My daughter asks me “How big is a leprechaun?” I do know the answer, having seen a few of them in their regalia, in the fields of ashen rye and all that, but I didn’t want to burst her rainbow-colored bubble.
It’s not the size of them that matters, it’s the smell. Living amidst the fungus has given the sprites an olfactory shield that only human pigs like myself can truffle out.
I used to give the little fellas a cursory nod as we trampled through the woods to pluck the full and fetid meat from the forest floor. This was, after fall, shared territory, but they are never happy. They are grumpy by nature, as are we. Not the mushrooms obviously, they like to be spread about porously. They enjoy the hunt and the tickle.
I have only had one conversation with a leprechaun and I found it to be a talking to that was akin to a lecture from a disgruntled squeaky matron.
Obviously I didn’t understand a word of the diatribe, but I gleaned the meaning. And I bowed and scraped the hovel from my boot, and left them in a shower of shillings. That didn’t make them any happier. Euros had not been invented yet. Gold was not mine. So, I deserved my comeuppance.
The curse that battered my back, in an old tongue I had no knowledge of, started to weigh heavy on my left shoulder years later, and only there. It is like a thorn stuck.
I get a mad burning itch underneath my skin and weirdly hear a squeak when reaching up to the cupboard. Or is it a laugh?
Leprechauns are big, I tell my daughter, but I can't see them anymore.
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