In the Autumn of 2019 I found myself spending a few days far from home at a cheap, mostly empty hotel in Oregon. A few nights in and at a rather late hour, having put my children to sleep and left my husband to supervise their slumber while he watched first series reruns of The Mighty Boosh, I escaped down the uneven, slightly-too-steep stairs to the nearest snack vending machine. This is what passes for a night on the town sometimes when one is a parent.
Once I’d escaped the tyranny of my angelic, snoring offspring and my loving spouse, I found myself reluctant to return to them, so I perched myself on the humidity-damp carpet on the landing of the stairs overlooking the vending machine nook and popped open the first of two bags of Raisinettes. A few minutes and half a bag later, I heard a noise.
I was not dressed for company, despite sitting in a technically public place, so I hunkered back a little bit until I saw who was coming.
What came into view was an elderly creature roughly three-quarters my height and half my width–and I am neither tall nor wide. He had a needle-point nose on which perched a pair of wee silver-wired spectacles, his face was decorated with a confused and meandering beard, and on his long, narrow back he wore a huge and rounded knapsack. A wide assortment of objects hung off the outside of the knapsack–it shimmered and shone with a suggestion of treasure, although the only objects I could quickly identify were a frying pan and a penny whistle–clacking and clanging as he walked as if he were a particularly lazy and untalented one-man band. His movement and carriage belied any laziness, however, both being upright, easy, and bird-like. He hurried right past without giving me any notice and stood at the glass door, staring into the night.
I kept silent, wondering if my luck would hold. My pajamas weren’t particularly embarrassing, but I was wearing a pop band t-shirt and I really don’t like anyone but my husband knowing about that side of me. But the little man kept standing, staring.
“A storm is coming,” he said, cheerfully, “to test the mettle of the civilizations of humankind.”
I couldn’t tell whether or not he was speaking to me or to the benighted world in general until he turned and looked expectantly at me.
“Ah,” I said. “What kind of storm?”
He shrugged. “Prob’ly pestilence.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s too bad.”
He nodded, still cheerfully. “‘Tis,” he conceded. “I am prepared, however. I shall weather the coming crapstorm the same way I have survived all the other crapstorms.”
This piqued my interest. “What other crapstorms have you weathered?” I asked.
He put up a long finger with grey-edged fingernail. “One, that big thing that lumbered out of the woods that one time.”
“What color was it?” I interrupted.
“Brown and grey,” he said.
“Oh. That doesn’t help identification much does it?”
“No, it does not!” he said, as if he had been thinking this himself for years and was overjoyed to hear someone else voice it. “Was it bigfoot? Was it a bear? Was it a really fat wolf? I cannot say!”
I made a sympathetic face at him.
“Two,” he continued. “Hurricane Ekaterina. Three, the ocean. Four, the other ocean. Five, the other ocean. After that, I stopped going to oceans. They disagree with me. On every point.”
I nodded. “Sounds wise. I try to stay away from oceans myself.”
“Six, being left by my one true love.”
I had stopped listening so well at this point, trying to picture a creature that could be mistaken for either bigfoot or a really fat wolf, and at the mention of true love I really lost interest.
“Hey, what’s in the bag?” I asked, to redirect.
“Oh, that is my preparation for the crapstorm,” he said. “Would you like to see?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
He hefted the bag down to the floor with a truly amazing clatter and untied the top so I could peer in. I did the peering.
“There’s, like, three dozen Arby’s sandwiches in there,” I stated.
He nodded. “They have seen me through all the other crapstorms, and they shall not fail me now.”
“Hm,” I said, wondering how he’d got his hands on Arby’s sandwiches when whatever had happened with the oceans was happening.
He removed one of the sandwiches and ensconced himself with it, cross-legged on the dirty floor. I observed that his feet were living in grey-blue shoes with curled and pointed toes. Rather than looking magical, however, they just gave off the feel like maybe he was a bit too into renn faires, like he might actually have a gig juggling at one or such. I decided to look past this failing.
“Would you like to hear a story?” he asked, companionably.
“You know,” I said, “it’s a long time since a funny little man in some random place–no offense–“
“None taken.”
“–asked me that. Yes, as a matter of fact, I would like to hear a story. Would you like a Raisinette?”
“‘Twould!” he chirped, and received three. “Would you like a sandwich?”
“Thank you, I would not.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Hey, this story isn’t going to be about the true love thing, is it?” I asked via raisin-garbled speech. “‘Cause I gotta admit I am not as interested in that as a person might be.”
He shook his head, his mouth full of the meats, then swallowed to allow speech. “I would not dream of telling that story in a place like this. That is a tale woven of a fine silver thread against a ground of deepest night, and only beside a fire of lilac wood in the dead of a silent void would I venture to speak it.”
” ‘kay, as long as.”
“No, my story begins much differently than it ends.”
“Oh, that’s a change of pace,” I commented.
“It is the story of my first day of high school.”
I stopped chewing. “You went to high school?” I asked.
“How do you think I became so visibly learned?” he asked, pointing at the spectacles.
I considered this as I resumed chewing and, myself, did some swallowing. “It’s not that I thought you weren’t learned, it’s just that I assumed you were some kind of mythical creature or something, and I wouldn’t think either learnedness or unlearnedness really comes into it for those.”
“Yes, I do get that. But I assure you that I am flesh and blood, as mortal practically as yourself. I am, in fact, a simple professor of poetry.”
“Oooooh,” I said, the last five minutes of my life suddenly making much more sense. “Gotcha. That makes the last five minutes of my life make much more sense.”
He nodded like he thoroughly understood.
“Hey, I bet I could throw this Raisinette and get it in your mouth,” I said, realizing that as a professor of poetry he might actually be game in a way that wasn’t creepy.
“Is there another Raisinette in it for me?”
“There will be,” I promised.
“Attempt away,” he answered.
I threw the raisin-and-chocolate missile at his mouth, missed, and hit him in the spectacles.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” he commented, picking up the Raisinette off the absolutely filth-infested carpet and popping it unconcernedly into his mouth.
“Don’t I know it.”
“Do you?”
“I do.”
“Glad to hear it. Would you like to hear my story now?”
“Is it perchance a tale of woe?”
“Not particularly,” he said wadding up the paper wrapper from his sandwich.
“You said it was a story of high school, so I just assumed.”
“No, not a tale of woe. It is a tale of carnival.”
“Carnival?”
“Yes,” he said leaning forward and looking excitedly over the top of his spectacle rims. “At my high school the first day of each year terminated in a small carnival. Oh, the delight of it! The lights, the popcorn, the darts! We threw darts at anything back then, since ’twas the beforetimes when no one feared the darts properly. Mostly at balloons, but high spirits, you know.”
I did not know, having never thrown darts at anything but dart boards and balloons, but I did not say so.
“I was a very popular young man–“
“You were?”
“Oh, yes. Even then the power of my words was formidable and drew the admiration of my peers. Also, I was a star basketball player and–if I do say so myself–a brilliant prankster, which didn’t hurt.”
I tried to imagine the level of prowess one would have to possess to become a star basketball player at under five feet tall. He must have been prodigious, either at basketball then or at lying now. Or possibly both, I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
“My sophomore year, the carnival was projected to be even more spectacular than usual. The PTA was in the midst of a virulent internal feud over rock music–“
“How long ago did you say this was?”
“I did not,” he said with dignity.
I shrugged.
“As I said, a virulent internal feud over rock music. The pro-rock music contingent of the PTA–motivated by spite–hired a Guns and Roses cover band to perform at the carnival without the knowledge of the anti-rock music contingent, but the money could not be refunded and the anti- camp was outvoted, so the engagement stood. You understand,” he said, in explanatory tone, “that this was a very small town far from anything interesting, the kind of town in which I might become a star basketball player–“
“Aaaaah,” I said, the light dawning.
“Yes,” he nodded. “A cover band of a cover band of John Denver would have been a welcome diversion, so a one-degree-removed cover band of not John Denver was a delight the like of which we could only know if we drove two hours, and for that one needed access to a car and money for gas, and who could afford such things when there was toilet paper that had to be bought to festoon rival team members’ homes? We were a small town,” he said, as an aside, “but we had many and intense rivalries.”
“The kids gotta have something to do,” I said sagely. “Better than drugs.”
“Better than drugs,” he repeated thoughtfully, nodding. “Yes. Bitter and malicious rivalry on the basis of arbitrary divisions was, in fact, our anti-drug.”
“Work with what you got.” I took my own advice and wheedled the last Raisinette out of the bottom of the bag.
“The first day of school dawned rosy and wholesome,” he continued. “The day passed idyllically and the carnival delighted young and old, freshmen and seniors. But the great event–the cover band performance–was still to come. The stage had been set–both literally and metaphorically–all the students had convened before it, prepared to rock out. And then, it happened.”
I gasped. “What happened?”
He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “The performance, of course. ‘Twas magnificent.” He swung one of his fingers back and forth in the air and hummed a snatch of song, which I assume was a bit of a Guns and Roses song, although I wouldn’t actually know.
“Oh,” I said.
“It was held at the gingerbread house in the woods,” he beamed. “On a stage primarily of sugar cookie construction. That was another controversy, because one contingent was adamant that only snickerdoodle would do if it was to perform any weight-bearing of significance, but then the shop teacher–“
“Now, hold up a second, ’cause I coulda sworn you told me earlier that you were mortal–“
” ‘Practically as mortal as you,’ was the sense of my words, I think.”
“Yeah, I noticed that discrepancy, but I rounded down when it came to the mortality vs. immortality thing, ’cause that seemed most reasonable. But now we’re talking about using cookies to build stages.”
He unwrapped another Arby’s sandwich and demurely took a nibble off it. “People build things out of cookies,” he said.
“Well,” I commented, crumpling up my Raisinette bag, “inevitably with these conversations, in my experience, there comes a point when I have to walk away or risk actually going insane, and it seems we have arrived at that juncture.”
My companion nodded. “I can appreciate that.”
I put out my hand, and he shook it cordially.
“Lovely to meet you,” he said.
“Mutual.”
“Remember,” he leaned closer, clutching my hand to his chest, closer and longer than I preferred, and looking into my eyes with an intensity that made we wonder if this was how it was all going to end, “the coming pestilence. Get yourself some sandwiches,” he admonished.
I tried on a few responses to that, found none that was entirely honest, and settled on simply nodding.
Although, I admit I did start going to Arby’s more often.
Elf in the Pudding 