with a ribbon. She has wide eyes to look for approval and they are framed by demurely flattering eyelashes; as they say, art isn’t art without the right frame to hang it. She is either very beautiful or very ordinary and it depends entirely on who she is standing near, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so her beauty is in the eye of whoever beholds her. Ted yearns to hold her. He looks for prizes, he understands that a prize is whatever you find and assign a value. Like empty lots and vacant buildings, Ted sees beauty in nothingness, in the lack of the concrete.

The relationship between the two begins in hatred, like so many love stories, and it is only when they realize the other has what they do not that they see how much they have in common. They are a pair of bulls-eyes, they are the center of what everyone tries to hit; the children of power and wealth, the products of vanity and acquisition, no one can see what good could come of them. It is odd to think that such famous parents have such infamous offspring. For those who have watched them grow up it is hard to imagine much more wasted breath than this pair of idiots, and everyone has watched them grow up, we see them on television and we read about them online. You can’t help but feel bad for two little lovers, two spoiled children, who have so many people watching them and judging them, cynically, from a safe distance. What a lovely couple they make, at any rate, as she stares at her boyfriend, staring at her, in the reflection of the mirror in her mother’s Victorian vanity.

Historical Omniscience

Write 700 words about an event set well in the past, twenty or one hundred years ago. Write from above, as if by means of researched opinion (but doing little actual research). Write about several historical characters or an interesting event, imagining any POV. All fiction is historical fiction in the sense that we write about what we knew prior to beginning our stories and novels.
(from prompt #9 in The 3 AM Epiphany)
Read my response:



Travelers had a certain tenacity to them, and yet a certain glamour as well. Their mere presence implied value, not of delicate bone China, but the intrinsic kind, like a solid leather trunk. Travel for leisure, so recently a concept, still required some strength and durability in its participants. And money, of course, but more than that, at least for women. Arriving by train, women dressed more practically than in their daily life. A little girl passing by a train station hardly ever took a second glance at these unfettered women, except for those few girls who had great stores of curiosity, those who noticed exceptions rather than rules. Hats covered heads, rather than decorated them, and gloves protected from the unknown, rather than keeping palms in a state of unknown.

For Martha, traveling was a way of life, and clothes had always been a practical matter. When she was younger she sought out books instead of fashion clippings, and explored with her brothers instead of knitting with her mother. The tenacity of a traveler was innate in Martha, but the glamour was acquired, slowly, as a result of her grit and her journeys more than any learned appreciation for personal style. Even when Martha went to Europe—which, except for during the War, was still regarded more as a shopping port than a haven for the artistic and literary expats, numerous though they were—she was unaffected by the markets. She rarely thought of material items, and in her presence, it was hard for others to think about anything other than her words, which were of far away places on the earthly plane and of the nearness of the spiritual world.

By the time Martha met with the Queen of Romania, she held all the dignity of royalty, without the aid of embellishments or stylish accessories. Martha, while not the sort to command attention, held it. Those who encountered Martha en route to a teaching location, be it Australia or Austria, South Africa or South America, nearly always walked away with similar expression: that of rapt attention and a glowing, almost ludicrous smile.

Meanwhile, Queen Marie had never not known glamour, and grew up as celebrated as a jewel. When she met Martha Root, Marie had already survived a scandalous youth and had come into her own as the face of Romania, the Soldier Queen, and she held control as easily as a crown rests on a head. The difficulty for Marie, striking as she was, wasn’t in getting attention, but in having her attention kept. The Queen had less of the wanderlust that pushed Martha further and further from known comforts, and Martha traveled with, and out of, love for her cause. Instead the Queen was restless internally. By volunteering as a nurse for the Red Cross and orchestrating an intelligent and effective defense against the invading Russians, Marie had employed physical and political efforts to lessen the carnage of the War, but for all that she did, as much as she would end up being celebrated, the destruction that had occurred worldwide left Marie, privately, with a broken view, and she felt deeply the moribund spirit that lingered long after the dead were buried. Like many, Marie yearned for something to revive her soul, and this is where Martha found her.

The two women, one the child of an American dairy farmer and the other with a lineage memorized by British schoolchildren, met in the Queen’s palace after brief correspondence. Martha had begun sending books and earnestly written letters to various ruling figures, eventually even the Emperor of Japan and the Shah of Persia. Marie responded emotionally immediately, and then she responded literally. The Queen felt a connection to Martha. Marie was just under fifty and Martha was just over, and both felt the weight of their years without letting it slow them down; though they died within a year of each other, over ten years later, both continued to travel and teach and lead with ever increasing fervor. Martha helped Marie to embrace a spirituality that the Queen had long suspected within herself but hadn’t known how to grasp. And Marie, as the first monarch to share the faith Martha taught, increased Martha’s sphere of influence and helped to publicize a burgeoning religion.

The fashion of the time, for Martha and for the Queen, left a great deal to the imagination; necklines were high and hemlines were low. Martha, when she traveled, met women whose breasts were on full display and women whose faces and bodies were veiled. As a little girl this had been of no interest to her, and as an adult women, it was indicative of nothing. Women’s clothing revealed where they came from but had nothing to do with where they were going or what was contained underneath. Martha knew this as a child, when she looked out her world for what wasn’t there instead of what was, and as she traveled this was her lesson for anyone who saw her, trunk in one hand and China in the other.