LSF Publications: spanking fiction ebooks

1. Thanksgiving in a New World: The Plan Forms
Coming home feels weird, Clare Marsh thought as she passed the gravy. Not as weird as going to college did, but weird.

She inwardly scolded herself for being ungrateful. Not every freshman college student could afford to come home for Thanksgiving, so she had no right to feel weird in her childhood home. That said, she did feel a bit weird.

"So, what do you think the King will say in his speech today?" Jessica Marsh, Clare's mother, asked to start a new round of conversations.

Clare didn't join in that conversation, but it gave her a new thing to be thankful for - the fact that she lived today and not 60 years ago before they had a King. But then everyone who wasn't around then was thankful that they hadn't had to live through the collapse.

Since history wasn't her forté, Clare didn't know all the factors that led to the collapse. It was something about energy and pollution or something along those lines. All she really knew (since it had been on almost every history test she'd ever taken) was that 52 years ago there had been a Constitutional Congress that rewrote the constitution from the ground up. Clare had heard about the 'checks and balances' system, but only as one of the causes of the collapse. History (as written by the new government) had judged that without those checks and balances the old government would have been more effective, more efficient, and able to prevent the collapse. Some said that this judgement was suspect since it had been a worldwide collapse, but those debates had never made it into any history class that Clare had taken. She had heard a few people (mostly seniors) debating the pros and cons of a republic versus the current monarchy, but as far as Clare was concerned, having the executive powers (such as they were) in the hands of a figurehead monarch clearly worked best.

"Do you think he'll try to reach out to some of the more, um, different areas?" Aunt Mona Kasey, Clare's mother's sister, asked.

Clare tried not to think about the different areas. The years of the collapse had taken their toll, as had the rebuilding, and not everywhere had been rebuilt along the same lines. Her professor for Economics 101 had said that the country was now more a commonwealth of locales than a true nation, and Clare believed that. In some areas you could walk into any drugstore and, if you could pay for it, leave with the drug of your choice, from old-fashioned heroin to the latest blend of S; while in others possession of alcohol was a capital offence. Most areas were somewhere in between those extremes, but mind-altering substances weren't the only issue that split the nation. Name the issue and most of the country was somewhere in the middle of it, with extreme positions taken in various jurisdictions.