Category: Short Story

Posted on

How to Trap a Leprechaun, Part 1

Leprechaun-WallpapaerThe first leprechaun I remember was the pipe-smoking one on the Boston Celtics’ logo who could have been mistaken for Mr. Magoo had he not been smoking the aforementioned pipe and balancing a basketball on the tip of his finger. And shortly thereafter I was introduced to that loveable curmudgeon on the Lucky Charms box with the brilliant green hat and abnormally tiny hands. Of course neither one was guarding a pot of gold when I saw them, so I figured they had left their gold unprotected and I went on expeditions to find it. Um, yeah. The joys of being 14.

Leprechauns were fascinating to me because they had something I didn’t: magic. And I wanted to find their gold, but I wouldn’t have sniffed at catching one of them for my very own. Legend has it that a leprechaun who has gotten captured has to grant its captor any three wishes in exchange for letting him go. I knew just what I wanted to do with those three wishes too.

  1. Get the newest pair of Air Jordan’s
  2. Be the most popular kid in school
  3. Have unlimited free pizza

The last one was negotiable. Free macaroni and cheese would have been just as good, but the Air Jordan’s had to be the black ones, and if I wasn’t at least more popular than Stanley Knapp then #2 wouldn’t have been worth it either. But then again I knew that according to folklore the leprechaun would have to give me exactly what I wanted, so I wasn’t too worried about it turning out poorly. I just had to catch him first. Continue reading “How to Trap a Leprechaun, Part 1”

Posted on

Monsters

Shadowhunter_Springborg_Beast02There were monsters under my bed. And no, not the same monsters that other kids had, the fuzzy kind that looked like various flavors of Kool-Aid, or the ones that grunted in the middle of the night for the sole purpose of making kids wet their beds. Nor were they the personable monsters of Monsters, Inc. who had entire lives completely absent of their scaring occupations. These were abominable beasts who ate children for breakfast and lived under my bed every second of every day and night. They were subtle until they weren’t anymore, and there were dozens of them. I lived in fear for years, and no one would believe me.

They could write, too. I would find notes from them at all hours. On my well-made bed. Taped to my clothes hanging in the closet. In my underwear drawer right next to my freshly laundered white briefs. They were obscene, these notes, with made-up language and crudely drawn smiley faces, and they accomplished their purpose. When I would show them to my dad, though, he would simply laugh and attribute them to me, and to my well-honed imagination. Then I would burst into tears and run back to my room, leaving the door wide open. I never closed it.

I imagined they had names like Bob, Terry, and Jack. I even made up little dialogues between them as they sat there bored under my bed, waiting for me to start freaking out. Believe me, if I didn’t make up those conversations I would have gone certifiably insane. Maybe I did go insane despite my mechanisms. Continue reading “Monsters”

Posted on

Still

358966The old farmhouse shudders against the oncoming wind, frightened of even more damage that would settle a score it hadn’t known it owed. A whistling sound screams against its sides and squeezes through the cracks under the doors, more eerie than a little bit, precursor to the squall that will come after midnight, when the house is all tucked in and snoring comfortably. An old cocker spaniel lies on the mat by the kitchen door, ears cocked, ready to defend his family against whatever is making the horrible keening noise. Of course that noise is him, but he listens nonetheless, oblivious.

A fire crackles in the stone fireplace, warming the thick rug in the den as the sparks get perilously close. The young man of the house stoked it quite full before he turned in for the night, as is his nightly habit, meant to ward off the need to get up in the middle of the night to re-fill the behemoth. A patter on the roof would remind him of little feet running pell mell across its surface if he were awake to hear its drumming. It is night rain coming down slowly but surely, and it will soon multiply in frequency and in pressure, but for now it runs across like the lost child they have tried so hard to forget.

A solitary human soul is tortured in the face of the nearby onslaught. The years have not been kind to her. Her lined face and the deep creases around her eyes are testament to that, that and long nights without sleep. She fights against herself harder than the elements pound on the house she has called home for longer than she would care to admit. Her back is ramrod straight against the wall as she sits up in the bed she shares with a corpse. Continue reading “Still”

Posted on

Transient

to-homeless-grate2The harshness of the grate ground into his back, making it hard to draw in breath, but the hard chill in the air made it a necessary evil. His teeth still chattered in spite of himself, and in spite of the hot air billowing all around his clothes, emanating from the deep machinery underground that produced the hot, slick steam.

Sweat drenched the small of his back, but he dared not move for fear that someone else would take his position on the coldest night of the year. He opened his tired eyes to see two others of his ilk crouched low over the next grate over, trying to warm up their gloveless hands as if over a campfire. It had been years since he’d seen an actual campfire, but it still brought back memories.

He remembered his mother bent over the pile of already charred sticks left over from the campers who had passed through the night before they arrived, an occurrence she found fortuitous, her back hunched over from years of hard labor. Regardless, she was the epitome of grace to him, but even her memory was a bit faded at the edges she had been gone so long. Where her face used to be in his mind there was now a blur, not unlike when someone doesn’t want their identity known on a show of Cops. But he still recalled her movements, most as subtle as ash drifting low over the ground on a puff of air. She taught him how to be a man.

His back cried out to him for salvation, but it was better than being a frozen corpse, he reminded himself, so far removed from that boy he had been in the woods with his mother, so jaded by what the world had turned into while he had stopped looking. He wore a thick jacket that had been eaten in sections by the rats who often sought the refuge that his body heat provided, and he had long since let them shelter near, something that had seemed an abomination when it first started happening. But he postulated that it meant they felt comfortable with him, that he had somehow assimilated into the world that the rats inhabited, had become one with a nature that lived in harmony with the city that it too inhabited.

Another quick glance across the street at his two peers still warming their hands, but he could tell it wasn’t working, their faces trapped in looks of desperation, looks he knew all too well from more than ten years living and breathing the streets. Continue reading “Transient”

Posted on

In the Morning Hour

stock-footage-flock-of-birds-fly-around-dilapidated-barn-surrounded-in-golden-mistA mist hangs over the valley, sticking dew-like to the leaves on the old maple tree out behind the coffee-colored barn. Eerily it dominates the space as nothing else is stirring in the cool breeze that accompanies the overwhelming moisture. A gray house stands sentinel over the property, approximately 20 paces to the south of the old barn, with all of its shades closed, shutting out the muted morning light. Across the cobblestone road there is a rusted cistern that sits isolated from everything else, like a middle child who often gets forgotten in the hustle and bustle of family life. Water swirls around its basin in a clockwise fashion, indicating its position in the northern hemisphere, and its slow gurgle is the only sound that can be heard in the area.

In one of the small rooms upstairs in the gray house there are old-fashioned bunk beds, upon which lie two children, dead to the world. The younger one snores loudly in a syncopated rhythm from her perch in the top bunk, covers pulled up under her chin just as they had been when her mother tucked her in late the night before. She dreams classically of fluffy, white sheep sliding over and under a perfect picket fence in pursuit of one another, and there is a smile on her lips. Her older sister tosses and turns in her sleep, plagued by nightmares that luckily don’t impinge upon her waking hours, complements of an overactive imagination that serves her well at playtime. They share a bedroom out of necessity, but they are also best friends, a happy coincidence.

Outside the mist begins to clear, no longer obscuring the sun that has risen in the eastern sky, as it slides off against the backdrop of the multi-colored horizon. Continue reading “In the Morning Hour”

Posted on

Playing Games

tn-airport_gate-550x450-rd10A young boy sits in a hard plastic seat, head bowed, intent on the pixellated action on the GameBoy in his lap. He sits next to a woman who is obviously not his mother, in her faux fur coat with tan lining and her mini-skirt that is not at all weather-appropriate. She fidgets in her seat like you would expect from someone the boy’s age, but she’s easily three times as old. Perhaps she’s his older sister, or maybe even an aunt, but she’s paying him virtually no mind with her headphones on that blare an Eminem song on a high enough volume to disturb other travelers in nearby seats. The boy doesn’t even hear the music, so intent is he upon proving his dominance over the game on his lap. He wears corduroy pants, awkwardly hemmed as if done in haste, and an old, ratty sweatshirt proclaiming him a Philadelphia Eagles fan.

They are sitting outside of Gate A in the Newark Airport, two people adrift in the sea of chaos that is New Year’s Day, with so many people heading back home after a vacation of sorts that has come to a swift conclusion. Most are hungover even in the early afternoon, waiting for flights with cups of coffee in hands that need warming up. An old newspaper with yesterday’s date sits on the chair next to the boy, but it might as well be his companion for all the attention he gives to it. If he cared to look, however, he would realize the front page of the paper is all about him, but he doesn’t look, and the woman’s eyes are closed so she misses the implication as well. She seems lost in meditation but she is in actuality thinking about all the money she could get if she plays her cards right. Opening her eyes, she glances at the game the boy is playing, then turns her attention to her watch that tells her they have half an hour until their plane will begin boarding.

Time has never been her friend even from the start when she was born three weeks after her due date. She was also the fourth child out of six so there was never any time for her needs, for her wants, or for her in any other way, shape, or form. But she hadn’t spent much time lamenting her fate, instead choosing to use her endless time in planning the great escape. The boy next to her was her youngest brother, the sixth of six, and she had saved up to get him the GameBoy he is playing. It had been worth every single penny because he hadn’t asked a thing about what they were doing or where they were going. In fact, he had spoken only a single word since he had started playing the first game, a word that she won’t repeat and that she didn’t even know he had in his vocabulary.

He is not as oblivious as she thinks, however. Continue reading “Playing Games”