Snotch had been real after all.
Michael�s mood suddenly altered.
�With the new wardrobe it just feels like I�ve got lots of other new t�ings,� Michael excused, trying to keep his voice steady. The sorrow that he had felt at losing Snotch was replaced with a joy due to the proof that the little man existed.
The memory of that day fifteen years ago returned with a startling clarity.
Having been a widower for only three months Michael�s daily routine consisted of taking regular visits to Mrs O�Sullivan�s grave. He would haphazardly put together two sandwiches (usually lemon curd), wrap them in tin foil, make a flask of tea that always contained too much milk and take the number five up to St. Christopher�s cemetery.
Michael, never one for hobbies and such had been quite happy - as happy as the circumstances permitted him to be - to pass away the day on the western side of the cemetery closely shouldered by a group of fir trees, sitting on a bench metres away from his wife�s modest headstone. If only he would have had the money for a more elaborate headstone instead of having to settle for the cheapest one they had.
He remembered it like it was yesterday. His wife�s death by reason of the merciless claw of breast cancer and the funeral four days later was now no more than a haze - grief can do that, or so he was told - but this particularly day three months after his wife�s death he never thought would be extinguished from his memory bank no matter how elderly and decrepit his mind became. It had been a Wednesday, under clouds that merely threatened but did not produce. With the foiled package on his right lap and the flask of weak tea resting against the side of his left, he was again reminiscing about days past. He spent so much time in the past that he never considered that he had a future. That was until he heard the tiny, almost indistinguishable noise. It sounded like a cough, a sort of splutter but made by something that sounded smaller than a child. And that was when he saw him. Their eyes locked. Michael remembered the fairytales and before the small man could move he made a grab.
That had been fifteen years ago. His reactions, as slow as they may have been, had earned him company whenever he had required it from that day hence.
It had been on that day that Michael O�Sullivan had used his first of three wishes. Earlier, when he thought there was no proof of Snotch�s existence, he had been wrong. Family and close friends had asked him where he had got the money to replace the meek headstone with such an extravagant one consisting of four dazzlingly white angels. Michael had only shrugged and lied, informing the curious that he had won the lottery.
His third wish had now been used and he had a new bed to prove it. His second wish however, had been used but he hadn�t yet reaped the benefits of it. Why else would relatives suddenly get the urge to visit their strange Grandfather half way across the world?
The End
by Christopher G. Threlkeld