{This is a response to a prompt from Friday Fictioneers. We are to write a 100-word piece based on the prompt photo above. Thank you as always for the prompt, and for reading! Miasma, for those of you who haven’t watched Victoria on PBS recently, is bad air, believed in the 19th century to have carried diseases. “Ming” is referring to a Chinese vase, which are supposed to be extremely expensive. The German word referred to is Feuer. }
Adelaide ushered Liz in. “Please, enter my foyer.”
Liz winced. Foy-ay. Like sobriquet. A miasma of French surrounded Adelaide. Most fell victim to her condescension.
Granddaughter of the granddaughter of a carpetbagger, Liz cursed. In the South, we call it foyer. Rhymes with lawyer.
“Oh, mind the Ming!” Adelaide steered Liz away. The faux blue–yellow bulbosity brimmed with fakes in full-bloom.
Liz preferred real, to fake; down-to-earth, to debutante.
Repelled by her polar opposite, Liz ignored Adelaide’s French-embroidered conversation.
In German, “foy-er” meant something else, entirely.
Infinitely preferable, to have flames meet her at the door, rather than Adelaide.
I wonder what has drawn these two opposites together and I wonder who will want to escape first. Well done. 🙂
Thanks Sascha. It will be a race for the door, I think.
Great observation here.
Thanks Lisa. Liz took me along for the ride.:)
Very clever… some people are all appearance and no substance…
Thank you Bjorn! True enough. Such people I find utterly confounding…
I loved bulbosity
I was so pleased to find it was a real word. Much better than bulbous monstrosity in the first draft!
Loved the clash of social cultures. Nicely observed.
Thanks Iain. It takes all kinds!
Poor Liz, I hope she makes it through okay!
I think though shes irritated at the moment, shes a lot more grounded than Adelaide. ?
So, a Southern “Keeping Up Appearances”. BTW, I tried to look up the German meaning but couldn’t find anything. Google-fail.
Feuer=fire?
Im sure Hyacinth Bu-kay (Bucket) would be right at home in Adelaide’s house.
?I have definitely seen every episode of the series, although the obvious parallels did not occur to me when writing this!
The hyacinths (plants) I got from the grocery two-for-one just finished blooming, and like their namesake, were constantly requiring attention, as they tended to get top-heavy as a result of their own ostentation. A lesson for life, I guess!
Love this, Andrea. Gah… don’t you just hate those pompous know-it-alls who have no clue what real life is about?
Mind the Ming indeed… pffft! Liz needs new friends – real ones!
Somehow you got caught in my spam folder, sorry Dale! Thanks and yes there is a special region in hell for such insufferables.
Wahhh! 😉
Happens to the best of us.