Archive for March, 2010
The Elves and the Barista
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Tune in this Friday for the Daily Cabal’s third anniversary extravaganza, featuring stories on a theme suggested in our reader contest.
The night before the closing, Melanie noticed that the papers referred to “the premises with all phenomena pertaining thereto.” It was late and she figured it was just one more bit of meaningless legalese–the shop was a bargain, a turnkey operation, fully stocked and with a loyal clientele.
And, for the first week, nothing unusual happened. Then she came in one morning to find a pot of breakfast special, half-empty and still hot. She had the guy from the security company come out, but the alarm system worked fine and none of the locks had been tampered with. His tone of voice didn’t say he didn’t believe her, exactly. She didn’t mention that she thought the milk and sugar station looked unusually tidy, sweetener packets all facing the same direction.
It escalated from there. She started showing up early so she could dump and wash the half-finished pot and figure out what random act of neatening had occurred overnight. Every time she put the key in the lock, she wondered if she might open the door to discover the overnight visitor. Whoever they were, their taste ran to darker, higher-octane blends and the level of organization increased with the caffeine level.
The final straw was when the mystery visitor discovered–and emptied–the jar of chocolate-covered espresso beans. They alphabetized the gadgets and sundries on the impulse-buy kiosks, from the Arabica beans to the Zanzibar spice tea. When she stepped out from behind the counter, she discovered they’d also triple-waxed the floors.
The security guy had pity on her broken ankle and gave her half off the closed-circuit TV system.
“Ach,” he said when they reviewed the tapes. “Infested with common wood elves. No way to get rid of ‘em. Not without,” his voice dropped ominously, “consequences.”
Melanie stared at the fuzzy video. They really were elves, the tips of their ears quivering from all the caffeine, their tiny fingers twitching to put things right.
She switched the coffee to half-caff , then decaf, taking the shop in an herbal tea and smoothie direction. She let the Enya and whalesong background music run overnight and wrote off the loss in chamomile mango (their new favorite) as cheaper than hiring human cleaning help.
The elves’ tidying mania mellowed. And if they built an occasional henge-thing on the counter out of plastic stirrers, it just added to the ambiance.
Footprints in the Fungus
Friday, March 19th, 2010
Author’s note: this story is dedicated to my friends Julie and Kirk and their daughter Matilda, because Matilda arrived in the world with a similar entourage, inspiring me to write this.
Though we live in the Internet Age, Sofia’s birth was announced in the usual way: a voice was heard crying the news from the sacred cave in Damascus (interrupting the congress of lovers in the condominium above); a woman fell down beside the holy well at Chartres (now a cathedral), saying, “She is come!”; and a spirit stood amid the burning lamps of the Pituk gompa’s altar in Tibet, waiting quietly until the monks understood, but since they know to watch for these signs, that didn’t take long.
Perhaps every mother feels—on a good day, for a brief moment—that her child is the Messiah. Only a few know for sure, and the news does not generally please them. Sofia’s parents, both professors at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” just looked confused when the angel Gabriel showed up while they were cooking dinner, alighting on the mushroom basket by the door, which never recovered.
“I’m positive I helped with conception,” pointed out her father Rafaelo. “And since we are—were?—atheists, I’m afraid God wasn’t on our minds at the time.”
“Yes yes yes,” Gabriel replied. “If you’ve glanced at your human race lately, you know the Divine does not to do anything the same way twice.”
Sofia’s mother, Catriona, looked down at her belly, where a bump the size of a small pecorino cheese liked to move about, first high, then low and off to the side: Sofia.
“At least that explains the animals, caro,” she said to her husband.
“Animals?” asked Gabriel sharply.
“They follow me around. Cats, dogs, pigeons, hawks, rats, foxes—any creature in the city. I walk to work and by the time I get there I look like a zoo on the move.”
“The odd thing is,” pointed out Rafaelo, “they never eat each other, not even when they disperse.”
“A sign of Universal Peace,” nodded Gabriel.
“That’s very nice, but someone has to clean up all the poop afterwards,” said Catriona.
“Ah! Not unlike having a baby, then,” said Gabriel. He groomed each wing with the air of one who has done his job. “Well! That wraps it up for now. Expect further communications as events warrant.”
“—But,” Catriona began, suddenly realizing how very many questions she had, yet too late, for Gabriel had ascended in golden state, leaving behind only fragments of wicker and footprints in the fungus.