A Foray Into Fiction

I came from that small town in south Georgia you hear about on the news occasionally -- the one where all the peaches die every year and nobody knows why.  They've had all these scientific people in from Atlanta digging up dirt and checking on the weather ever since it started about seven years ago, but all anybody can come up with is that it's a 'natural phenomenon'.  That means they just can't figure it out but are too proud to admit it, what with all those doctorates after their names, so they just slap a fancy name on it and they're done.

I figure my explanation's as good as any.  See, it started about the time my crazy grandmother started thinking she was a witch and could fly around at night on her broomstick (which was really a pool cue from the billiards room my grandpa had built that time the Vanderbilts came down from Asheville to visit).  

Grand had no idea where Estelle, the help, kept the real brooms and couldn't ask her because Estelle had gone down to see her daughter's first baby being born down in Macon.  Anyway, Grand is the creative type and when she saw all those tassels hanging from the valances in the music room, she yanked them all off and put two and two together, so to speak, and she had herself a broom.

And I know for a fact Grand hated peaches all her life and couldn't stand the way the air smelled when they got ripe every year, so I imagine she just cast a spell on all those trees one night and that was the end of them.

But that doesn't stop them making headlines every year and all the bookies taking bets on whether anyone would eat a peach grown in Bonaire, Georgia that year.

(I found this in one of my old journals.  It was an exercise in creative writing I gave myself years ago.  My husband liked it so I thought I'd post it since I couldn't think of anything else.)