How NOT to Catch a Leprechaun

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Just like there’d once been vampires in the alleys, a living wage made in only forty hours a week. A god in heaven and a chicken roasting in every hearth. Once, but not always. Dragons were the last exhalation of belief, leaving this world. And the cough that came afterwards, the little scrap of upside-down breath that hiccupped when you thought you were plumb out…well that was Barry.

He was currently occupied trying to de-tangle his sneaker from the wreckage of a laser-sprung leprechaun trap he’d bought at a 7-11. His step-aunt had warned him about that. Said they were cheap and he should only buy weaponry at the government store, and why didn’t he eat his vegetables, and it wouldn’t hurt him to like one of her pictures now and then, on the socials. Ungrateful, is what she’d said.

But that was before he’d caught the leprechaun. No one in Reseda had ever snagged one. You saw them, sure, peeking through the sewer grates, or snoozing in the back of the sandwich display at the airport. The news said it was their fault. The droughts and the superstorms. The tornados and rising oceans. They were changing the climate, from a human ecosystem to one more suited for leprechauns. When that happened, they’d stop napping in still-warm stolen dryer socks and run rampant across the ruined cities of men. Probably.

Barry yanked at his shoelace, the cotton blackening with an acrid curl of smoke when it edged too close to one of the lasers still beaming out of the sprung trap. “Give it,” he hissed.

The leprechaun tugged on the other end of the shoelace, its eyes narrowed and wordless, but wordless in a way that clearly said, “No effing way, you little cheap-trapping punk.” He was strong for six inches tall. Heck, he’d be strong for six feet tall, but Barry wasn’t giving up.

People staked out the valley all the time for dragons, because scientists hadn’t marked them as officially extinct, just most likely very threatened and in need of further paperwork. A captured dragon would have bought him a gated estate with plenty of sky-acreage, a Mountain Dew fountain, and a Vespa. A leprechaun would buy twice as much, because it was harder to catch, on account of—

Barry made a grab, and the resulting zap zinged all the way down to his toes. Right, that.

The leprechaun laughed—a silent, pointy-eyebrowed laugh—and yanked the shoelace hard enough to give Barry a tiny rope burn. Barry growled.

A leprechaun would be enough to buy cheekbones.

Barry didn’t want cheekbone implants personally, but his step-aunt did, for her selfies on the socials. And he wanted, very much, to be adopted as her full nephew.

Barry had parents, of course. Two dads and a mom and an ex-Susan besides. Parents were boring. Everyone had those. But a full-aunt who would tip up her face to smile at him when he shuffled out on Sunday mornings? Who would let him sit next to her at the table instead of in the tiny chair just outside the laundry room?

For that, Barry would do a lot.

“Ah-ahhhh!” he shrieked as the leprechaun jerked Barry’s elbow into the beam of the laser trap. The smell of sizzling arm-flesh was almost as bad as the pain, but not quite as bad as the understanding that now the laser was officially “used” and he couldn’t return it using the receipt folded into precise thirds in his front pouch. “You little mutt, now I’m going to have to pay $12.99 for this piece of garbage,” he seethed at the leprechaun.

The leprechaun slapped him in the face.

This time, Barry yipped. The zzz-ZAP of leprechaun’s touch jazzed his brain so he dropped the fight with the leprechaun altogether and slumped forward, his wings crumpling tiredly against his back. The sneaker was a mess, all torn to shreds and with a half-burned shoelace. The laser trap was mostly intact, just the leprechaun’s foot stuck between a loose screw and the cavity where the laser tractor beam would have pulled it inside. That was the ironic part—it hadn’t even gotten properly caught by the cheap trap, not in a way that would allow him to bring it home to his step-aunt, who’d made him sleep in the laundry room again. No, the trap had just snagged the leprechaun’s foot on a piece that wasn’t quite made as it should have been.

Though Barry thought, given the state of the shoelace, that the evidence quite indicated that the 7-11 had saved a bit of cash by swapping out the tractor-beam laser that had been advertised for the more prosaic type of laser. The one used to slice bread, and to pre-cut cheese before it was fanned out with those little bits of waxed paper in between.

The change in laser made sense, as no one could grab a leprechaun, so there was little sense in building a real trap for one just so it could electrocute whoever tried to take it back out.

Except.

Barry’s perspective on “touching” was quite different than anyone else who’d tried to capture a leprechaun. First, because he didn’t have hands, he had claws. But second, because he’d been living with his step-aunt for twenty-eight months now and she hadn’t touched him once. He knew there were ways to get around the skin-on-skin contact that triggered the leprechaun allergy zap.

Barry bent over. The leprechaun’s pointy eyebrows pointed, his little mouth opened, and he shrieked soundlessly as he tried to rip his foot out of the screw.

And Barry swallowed him whole.

There weren’t always dragons in the valley, no. But when there were, someone was bound to get eaten.