Day 30 of 30 days of Fiction: “30) Write a scene saying “good bye.”

Stay tuned for the next 30 days Meme!

The ogres next door were moving out.

I should have been happy, I suppose. They were loud, smelly, and messy, and their yard trash not only stank, it attracted wyverns and other strange vermin . Their son, too, tended to throw his “toys” around randomly, and I didn’t really enjoy explaining to my children why there was a rotting leg in the yard.

To say nothing about the threat to my children.

Well, let’s be fair. There’s nothing to say. The ogres would eat human meat when it came to them, hunters and criminals and the like, but they didn’t eat the neighbors and, indeed, had been known to eat the nasty sort of human predator when they spent too much time lurking around. Messy, yes, but they liked their neighborhoods friendly.

And my kids liked them, even my oldest, who was going through one of those phases children go through, where they don’t like anyone or anything. Plus, in this neighborhood, you really, really never know what’s going to move in next to you.

Suffice it to say, their leave-taking was a mixed blessing. We threw them a little party, us and the Brownies across the street. My oldest brought them a cow. I didn’t ask where the money had come from. Cattle thieves run in our family, anyway; we have the rope great-great-grandma was hanged with displayed over our mantle (it didn’t stick, which is good for her progeny). My middle child brought them a voodoo doll; she’d been learning in school. The youngest I kept home; worried about incautious footfalls.

My husband and I made a charm for them, with hopes it would smooth things in their new home. And when they were gone, we stared across the wreckage of their front lawn, wondering who would replace them.

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