Leaf Pile Adventure

Let's admit it; English isn't everyone's favorite subject. We've all spent hours upon hours on essays and pondering silly questions about books we hated reading, but in the end, we all did it one way or another.

I personally loved English, but having been in a small rural school, the other seven students did not have the same passion. I alone loved our weekly essay assignments, and I alone managed to finish essays in a whirl on the very first day when it came to fun storytelling and word weaving.

This particular essay was not one of my favorites, but then again no one loves everything they do. Short stories are something to be admired, as it's very hard to fit all the excitement and mysteries of an imaginary world in a two-page document, but I did, and I believe in the saying that sharing is caring.

The fall was always a time of mischief, but when me and my cousin, Angela Greene, jumped into my mysterious neighbor's pile of leaves, we didn’t expect this. I had no idea the scary old hag was even capable of having a place like this. The space was large enough to sit under what had to be half of town. Heck, most of the town didn’t even know her first name. Everyone knew she was quiet, always wore dresses, and that Angie and I always bugged her. In fact, we jumped into her pile of leaves knowing she had just raked them up.

“Mrs. Perrilot’s been busy,” Angie snorted out as we stared at the high ceiling and green shrubbery around us. It was a beautiful garden, like what my Mom told me what the Garden of Eden should have looked like. Heck, there were even hummingbirds flitting back and forth over gorgeous purple lilies and in front of us sat a large pond.

“Is that a mermaid?” I screeched in excitement. In the water, a beautiful woman floated about, her fit stomach and torso flowing into wide hips and a long, scaled fish tail. She had a gentle look on her face as her sandy brown hair rode with the soft water ripples. Her eyes snapped open at my screech, and I slapped a hand over my mouth and stared into moss green irises. Angie grabbed me and slowly we backed away.

The next odd thing we encountered was the cat. No, it wasn’t the usual fat orange tabby you’d expect a senile old woman to have, but it was in no way small. Actually, I don’t even think it was a cat, it was so weird. See, as we backed away, we saw this old willow tree and decided that if the mermaid was going to try and eat us then we should climb the tree. Good logic, right? Well, we thought so, and ran over and climbed it. Thing is, we didn’t expect to have a tiger in the tree, let alone a tiger that could talk. And as gentlemanly it looked with its one eye glass thing and top hat, as soon as it said hello, we ran away from him too. Tigers could eat us just as easily as the mermaid!

We ran back to the sled, thankfully, and decided all those years of climbing up slides could help us out. We both made it up about ten feet before slipping right back down, but on my third try, I heard Angie scream and tumbled down like a rock down a hill, painfully. Once at the bottom, I came face to face with the old schemer herself.

“What on God’s green earth are you two evil spawns doing in my garden?” she demanded rather calmly. Angie and I shivered in fear and the woman sighed sympathetically. She dragged us over to the pond and under a floating rose patch, to the staircase leading to her house. After calming us down with tea and an honest conversation, she made us rake up the leaves we scattered and sent us home. And that was how my cousin Angie and I found out my neighbor was a Witch.