The Peacock 480

"You say you had an apple tree?" say I, more to prolong the conversation than actual curiosity.

"Yes, I did have an apple tree", says Sheila.  "Golden apples.  The only tree of its kind.  Do you remember those apples, Glen?"

"That tree was quite the mystery", he says.

"There was some rather strange phenomena about that tree", Sheila says, "So one day I summoned a psychic to give the thing a reading  He said it was from Atlantis."

"Do you still believe that?" says Glen.

"I don't know", she says.  "I didn't know then, and I still don't know.  But it was a very strange tree.  I featured it in a series of water colours over the years, then one day, my last painting of it, I took real artistic license and painted a young high priest and high priestess, decked in white robes, with a sword and a dove that had been sacrificed and a chalice.  Without having ever seen the painting this psychic, and he was really a very ordinary man, an English teacher at a private college, but he saw in a vision exactly what I had painted.  Then he told me that the tree was the last of a race of such trees from Atlantis, that the tree was cursed, and that the house was in great danger.  Well, less than four months after, just following nine eleven, when the twin towers fell in New York, the entire house burned to the ground.  Oh, and one other detail that I have never shared, by the way.  The fire came from the tree in the back yard, and destroyed both the tree and the house.  I saw it all happen there in the back yard.  Only the cat and I survived...