Tripping Through a Gnome's World
By Eric Farrell
Gertrude walks through her mushroom forest, the land fertilized by her late husband Roger’s remains. She’s secluded beneath the scrub of a remote gully, safe from the beating sunlight and the awful giants that domineer the planet.
Footsteps approach. Those from the very big people she’s sought to escape.
Evil, she senses, before turning to stone.
Prior to Roger passing away, the gnome couple had enjoyed a few good years guarding a stylish craftsman home in Long Beach, many miles away. The direct sunshine above their heads was relentless back then, hence the need for pointed hats.
As at all the other homes they’d been tasked to guard, they had just one motive in life: to guard against evil.
But oh, how arduous a task that can be.
Now she hears the whining of a combustion engine, the crunch of heavy feet on the dry earth just above the gully.
The giants nearly trample her. They tug up all the weeds shielding her mushrooms, and laugh at her rosy face and gentle frozen smile.
After Roger died, Gertrude knew she wanted to scatter his remains. The idea of keeping him in a jar seemed silly. Plus, Roger would want to make the world around him better. Ever since they’d first met in the frigid serenity of Switzerland two hundred years ago, he was the very definition of goodness. Of love. From one garden bed to the next, the couple’s stone servitude never relented, always standing in staunch opposition to the evil encroaching upon them and the giants who hired them.
The two could have lived for eternity, but a haphazard weedwhacker back in Long Beach took Roger from her. Gertrude saw the vapid giants sweep his crumbled remains up and walk him to the trash like he was just some inanimate object. But gnomes are far from that, and she reanimated when the humans left later that night and retrieved her husband’s remains.
The next day, she was swiftly donated to a secondhand store.
She stashed Roger’s remains and eagerly awaited the next freight transfer out of the thrifty. Eventually a truck arrived to whisk her and rest of the overstock to Reno. She jumped the truck bed on the first bump out of California, and found this dry desert gully, just scabbed land and crab grass most giants pass through without thought.
A terrible storm came that first night. Bolts of lightning crawled across the valley. She found high ground and, when the rain cleared, discovered fertile soil. The surge of water off the distant Sierras brought plenty of spores and seeds.
It only took a day to get seedlings to sprout once Gertrude scattered Roger’s ashes. A forest sprouted up, up, and up, surrounding her, gorgeous and ruby red.
By now, the giants have finished harvesting all of Gertrude’s mushrooms, leaving just a single red-capped specimen, the fruiting body closest to her.
That’s all these people seem good for. Take, take, take.
She thinks back to how giving Roger was his whole life. What he exuded was, in essence, goodness. The antithesis of the evil he and her fought so hard to protect against.
That latent evil in giants is what causes gnomes to turn to stone in the first place.
When the big people employed Gertrude, none of them, across multiple centuries, ever quite realized that they too were filled with the same evil they wanted her and Roger to stave off.
But if a gnome’s very existence is to guard against that evil, then Roger offering these mushrooms is the right thing to do. What good was in him is surely in this loamy soil too, and the shrooms he’s imbued himself within.
The giants retreat to their bonfire as the sun droops low on the horizon. One by one, they ingest the fungi. The last of the golden sunset blushes away, and stars in the eastern sky begin poking through.
Once their guard is down, Gertrude animates and scrambles up the side of the gully.
When the moon is right above their heads, the humans all begin acting the strangest way.
Before Gertrude’s very eyes, she sees the humans being kind to one another. Being good to one another. They listen during heated overtures, speak compassionately amidst contentious retorts, and reconcile after petty squabbles. On this evening, love resounds, despite the lifetimes of quarrel and contempt defining each giant’s nature.
And for the first time in her long life, Gertrude realizes she hasn’t turned to stone in their presence. Instead, they welcome her with open arms. Over the course of the night, they all become one, laughing and tripping through a gnome’s world.
Gertrude returns at dawn and finds the mushrooms have already begun growing back. She wonders if she’ll ever experience that connection with giants again, or if it will simply live on as a fleeting revery to those individuals. At the very least she witnessed something beyond the latent evil in the big people – the intrinsic love that fills them as well, waiting for the perfect moment to burst out.
She sighs, ready to sleep a good long time. After two hundred years spent in the garden beds or on the stoops of another species, guarding someone else’s home, she has finally found her home. Roger’s home. Their home.
Under the desert sky, just the faintest breeze rustles through the ever-growing forest, and she hears a whisper in her ear.
“I love you, dear.”
Eric Farrell lives in Long Beach, California, where he works as a beer sales rep by day, and speculative fiction author by night. His writing credits stem from a career in journalism, where he reported for a host of local and metro newspapers in the greater Los Angeles area. He posts on Twitter @stygianspace and has recent fiction with Aphotic Realm, Haven Spec, and HyphenPunk.