Weeping Willows

A haunting tale set in Louisiana. A young couple tries to outlast another couple and survive a haunted mansion to win a honeymoon in Hawaii. Angela peeked out the window. “They’re beautiful. What are they?”
“Beautiful and deadly if ingested.” Kevin stressed. “Oleander bushes.”
Angela glanced out the window again. “They sure bloom beautiful flowers. It's hard to think something so pretty could be so deadly.”
“Yes, their beauty is deceptive, like a woman.”
When I was a little girl, Daddy was in the process of building my mother a home on an Angie, Louisiana red cliff. I remember standing on the edge and looking down into what was an abyss to me. Of course, I was small so perhaps that cliff wasn't as high as it appeared and the gulley may not have been as deep. This story was born out of that experience and the use of my writer's imagination. Daddy sold the house in Angie before he finished it and moved us to another part of Louisiana so Mom could be near her people. He knew he wouldn't be around much longer. We lost him when I was four on Christmas Day, so I have only my early childhood memories of Angie, Louisiana, which neighbored Bogalusa, Louisiana, and a paper mill we could smell when the wind blew. When the wind blew just right, we could still smell it all those miles away in our new Louisiana home. This is a contemporary short story set in Louisiana.