Bad Weather

It was a sunny day in the middle of July, and I had no idea that my life was about to take a dark turn.

I looked up into what I thought would be the sunny blue sky, but what I saw made me stumble back in surprise. The sky was turning gray! It was faint at first, but it started to get more highlighted in the slate-colored sky. But the color wasn’t from storm clouds. It was something different altogether.

I ran down the stairs of our shed and into the cellar. There were enough grains in our storage to get us through a hard year, but the supply wasn’t infinite. Beads of sweat started to roll down my forehead, and I started to panic.

I woke up to a strange cloud buzzing around the crops. Wait…A cloud buzzing? I leaped out of my bed and looked out the windows. The cloud wasn’t a normal cloud; it was a cloud of locusts. I hated those creatures. They ate anything in sight. The crops were gone in under five minutes. Our field looked like Kansas from The Wizard of Oz. Everything was dark and sad. I decided to collect the eggs from the chickens. With barely any crops, eggs were a necessity. I ventured outside and braved the chaos.

My boots crunched on dead locusts and I shivered. It felt like locusts were climbing on my back. Most of the locusts were dead, and a handful were left, but that was still a problem. Five locusts could devour two whole fields, fence included. Our horse was grazing on the crunchy critters, and it didn’t seem to be doing them harm. Suddenly, an idea struck me. Didn’t I read in some book that people could eat locusts? And the horses were… Well, as healthy as a horse!

I ran inside the inn I owned and took a large soup pot and went outside again, collecting as many locusts as possible. People started streaming through the doors of the inn, their faces lighting up when they smelled the savory soup. As I served dinner, people practically inhaled the soup in, asking for second servings. There was plenty to go around. After they were done, my neighbor, Mr. Tooley asked, “Say, where’d you get the shrimp?” I smirked and said, “I asked for a miracle,” Locust soup was the best soup you could get. The more soup there was, the less locusts appeared until the soup was finished and the locusts were gone.