Don’t Eat the Beans - free short stories

Buddy Wilson had been a bean farmer in a small eastern Georgia town for most of his life. Unfortunately, he was barely making ends meet with his crop earnings. There was just not much demand for beans in the marketplace. It was springtime again and Buddy had gotten his seed crop prepared for this year’s planting. He was examining the planter beans p close one day to see if they were of good quality when one of the beans in the burlap sacks caught his eye. It was a clear bean with a glowing blue center and was radically different from all of the other beans in appearance. While pushing the beans about in the sack it got lost among all of the normal beans. He quickly dug through them until he located the strange glowing bean. It was a weird bean, the likes of which the old farmer had never seen before in his life. Buddy decided to plant the strange glowing bean in a special spot away from the rest of his crop so he could monitor its growth. He dug a small furrow near his house and dropped the bean into the hole. Covering it over with dirt, Buddy then watered it well. He continued with his normal planting and almost forgot about the strange clear and blue glowing bean. After oniy a couple of weeks the bean had sprouted from the earth and grown rapidly. In ffict, none of his normal crop was anywhere near as fast growing as the special bean was. Comparing the plant with the rest of his crop, Buddy estimated its growth rate to be that of twenty times a normal bean. A few thys later it sprouted pods of hundreds of beans. The crop from the one special plant was twenty times that of any of his norntl bean plants. All of the new beans had the same odd appearance of being clear with a blue glowing center. “Wow, these beans grow at twenty times the standard rate and produce twenty times the crop. But, it won’t do me any good unless they taste just good as normal beans do,” Buddy reasoned to himself He took a small handful of the beans into his house to have his wife cook them up as a sample for dinner. She did her best with a light seasoning and the beans came out great. They were twice as tasty as any of the normal beans were she had ever cooked for him. The next thy, Buddy collected all of the gb-beans, as he decided to call them, and planted a special field separate from the rest of his bean crop. As he was riding on his tractor, he noticed he had some internal gas buildup from the gb-beans, but beans had always given him gas and he did not pay much attention to it. After he had gotten all of the beans planted, he had an area about the size of a small backyard garden covered. He watered the beans and treated them as he had done with the original gb-bean. Three weeks later he had a gigantic crop of the tasty gb-beans. This time, Buddy decided to replant the entire crop and make enough to sell for a possible profit. He had never worked so hard during the growing season in his life. He collected the entire precious crop from the plants and immediately replanted them in several of his largest fields. Shortly thereafter, those, in turn, produced a gargantuan crop. The sight of the field was quite spectacular at night. They appeared to be blue Christmas lights strung throughout his property. Buddy decided to market the beans himself under the label ‘Buddy’s GbBeans’. His wife helped him cook and can all of the beans thy and night until they had finished. It took them weeks to complete the entire crop. Buddy sold the beans to all of the local grocery stores and even got a small contract with a larger chain store. He made quite a lot of money off of the deal and planned on growing only gb-beans in subsequent years following his great success. Unfortunately, the gb-beans also gave off twenty times the gas levels of normal beans as they passed through the consumer’s intestines. Many people were ending up in the hospital after ingesting large amounts of the new beans. A few of the customers even had their guts burst from all of the pressure. Almost as quickly as Buddy had gained his new fortune, he began to be sued for not putting warning labels on the cans. All of the money It had made by selling the beans was lost to the defending of the suits against him. The new business of gb-beans was over before it really began to take off Buddy had to eventually claim bankruptcy from all of his bad fortune. After it was all over, I decided to go into another, less thngerous, line of work than bean farming.