Story Monday - 'Raise a Toast'

Good morning from wet and rainy Farnley.

Today's short story came from a Writers in the Rafter exercise. We were each given a newspaper headline and image and told to write the story of the headline. We were given nothing of the original articles except that.
Bizarrely, I got a piece of toasted bread with the headline 'Raise a Toast!' for mine.  As I don't do bread, or toast for that matter, I had trouble taking the challenge seriously.

So here is my imagined newspaper article story, which actually went down better than it deserved...

Raise a Toast…

Residents in a sleepy Wirral village woke to breakfast time chaos today as their toasters began behaving in an unexpected manner. Amongst the first to have their normal routine interrupted were

 Mr & Mrs George and Maureen Dovecot .

‘It was a bit of a shock, to be honest,’ Maureen said. ‘My George was waiting by the toaster when it gave off this really loud ‘clunk’ and the toast shot right up into the air! I mean, it just didn’t stop; it buried itself in the ceiling, both slices. Well, poor George, he was ever so upset…’

When asked about George’s distress, Maureen explained: ‘Well, he had to have cornflakes.’

But it wasn’t just the Dovecot’s whose breakfast was disrupted.  In an adjacent house, Phillip Lewis had similar issues.

‘It’s a relatively new toaster, so I can’t blame it on a fault in the mechanism…’ he explains. ‘But I put in two slices of wholemeal bread, as usual, and when the toaster ejected… bang! Up they went, turning in the air like Ninja stars, and finished up embedded in the beam… I’d blame my son, but he’s staying with his grandparents this week.’

Betty Hughes, the retired schoolmistress  across the street was also affected. 

‘I like a bagel for breakfast,’ she explains.  ‘I sliced it as usual and popped the two halves into my toaster. And presently they popped up… and up… and up… I’m used to odd things happening though, for a very long time I’ve felt a Presence. But nothing like this! Maybe it’s a poltergeist.’

Recent arrival in the village, Col. Jack O’Neill, late of the US Army, has his own explanation. ‘Magnets,’ he says, eyeing the three slices of bread decorating the ceiling of his cottage kitchen with suspicion. ‘I’ve seen some pretty odd things during my time in the Military. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll find it’s generally down to magnets.’

So, was it a prank, magnets, or the work of a mischievous poltergeist – a toastergeist, perhaps -  that disrupted the village this morning? Perhaps we’ll never know.