About Willowbrook Farm:
But on the day they are supposed to be evicted, a flying saucer from outer space appears in the sky above Willowbrook Farm…
This is a short story of 2700 words or approx. 10 print pages in the The Day the Saucers Came… series, but may be read as a standalone.
Excerpt:
June 9th, 1956. Oh, I remember that day well. After all, that was the day that me and my Mary were gonna lose our farm.
We’d been working the farm for thirty years, my Mary and I. Just like my Daddy before me and his Daddy before him. But times were hard. Two harvests in a row went bad and then our cattle caught foot and mouth. So we had to borrow money from the bank, my Mary and I.
And you know how them banks are. They want their money back, with interest. A lot of interest. More than me and my Mary could pay. I tried to negotiate with the bank, of course I did. I tried to get payment deferments, deadline extensions and so on.
“At least give me until the harvest comes in,” I begged them, “Once the harvest comes in, I can pay you back, all of it.”
But the bank — or rather, Mr. Marsden, who was the bank as far as I was concerned — wasn’t willing to wait. For you see, they’d bought up the land of my neighbours and now they wanted mine as well. They wanted to build one of them new subdivisions of little box houses, every single one the same, or maybe one of them newfangled shopping malls. I don’t quite remember what it was that they wanted to build and it doesn’t matter either, because in the end, it never got built anyway.
What matters is that Mr. Marsden of the bank wanted my land and my farm. And what Mr. Marsden wanted, he got.
Our last deadline to pay back the loan and the interest had run out on May 31st. And of course, we couldn’t pay, my Mary and I, cause we didn’t have the money. I tried to get the deadline extended again, at least until the harvest came in.
But Mr. Marsden, he would hear none of it. And so he sent us one of them eviction notices, telling us we had to leave within a week.
My Mary and I, we weren’t leaving. After all, my Grandpa had come here to this land in a covered waggon in 1871. He saw the brook and the trees and the grass and said, “This right here is where I’m gonna build my farm.” And so he did.
My Grandpa built the house, too, after the log cabin he’d built at first became too small for his growing family. It was a simple house, true, but Grandma insisted that he put pretty windows in it — arched windows like those in a cathedral.
My Daddy lived in that house and worked the farm. That house is where I was born, where I met my Mary at a church social, where we got married and raised our boy until the war took him. No way in hell was I going to just give all that up.
So my Mary and I, we decided that we ain’t leaving unless they make us. And on June 9th, 1956, they were gonna make us.
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About Cora Buhlert:
Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of standalone stories in multiple genres.
When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher. She also runs the Speculative Fiction Showcase and the Indie Crime Scene and contributes to the Hugo-nominated fanzine Galactic Journey. Cora is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award.
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