#MotivationMonday Flash Fiction Challenge - My Entry

My 6/11/12 entry for Wakefield Mahon's #MotivationMonday

WORD PROMPT: "The trouble started when they threw the book in the fire." 

The trouble started when they threw the book in the fire.

We weren't harming no one. We keep to ourselves, we do. We only sell our remedies to the people who seek us out. We never even bring our concoctions inta’ town.

But one potion goes wrong, one time, and before you know it, we’re being hunt’d down. The whole town is in an uproar.

“Hang ‘em!” they shout.

“Burn ‘em at the stake!” they chant.

Animals.

They’d like’ta see us hang’d. And for what? Dorothy Walcott, that’s what. Head of the town council, and most influential of the bunch. She come’d to us in secret one day last fall. Said she want'd to punish her old husband Edmond, she did.  For cheating on her with Mary Alice Young of all things.

"Sure," we say. "Punishin’ husbands is easy."

So we give her the potion. "Put this in his stew,” we say. “Whisper the words,” we say. Simple instructions for one so educated as she. But she come back. And she screamin’ and hollerin’ about us being witches and devil-women.

Edmond Walcott, see, he turned into a goat. 

She should have been happy, really. We punished her old husband for his wrong-doin’s. I tell her it’s a good thing. All the milk and cheese you could ever need, I say.

We weren’t harming anyone, really. 

Not until that old book hit the flames, of course. And I can say I warn’d ‘em all, I did.

Because when that old spell book flew back out of the fire, it hit one of the council women in the face.  Right square in the nose.

The spirits of my ancestors’ didn’t take too kindly to the heat of that bonfire, no sir they didn’t. 

You should have seen those townsfolk run.  

298 Words