Word Count: 522
Note: This was written in answer to a prompt. I had to work four words into a story in this order: schoolhouse, linen, fighting and munching.
The Old Schoolhouse Flea Market in Wattington, LA, always attracted crowds. But if you weren’t looking to buy or sell your old stuff, there wasn’t much reason to go, unless you felt like having a sweet dough pie, which a vendor sold through the kitchen window of the old gym behind the old schoolhouse.
Last year was a bit different. Last year was an event for the ages.
It all began next to the booth of a teenage girl named Vanessa, who was manning her own booth next to her parents’ booth. She was selling linen. Linen crawling with lace. Linen tablecloths. Linen handkerchiefs. Linen placemats. Black linen. Red linen. Patterned linen. Bleached white linen. Off-white linen. All of it was there, in piles or draped across stands. Vanessa liked to think of herself as an influencer and had a YouTube channel about thrifting. She’d collected linens from flea markets, clearance sales, estate sales, garage sales and more, and she was now selling it all for twice what she’d paid for it. Everything was laid across a rickety table she’d also found in a garage sale, which shook with even the slightest touch.
Unfortunately for her, the booth on her other side belonged to a woman named Sasha. Vanessa and Sasha didn’t know each other, and besides making small talk the day of the antique fair, they had very little to say to each other.
Vanessa was talking to a customer, hyping up a set of napkins and pointing out the lack of stains on any of them, when a man strode down the line of booths and yelled, “Sasha! Those are my grandmother’s! How dare you!”
Sasha scowled. “Get away from me, you psycho!” She backed up behind the tables covered in her wares and turned to the crowd watching. “Help! This man is going to hurt me!”
“I’m not going to lay a finger on you! But I should! You’re selling my inheritance!”
People rushed over. They put themselves between the two. The man shrugged off the hands that fell on his shoulders and stepped forward, closer to Sasha.
Sasha grabbed the closest thing to her – a beaded handbag, which looked like an antique – and threw it.
“Hey!” The man scrambled to grab it. “Okay, that’s it! Now you’re disrespecting her!”
Sasha didn’t seem to care that the handbag could have been damaged. She picked up another bag, and then a necklace, and then an old clock. All of them sailed through the air. Bystanders ducked for cover. The man tried to get out of the way and catch the things thrown at the same time.
An AM radio came toward Vanessa. She gasped as it landed on the table in front of her, which shook so violently that linens went tumbling to the ground. “No!” she screamed, horrified, as the table collapsed, taking the rest of her merchandise with it. So much for stain-free linen. The fighting had claimed its first victims.
Nearby, a couple sat at a table, staring at the chaos, munching on sweet potato sweet dough pies as if they were eating popcorn at the movies.
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