Legend Has It…

/ Liz H-H
Weathered sailboat beached on a strip of river bank. Been there s long time

© Ayr/Gray

Many thanks to Jenne Gray and C.E. Ayr for their photo prompt, THE UNICORN CHALLENGE. 12/06/2024). No more than 250 words in length.

It hadn’t been much of a storm, just enough to suck up a sailboat, a couple of cows, a wagon load of hay, and Mrs. Johnson’s yappy little Chihuahua.

Storms often blew up in the summer months near Clarksville, accompanied by dark, angry twisters that would flatten a barn, take out one of the two area churches, and dance and skip over houses in the tiny tourist and farming community.

With global warming, those twisters became unpredictable. The churches, being clever, built community by creating an annual funding pool: which church would get blown down, which would lose their steeple, which would get a leak in the sacristy. Because of the frequent storms, both churches always won something, which distracted the parishioners and kept the peace.

Unpredictability wreaked havoc with the peace.

When the tiny twister hit, it sucked up the items described in sentence one. The hungry cows were dropped five miles away in a neighbor’s cornfield. What with the peace being havoc-stricken, the neighbors could’ve got into a terrible row, but because the wagon load of hay was dropped a hundred feet from the cows, no real damage was done. Scooped up from the sizable lake (a major source of tourist income for the town), the sailboat was dropped by the twister, dissipating over an especially wide curve in the river. It sits on the river bank still. We created a pool around that, too. Peace maintained.

Mrs. Johnson’s dog was never found, but nobody minded. Nasty critter.

© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2024)

18 thoughts on “Legend Has It…”

  5. Good story, Liz, with a satisfyingly peaceful ending.
    Would that the world could be fixed like that, rather than by betting on supplies of nuclear weapons.
    (I’m not sorry about Mrs Johnson’s dog, I have to say. I know it’s not the dog’s fault that it’s a chihuahua, but they do tend to be snappy wee things.)

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