Changing times means changing habits.
The prompt is:
ENHANCING THE EXPERIENCE
Trolls. That’s what people think about when they see my bridge. Trolls. I hate trolls.
Who came up with this cliché? Trolls are big, ugly monsters who live in caves in the mountains. They don’t live under bridges, especially such a small one like mine. No, I’m not a troll.
I am an ogre. And I don’t have layers or smell like onions. I live under this bridge because…I don’t like the rain. Or the sun. I’m not a troll and I don’t ask people riddles just to get across. In point of fact, the only person who ever crosses my bridge is Sean the shepherd and his sheep. And Sean can’t count above his fingers and toes, so he doesn’t miss a lamb or sheep gone missing once in a while.
Before Sean, it was his brother Ian, and before that their da’ Thom. For the last hundred and fifty years, some member of the O’Malley family has crossed my bridge with their flock in tow. And nobody else. That is, until this week.
Sean went off to college last week, and his mom started up something called a Bed and Breakfast—two things I’ve never had in my entire life. People actually pay to sleep on a straw cot in the O’Malley’s peat-heated stone hovel and slurp down gruel on cold mornings.
I only know this because of the proposition Sean brought to me the day he went off to school. With no one to tend the flock, Miz O’Malley turned it into an “Experience” for her guests.
“Spend a day as a real shepherd!” the brochure said. Which meant strangers tramping across my bridge. But “enhancing their Experience,” as Miz O’Malley put it, with a belly-roar, sends them running, and keeps me in lamb and mutton.
THE END
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