Inedibles by Dawn Felagund  

Lúthien in Bullet Points

Maglor is an accountant in the 1980s, trying to blend into his world but unable to resist collecting artifacts that allude to his past. When a Tolkien calendar arrives with Lúthien presented as a pin-up girl, he contemplates her depiction through the centuries compared to who she really was. A triple drabble. There are allusions to sex and violence and their overlap in this one.

Prompt: cheesecake

Cheesecake has a rather old-fangled double meaning as a sexy image of a woman. The specific prompt for this piece is Rowena Morrill's (in?)famous artwork of Lúthien dancing for Beren. Is this how I imagine this scene, Lúthien, Beren? Not at all, but I give Rowena credit for seizing on 80s fantasy and popular culture and going all in. Feathered hat off to you, Rowena!

Maglor had maintained an interest in the renderings of his people's history across the centuries. He was neither an expert nor connoisseur; he merely acquired artifacts at his convenience (not waiting in a line or anything like that), maybe by mail order or secondhand. He had a small collection that would be difficult to explain and likely dismissed as an old man's eccentricities—that is, if he was ever to age beyond the body of a middle-aged accountant (he would not).

When Rowena Morrill's calendar arrived and he paged to May, he said, "Oh," when he saw Lúthien: not an exclamation, just a bullet point in an ever-unspooling list that could be headed Well That's New. He certainly couldn't put it up in the office, though it might make him "righteous" enough (quote-unquote) to net an invitation to after-work drinks with the accountants who left one too many buttons undone (in his opinion, of course), revealing a furze of chest hair or parentheses of cleavage.

By now, Lúthien had stepped onto the stage of history in the roles of goddess and witch and damsel and temptress. This was just the latest iteration—and not the least-clad of them! She'd been carved onto the prows of ships, played by rouged men with melons in their bodices, and invoked in frantic Beltaine couplings. She could withstand being May's pin-up girl.

But he'd known her. Only in passing and, truly, mostly by reputation, but neither she nor her mother were to be trifled with: like wolf bitches, supple as the night, eyes afire with incinerating starlight, teeth not-unstained by blood. Even while his brothers lived, tales of her had been subdued to propriety—but it had not been benign magic that tamed even Curufin's hunger for the Silmaril to docility, that stripped Sauron to a naked fëa.