Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 45319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 227(@200wpm)___ 181(@250wpm)___ 151(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 227(@200wpm)___ 181(@250wpm)___ 151(@300wpm)
It was true, I realized as the half-formed dreams I hadn’t been able to remember suddenly came rushing back. Malik had been in every one of them, taunting me, teasing me, doing all kinds of erotic things to my body no man had ever done before…
“No!” I said out loud and then jumped at the sound of my own voice echoing through the empty house. Empty—that’s right, the house was empty because Malik was gone. So it was time to stop stressing over a problem that had solved itself and go check on the pear tree.
I slapped on a little makeup and put my hair up in ponytail. Then I got dressed quickly in Yoga pants and an old t-shirt. I would change into my baking whites later at the bakery. I always kept my work clothes there so they wouldn’t get dirty going back and forth.
Before leaving the house, I grabbed the enormous wicker basket that Sarah had given me just the other week. I was extremely excited to use it because she’d bespelled it to make anything I put in it extremely light and easy to carry.
As I said before, I can hold my own when it comes to lifting heavy things but pears aren’t a light fruit and the more of them you have, the harder they are to handle. And since I can only pick from the tree once in an entire year, it’s not like I can go back and forth and get more. So what I gather in that one picking is all I have to work with. Which meant for the past few years I’d been breaking my back hauling an enormous heavy basket jam-packed with pears back to my bakery.
Sarah, being a Natural Witch, hadn’t even had to do much. When I explained about the problem in gathering the Golden-Skinned Warbler pears, she simply asked what basket I was using. When I pointed it out to her, she touched it and said, “lighter,” and that was that.
I couldn’t help being a little envious but then, my own witchy powers came naturally to me as well—it just so happened that they all had to do with baking. Sarah’s power was much broader but she was so nice about it I couldn’t really begrudge her. And of course, I was extremely thankful to have the basket.
I carried the basket—which now weighed almost nothing—down the path that led away from the back of the house my Great Aunt had left me. It ran right along the edge of the magical bubble that enclosed all of Hidden Hollow. As I walked, the white stone walkway glowed faintly in the early morning light.
It wasn’t very long before the trees behind my house ended and the path was bordered on the left by a high, wild, evergreen hedge. I didn’t know who had planted it, but it was badly in need of a trim. The hedge varied from around the height of my shoulder to a few feet above my head. I had never bothered to try and get around it because it was completely impenetrable and besides, I was happy to stick to the path.
Around a curve I finally came to what I had been looking for—the Golden-Skinned Warbler pear tree. Or at least, part of it.
I say part of it because the trunk and most of the limbs of the tree grew on the other side of the hedge. In fact, only a few long branches hung over onto my side. But those few branches produced an enormous amount of fruit when the tree was ready to yield.
To my delight, I saw that my instincts had been right—the branches hanging over the hedge were so heavy with pears that they were dropping nearly down to the ground.
I stared happily at the golden fruit, gleaming in the rays of the rising sun. This was possibly the biggest crop I had ever seen and I could smell the sweet, ripe scent which was like a mixture of pear and honeysuckle long before I got close.
“I knew it!” I exclaimed out loud. I was so happy I did a little dance right there. There were so many pears here! I was going to be able to make so many tarts which I knew would make all of Hidden Hollow happy.
Before I started picking, I took a moment to examine the branches and make my plan of attack. As long as I was actively picking the pears, they would stay good, but the minute I stopped picking for any length of time the pears still attached to the tree would start getting overripe. Eventually they would blacken and shrivel and fall to the ground where they would make a slimy patch on the path and soak into the ground on either side of it. So once I started picking, I had to keep it up continuously until I was done.