Words for Wednesday -- 13 February -- Unicorn Farm 22

  The prompts for February are provided by River at Drifting through Life.
 
1. shutdown
2. wreck
3. hairclip
4. marked
5. old school
6. brewery

and/or:

1. release
2. hell-no!
3. cherries
4. insignificant
5. coffee
6. almost


Once again I wrote a small chapter from my magical autobiography, but this time I used the prompts in the order I needed them.

The story continues a bit more than a week later. It's Friday, last day of school before the Winter Holidays (Winter Holidays in Denmark are not the Christmas Holidays, but a week in early February - actually this very week ). 

The shutdown of the old brewery in town was the reason for much gnashing of teeth. Parents went unemployed. Children came late to school, the workers in the shipyard had lost their spirit, in short disorder reigned everywhere.
Susan felt the damp spirit permeating the town as something almost physical. She waited impatiently for release. But of course the teachers were affected by the dismal spirit as well and given them a test. Today when the Winter holidays began! Susan felt almost defiant as she marked the wrong words in the text with ease. These old school test were so easy.

She was going to the Unicorn Farm tonight. She could hardly wait. Her parents had reluctantly allowed her to go alone by train to the Farm, little did they know that Susan had no intention of ever using the train ticket in her purse. She was going to use her portal, of course. Her mind wandered. Heidi and the twins had had something to say about the evil man and the folder from that Belgian tourist resort. But their letter had been short, almost insultingly so. But then, she was going to meet them tonight.
The teacher came in, carrying a mug of steaming coffee. This brought Susan back from her musings. Hurriedly she gathered her stray hairs back in the hairclip, and filled out the missing words in the second half of the test.

Susan felt like a wreck. The school work felt so insignificant compared to the evil man, and the chaos that threatened her magical world. She was lucky that she was good at the ordinary school subjects, else her notes would have suffered this semester, earning her a solid scolding and maybe even a week of grounding, a worse punishment than a solid beating in Susan's opinion.

The teacher rated their test during the long break, and Susan was as usually in the top five of the class. Now she could relax on that account at least.
She said good bye to her class mates, wishing them a happy holiday and ran home. She ate lunch all alone, and packed her gear in a small bag. She did not know if the portal could handle her bike, but did not dare leave it in the old lumber yard for a week in case it could not, so she decided on walking.
Her parents returned home, and Dad bade her go to the grocer's at the end of the street for a crate of beer before she left for Heidi's place. "Might be they closed the brewery in town," Dad said, "but they still make the best beer."
"I'm going to lug a crate of beer all that way," Susan asked.
"Well yes," Dad said, "Those plastic crates are not that heavy. When I was your age the crates were made of wood, and one crate was 50 bottles of beer. Now it's only 30, and you're a big girl, off you go."
Actually Susan did remember the wooden crates, she even remembered carrying one of them for a few steps, they were heavy as lead. They had gotten some empty ones from the beer depot down the street when they went out of use. Susan of course used hers for books and stuff. Linda's were home to an ever expanding collection of horse magazines.
Susan took the money, dressed in her winter clothes, and put her wand in a pocket. She did not want to try and carry one of those heavy buggers all the way without a little bit of magic. She had not forgotten about the DO-NOT rule, but she was not going far, she was not going to use magic on or in front of people. Hell-no! she was not going to ruin her only joy.
At the grocer's she bought the beer, and also some sherbet powder, mostly lemon and strawberry flavoured, and then one of the new ones. It was supposed to taste like cherries. Susan liked the fizzy, popping feel of sherbet powders, but suspected she would not like the cherry variation.
Then she carried the crate a little way from the grocer's. Pausing between two street lamps, she tasted the sherbet powder, confirming her suspicion that cherry sherbet tasted nasty. Then, after a quick look around her, she cast a spell to make the crate lighter to carry.
She took care not to show that she could carry the crate with ease now, but walked as fast as she deemed wise in the thickening darkness. She dumped the crate in the back yard, cancelled the spell, and went inside again.
She carefully placed her wand inside the bag again. then she slung the bag over her shoulder. She went into Linda's room, and gave her the rest of the cherry flavoured sherbet, and said goodbye. She quickly hugged her father. She hugged her mother for a longer time, listened to her admonishing, and promised once again to take care, look closely at the time tables before boarding the trains at the central station, eat her sandwiches, mind her manners at Heidi's place, and not speak to strangers (she was not going to obey this one). And yes, she was totally able to walk all alone to the train station. After all it was not even six o'clock, and she knew the way.
She waved goodbye and headed for the railway station. But when she reached the end of the road and was out of sight, she turned left and doubled back via a parallel street. It was only a short detour on her way to the old lumber yard.