Author: Amanda Pica

An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature

By: James Hobbs

The toad squirmed in my pocket as I knocked on the witch’s door. Her name was Granny Hexham, an old, withered woman, so hunched that her body was practically a hoop. She couldn’t move around too fast, so there was a lot of grumbling, banging, grunting, and growling before the door creaked open. Her watery eyes squinted at me as she scratched one of the hairy warts on her cheek with a long, moldy, yellow fingernail.

“Well, well, well, well, sweet, little boy, did you bring my fee?”

I was too scared to speak, so I just nodded, reached into my pocket, and held out the bundle I’d made from my handkerchief. You could see the toad inside kick and struggle as Granny Hexham brought it to her nose, almost as lean and crooked as her body, and took a long sniff.

She licked her skinny lips and hissed, “Yes, yes, sweet boy, this’ll do nicely.”

She ushered me into her crooked little cottage and hurried me to sit on a stool. It was dark except for the needles of light that poked through the gaps in the crooked boards of the walls. Then knotty fingers unwrapped the bundle, grabbed the toad by the leg before it could hop away, and slammed its head against the table until it stopped trying to escape. Then she took stock of the rest of her payment: a blue-shelled beetle; two small green apples; six hairs from the tail of a three-legged dog; and a small stone I’d kept in my shoe for three days and three nights.

“So, little man, you wanted someone cursed.”

“My new school teacher, Mr. Cospwattle. He yells at me all the time, when I can’t do my ciphering or forget my grammar lessons.”

She nodded, a look of exaggerated sadness twisting her wrinkled face. “A dreadful shame to be so cruel to such a dear, young child.”

She pulled a dented frying pan off the wall, tossed a pat of butter into it, lit a fire in her stove, and started frying up the toad with a pinch of salt and pepper.

“I…I don’t want you to kill him or turn him into a worm or anything. I just need you to chase him away, so they have to get a new teacher.”

Granny Hexham cackled to herself as she tossed the toad in the pan. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, I know many spells to vex him.” She flipped the toad onto a plate and started frying some eggs to go with it. “I can make it so that every time a Thursday falls on the seventh day of the month, if he wears black or green, a sparrow will drop its dung on his shoulder. I can cast a spell that will make his left wrist tickle perniciously before it snows. I can make him unable to spell the word ‘social.’ I can cause him to drop his favorite mug, so that it shatters into a thousand pieces, as long as that mug doesn’t have diagonal stripes on it. Do any of these little tricks strike your fancy, hmm?”

“Umm…” To see Granny Hexham, I had braved the dark forest, which my parents had told me in no uncertain terms never to enter. “Is there anything else you can do?”

She whirled around and glared at me. “I have other curses, little man. I can make him sneeze any time he meets the eyes of a two-year-old hog. If he has a fondness for fruit, I can cause pears to taste like slightly rotten apples. If that is not cruel enough for you, I can cause the knot of his favorite cravat to come untied twice as often as usual. Are any of these wicked enough for you?”

“Well…”

I have never in my life seen anyone take fried eggs from a pan with so much malice. She slammed her plate onto the table across from me and grabbed a two-tined fork so long I was afraid she’d skewer me with it, not her supper.

“Ungrateful boy. Don’t be so choosy. I haven’t tasted toad and eggs in a long time. I would rather eat them in peace.”

“Those curses are all really very wicked, but I thought—”

She stabbed the toad and bit off its head so forcefully that I shut my mouth with a snap.

After the lump of chewed toad made its way down her skinny throat, she licked her lips and said, her voice suddenly less hissing and mysterious, “Listen, I don’t know what you expect to get for a toad and a few measly trinkets. If you want better curses, you can go see another witch, but I can promise you nobody’ll cast a curse for cheaper than me.”

“But I’ve heard all about you. They said you were the wickedest witch this side of Glarmsby.”

She sighed and hunched over so far that her long nose almost dipped into the runny yolks of her eggs. “I was, little man. I was, but that was many years ago. In my prime, I could’ve had your teacher’s house eaten by termites or struck by lightning or given him the old yalping cough; howling aches; and the foul fustian flux. I could’ve filled his bed with hedgepigs and his breadbox with bog worms. I’d vex him. I’d well and truly addle him.” Then her voice rose and her jowls shook with anger. “But I’d like to see you do a better job of casting a curse when you’re a hundred and two, and your eyes don’t work, your back aches, and you set things down one minute and can’t remember where you left them the next. And for only the price of a toad.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her sudden outburst, so I fidgeted with the buttons on my coat and said, “What if I brought you another toad? Could you cast two curses for me?”

“Another toad, another stone from your shoe, and a fly’s left wing.”

I didn’t like the idea of walking around with an uncomfortable stone in my shoe for three more days, and flies are hard to catch, so I said, “My mom’s tomatoes are ripe. I can pick a couple of those to eat with your toad and eggs.”

She took another bite of toad and chewed thoughtfully for a minute, before saying, “You’ve got a bargain.”

So I went home and stole two oblong tomatoes and scoured the forest and splashed around until I had caught another toad and tied it up in my handkerchief. She told me she cast curses on Mr. Cospwattle that made his leg itch whenever he ate peas and that gave him a splitting headache in the morning of any day in October when a bird had sat on the roof of the schoolhouse the previous night. I guess it worked. I think I noticed Mr. Cospwattle scratching his leg sometimes as he ate his lunch out of a tin pail, and he did seem especially irritable in October from then on, but it didn’t drive him away. I doubt he noticed anything had changed. Finally, he got offered a better paying job teaching in the city and left. As for me, I never made another bargain with a witch. As far as I can tell, it’s not worth the trouble.

About the author:

Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, James Hobbs is currently a PhD student at the university of York, studying early modern history. He writes as a hobby in between doing research.

An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature

By: Alyson Tait

From low tide of the pirate cove all the way back to our camp, me and Peter ran, ignoring everything except each other and the traps we’d set because those weren’t for us. They were for grown-ups and other beasts: bear traps, swinging nets, and hidden pits with sticks we’d spent weeks sharpening. We didn’t stop until we reached our home tree. Staccato laughter punctuated gasps of air.

Peter boosted me, my foot pushing off his hands so I could grab a branch and climb. He jumped as if he weighed nothing and beat me to the top where we lay next to each other on thick branches and planks of wood, gulping air.

When we could breathe again, he turned to me, grinning. “They thought—” The rest of his sentence vanished beneath roaring laughter.

It’s impossible to know how long we stayed there laughing, catching our breaths, and talking in half-finished sentences about the raid on the pirates. The only marker of time was the sun disappearing, and in its place, the moon arrived, bringing friends with it. A hundred thousand million stars, and those were just the visible ones.

I asked Peter how many stars he thought there were. “Not just the obvious ones. How many total in all the universe?”

He shrugged. “Who cares? Wendy, you should leave that kinda stuff to the philosophers.” He stood and climbed down the tree, whistling a tune as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

And really, he didn’t. It was the best thing about him.

He didn’t care that he’d lost when we played cards that night, numbers barely visible in the moonlight—even when I’d played the queen of hearts. He never cared. Maybe because he never got tired, injured, or lost anything of great importance.

Sometimes, I wondered if he considered me of great importance. Was I worth him getting upset about? Would he grab that play sword of his and swing it at a pirate? Or a canyon if I fell in?

I almost asked but I knew what he’d say. The same thing he always said about questions like where the other kids were, how many stars there were, or why we never grew.

Leave it to the philosophers.

I didn’t need the philosophers for that one though—I just wanted his attention.

When dawn came, he didn’t sleep. Instead, he suggested we go swimming after breakfast.

The sun was bright overhead when our toes dipped into the water. I sat on the sand, nursing a stitch that pinched at my side because we’d traveled from one end of the island to the other with no dreams in between.

“The water’s warm!” Peter sang—taunted—from chest-deep in the lagoon.

“The water’s always warm!” I yelled back.

He shook his head. I could hear his thoughts. “Stop thinking so much.”

“So swim with me,” he said instead and grinned.

There was never any arguing with him, and I didn’t want to, I liked him too much.

So I swam.

We splashed and called out for the mermaids that liked to play sometimes and ignored everything else until my arms got tired and heavy.  When I was halfway to the shore, Peter yelled. I assumed it was about me leaving his game, but something sharp scraped against my leg.

I picked up my pace.

The sharpness came again. A thin burning pain ripped across my calf from some wayward shark that’d ventured into the shallower water.

My fatigue drained away—my tiredness vanished as if it had never even been there.

Water splashed behind me, and impossibly, my aching arms pumped faster despite my lungs burning from the effort until I was safe on land.

“Peter!” I screamed, voice cracking.

I didn’t see him anywhere. Not a limb, finger, or single strand of hair.

The water went still.

I held my breath.

“Come up.” My heart thundered in my ears.

Panic came in waves. My vision went dark at the edges.

I’d escaped. Was it because the shark had feasted on Peter instead?

That meant my guide—my best friend—was gone.

A choking sob left my throat.  “What do I do?” The thought was unfinished, swept out to sea with my heart and lungs.

Only the wind moved.

“Always so many questions, Wendy,” a laughing voice said behind me.

A startled scream tore out of me before I turned.

There he was.

My chest tightened and he grinned, as if the ocean hadn’t just threatened to take us away from each other. I slapped his arm for always scaring me.

His grin widened. “Too many questions, actually. Save some for the—”

“Maybe I’m the philosopher!” I said although I wasn’t sure what it meant. Not really.

I wanted to push him back into the water so he could feel fear too.

But then Peter laughed, and just like always, the sound took all my anger away.

When he caught his breath, we ran.

I ignored the scrape in my leg, and we ran all the way from the lagoon back to our tree. We didn’t slow down, not even to take a breath or watch the beasts that ran by. We tagged each other’s shoulders anytime the other got too far ahead, and both of us jumped over hidden pits, and we veered around the traps along the way so we didn’t get hurt because injuries meant less adventures—the worst possible thing to happen on Peter’s island.

When we reached the tree again, we flopped onto the grass, Peter laughing like always while I watched the sky. Clear, blue, and endless, like the ocean had been flipped upside down above us.

How many days of careless running did we have left? I glanced over, catching him staring at me with a grin. Maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t need all the answers if I could still run with him, and maybe I should leave all those hard questions to the grown-ups.

And so with a grin, I decided I would.

About the author:

Alyson Tait was born and raised in the Southwest USA, where she walked alongside cactuses and scorpions before moving to Maryland. She now lives among the crabs with her partner, daughter, and multiple judgmental pets. She has appeared in (mac)ro(mic), HAD, and Pseudopod. She has chapbooks published by Querencia Press, Bottlecap Press, and Fahmidan Publishing, one book forthcoming with Graveside Press, and several novellas on Amazon.