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Always Invite The Gnome
by Sara Genge
The garden gnome couldn't sleep. The thumpa-thumpa coming from the neighbour's house made the windows vibrate. Albert turned on his side and stuffed the tip of his red cap into his ear. Nothing. He could still hear the sound of people having fun without him.
Why hadn't he been invited? He was a nice gnome, polite and respectful. He mostly kept to himself, sitting on that tuft of moss in the back yard. He hardly ever crept up on anybody using magic and it had been a whole month since the last time he'd spied on the neighbour while she was dressing.
Albert dressed and went out to the garden. The grass didn't tease him about not being invited to the party. The lawn could be sarcastic, but for once, it kept quiet. That almost made it worse; he must be pitiful if even the grass had decided to put on its tact gloves for him.
The lawn transmitted minute vibrations originating a couple yards away. A party goer must be trespassing. The nerve! He'd show 'em!
Albert tiptoed closer to the source of the grassy disturbance. A figure silhouetted against the moon, murmuring under its breath. There was a shovel in its hand.
"Ehem" Albert coughed . The creature jumped and turned around, clutching a sack.
"I won't give it to you!," shouted the leprechaun.
Leprechauns always thought you were after their stash of gold and they were capable of anything to protect it.
"This is private property," said Albert. His eyes widened; he had an idea. It was evil and twisted. It was perfect.
Without hesitation, he reached for the leprechaun's stash and chucked it over the wall into the neighbour's yard.
"You! You!," shouted the enraged leprechaun. The creature darted off, tearing through the brick divider as if it were styrofoam and crashing the party with, well, a crash.
From the other side of the wall, came shouts and the sound of broken glass. A symphony of havoc. Albert smiled. He'd sleep well tonight.
We Are Siamese If You Don't Please
by Sara Genge
"Ooooh prettty," the leprechaun sighed. The garden gnome hushed him
and reasserted his grip on the leprechaun's arm. The bar was noisy,
there was a chance Pandora hadn't heard but if the other one kept this
up someone was bound to notice.
The tie of invisibility was knotted around both their necks. As long
as they stayed bound together nobody could see them. Albert felt like
the smart sibling of a pair of Siamese twins, being dragged around by the
leprechaun. It had been the leprechaun's idea to come to the bar to
stare up girls' minis and the gnome had agreed thanks to a few glasses
of whisky. Besides, there had to be some advantage to being a
foot tall.
Albert was terrified of being caught. It wasn't like him to go off on
some undignified panty quest and the leprechaun gave new meaning to
the term ADHD. Disaster was imminent and the gnome wished he were
outta here, preferably with his reputation intact.
"Preeety." The leprechaun looked blatantly up Pandora's legs. The girl
took a step back and stared at the floor in their general direction.
For a second, Albert wondered whether she could see them, but her
pupils scanned the space in front of them without focusing and the
gnome relaxed.
Pandora's confused look turned into a smile that made the gnome feel
like ice-cubes clinking down his back. She opened her purse and
extracted a pearl, twirled it around her fingers and tossed it on the
floor.
The leprechaun gasped and the pearl erupted into a lily, which
blossomed and morphed into a white rose.
"Oh!" The leprechaun shouted and leaped off, yanking the tie away from
Albert and leaving him exposed.
"Sorry Miss." The gnome blushed, tipped his red cap at her and ran.
Three blocks away, he turned around to look. All that was left of the
bar was a mushroom cloud, red with white dots on the top, a typical
Amanita. From where he was, he could still hear Pandora's mad cackle.
Changeling
by Sara Genge
The changeling girl held a bazooka out of the window of the house and waited for the leprechaun to try to steal her stash. Leprechauns were the only beings in magical creation too dense to understand that fairy gold wasn't real, just glamorized bits of leaves and dust, and they spent half their time trying to steal it and then wondering why it disappeared the next day.
Last night the leprechaun had made a dash for her gold Barbie doll. Sharon bit her lip. She'd had it. It might not be a real gold gold Barbie, but it was her gold Barbie and nobody was going to take it away from her. Just let them try.
Her arms hurt from pulling back the string of the sling that she'd glamorized to look like a bazooka. She wondered if the stones would hurt more if she changed it into a missile, but realized that they probably wouldn't. Her only hope was that the sight would scare the leprechaun off and that he wouldn't dare come back. Keeping this farce up was too stressful and Sharon had nobody to help her.
Nobody understood her. Life was hard on a changeling fairy trying to fit in among humans. She wondered how her human mother would react if she ever found out, and the bazooka trembled in her hand.
"Mom, Dad, you guys don't know it, but I'm adopted. Your real child is in fairyland being forced to work for their bread or something." Didn't sound right.
Frustration welled inside and she wanted to cry. Why me? She thought. Why my Barbie doll?
"Sharon? Come down to dinner, darling. Now." The girl hesitated. Nobody cared about her. Why should she even bother going down to dinner? Why should she bother eating? Why not just waste away and leave a pretty corpse? She bit back her tears.
"Honey?" her mother was climbing the stairs. "Honey, I want you downstairs right now. Don't make me come up and get you."
The changeling dropped the bazooka, grabbed the Barbie and hid it under her clothes. Then she put on her best slouch, opened the door and went downstairs to join Humanity
Gnomenapping
by Sara Genge
The old garden gnome didn't know where his captors were taking him. Albert sniffed, hoping to get a telltale whiff that would tell him his relative position to the concrete factory in Bellview, but the cloth sack he was in buffered smells.
Clever.
He guessed it was 00.45. Albert was sure they'd nabbed him around midnight as he slept under Aunt Martha's shrubs. The memory made him shudder. He was getting old; nobody ever crept up on him when he was younger.
The door opened, and something heavy was dumped to his right. He heard a chink.
"Be careful Rob!," a female voice whispered. "Nobody's gonna pay ransom if they're broken."
The man grunted and closed the door. Should he try to escape? The girl's tone had convinced him that he was dealing with lunatics, but the mention of ransom suggested that he might be better off sitting tight. No, who was he kidding? Aunt Martha didn't have money.
The garden gnome was on his own.
Albert gnawed on the cloth and managed a hole, which he picked apart with his fingers. Then he took the tip of his stiff red cap and used it to enlarge the opening. Soon, he wriggled out.
The van was full of sacks. He touched one and felt the shape of garden gnome inside.
"Don't worry buddy, I'll get you out," he whispered. The other gnome didn't answer.
"Don't worry, we'll find a way to escape. Do you hear me?" Silence. Albert worked fast, worried that his comrade was in shock. He almost lost a molar but he got the knot loose and dragged out the unconscious gnome.
No pulse! He started CPR, took a second to remember that he needed to tilt the guy's head and did so. He heard a chink.
"Shit!" He started tapping the gnome's body. The guy sounded hollow.
"He's dead," the gnome whimpered, "I've administered CPR to a dead gnome."
He worked frantically on the other sacks and pulled out one lifeless body after another. What kind of sick person stole dead gnomes? And why had they taken him?
Confused and trembling, Albert lined up his companions on the far side of the van. The lock was way too high for him to reach. There was no way out. The bodies standing to attention stared at him silently and chilled him to the bone.