The case of the missing gnomes.
I don't know just where they went but I do know they get together for secret meetings.
In my front yard!
It was a craze that was way too slow to die. Everybody was putting gnomes in their gardens. Sometimes dozens of them!
This went on for a year or two when all of a sudden gnomes started getting stolen. At first, it was one or two every week or so then it turned into a full-blown case where a whole garden full of gnomes would go missing!
Was it just jealous neighbors destroying the local competition? Was it people selling them at the flea markets and garage sales?
Nobody could prove anything substantial. That was until the "Night of the Gnomes" as I called it.
We lived just out of town on a large block of land. Trying to grow some food and raise some chickens for our own fresh eggs. Organic food was just too expensive for us so we had to grow our own as much as possible.
It was late at night, maybe early morning when we were woken by the sounds of clinking and clanking. A lot of it too!
We all got up and raced out the front door to see hundreds of little flickering lights marching up our driveway. Sort of like cigarette lighter flames. As all this got closer we could start to distinguish little faces.
Little gnome faces!
What the heck?
We just stood there paralyzed in amazement. Were we all mad? Is this some sort of nightmare?
In the middle of our front yard was our main freshwater well which I had just recently decorated into a "wishing well" because the wife thought it was an eyesore.
They circled the well and started chanting. Three times they marched around that well then they threw their little flames into it and went off into the night.
We never saw them again. In fact, nobody but us ever saw that spectacle that night. So we all agreed to maybe stop talking about it. We were getting some funny looks and people started talking.
Then one night they came back! The exact same thing.
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Short Stories
Historia Corta"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story." -Ursula K. Le Guin An anthology of fictitious stories I have written and put together in one volume for your read...
