Wishing On A Leprechaun

A tattered cardboard box sits upside down in a large field, propped up on one end by a large stick. The box is spattered with green paint by a child's hand.

A young girl patiently waits in the bushes, staring at the box with a hopeful but haunted look. For her, this box was no ordinary box. It was magic. It was St. Patrick’s day, and this year she was fiercely determined to catch a leprechaun.

It was a tradition shared by her father. The first time she remembered doing it she was four. Her father sat her on his lap and told her the story of how he caught a leprechaun on St. Patrick’s Day as a boy. She remembered the impish grin on his face.

“You know, Melissa, if you catch a leprechaun on St. Patrick’s Day, they have to grant you one wish”.

“Just one wish daddy?”

“Yep. Just one.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I caught one when I was a boy.”

“What did you wish for?”

“I wished for a beautiful little girl named Melissa.” Then he hugged her tight and kissed the top of her head.

He always told her the story the night before St. Patrick’s Day, and every year they got up before dawn the next morning and built their leprechaun trap. Every year, the trap was slightly improved from the year before, as her father thought up new ways to fool the leprechaun.

Once the trap was made, Melissa and her father crept out the back door, climbed down the stone steps at the edge of the property that her father had run up and down as a boy, and snuck out to the field where they set their trap. Then they hid in the bushes where her father told her wonderful stories about his childhood until Melissa fell asleep. Then he brought her home and tucked her back into bed. They never caught a single leprechaun, but Melissa still believed.

This year was especially important. Her father wished for her, and Melissa knew that now she had to wish for him. But she had to catch a leprechaun first. This year, she couldn’t fall asleep.

Just after her birthday a few months before, a police officer came to her house. He spoke to her mother for a few moments quietly in the kitchen before coming into where Melissa was pretending to play in the living room.

“Sweetie, I need you to go get your shoes and jacket on. You and your mother need to come with me to do something very important, okay?”

She knew something was very wrong. Her mother cried hysterically as Melissa did as she was told and rode to the police station. The officer took Melissa’s mother, Nancy, away from her as she sat on the cold chairs pretending to accept the forced smiles of the other officers in the station. But all she remembered was hearing her mother cry. No matter how hard everyone tried to hide it, she knew why they were there.

Her father was dead, killed in a collision with a drunk driver on his way home from work that night. The accident had been really bad, his body was almost unrecognizable. Or at least, that’s what she was told when she asked if she could see him one last time.

The funeral passed by in a blur, and Melissa never shed a single tear. Her mother was lost in her own mixed-up world of sorrow. Melissa and her mother barely spoke. They had never been close and neither of them knew how to discuss their feelings with each other. Melissa was too young and Nancy was too broken.

Melissa always had a special bond with her father, and she got through each day by pretending he was away on a long business trip, due back any day. The holidays came so soon after the funeral that Melissa and Nancy missed them. But on St. Patrick’s Day, Melissa woke up missing her father more than ever before. She sat in his old chair, pretending he was holding her in his arms and she told herself the old familiar story of how he caught a leprechaun and wished for her.

Suddenly, she knew what had to be done.

Melissa tiptoed down to the basement to avoid disturbing her distraught mother, determined to make everything right again. She found an old box and brought it to the field. She set her trap and settled in the bushes to wait.

If she caught a leprechaun, she could wish for her father to come home. Just as he wished for her; she would wish for him and then everything would be okay. In her excitement, she forgot to put on a jacket and warm clothes. She was cold, but she was scared the leprechaun would get away if she left. She huddled in the bushes in pajamas and slippers in the snow, waiting on the leprechaun, and eventually fell asleep.

Nancy awoke a few hours later and vaguely noticed her daughter wasn’t there. Melissa tended to run off in the mornings, and she was fairly self-sufficient, so the tired mother didn’t worry at first. She had tried to give her daughter space to be alone since her father’s death. The doctors told her that Melissa needed to work through her grief on her own. But Melissa had left no signs of eating breakfast in the kitchen, and by lunchtime, Nancy started to get worried. Then she noticed that all of Melissa’s jackets were still hanging up in the coatroom and she panicked. It was too cold for the small girl to be out without a jacket. Nancy rushed outside frantically calling Melissa’s name, looking in all of the usual spots.

The calls briefly woke Melissa up. But she wanted to get back to dreaming about catching a leprechaun and seeing her father again. She ignored her mother as she quickly fell back to sleep. She couldn’t give up her hiding place anyway; if she didn’t catch a leprechaun this year then she knew she would never see her father again.

Nancy called the police and then the neighbors. Everyone was out in snow gear with flashlights looking for Melissa. They knew that a girl her size couldn’t possibly last long in the cold and the snow. By the time the sun came down, Nancy couldn’t do anything else; she had given up all hope. She sat at her kitchen table, staring off into space, fairy-like due to the toll the past few months had taken on her body.

As the sun went down, the decrease in temperature woke Melissa up again. She slept all day in the snow, but she still refused to budge. I don’t think I could get up if I wanted to, she thought, dreamily. She stared at the leprechaun trap in a daze, willing something to happen. She needed to catch a leprechaun and she was unable to accept the fact that it was never going to happen.

“Let me make you a cup of tea dear,” Marjorie from across the street offered. Nancy nodded vacantly.

Marjorie silently urged everyone to follow her into the kitchen, as some were taking a break from searching to warm up.

“At this point, um…” Marjorie’s husband started to speak but found he was unable to continue to say what everyone was thinking. If they found the girl now, it was likely she wouldn’t be alive any longer.

“Don’t be foolish!” Marjorie snapped. “We can’t give up now! You all warm up, have a cup of tea or something, and get back out there! That little girl needs us and she has to be somewhere! I’ll be out there myself in just a moment, I have to tend to Nancy.”

Then she turned to Ellie, an elderly neighbor. “It’s getting too cold for you to be out anymore, you stay here and try to keep that poor woman from giving up hope. We will find that girl!”

Everyone nodded, somewhat guiltily as they wearily pulled their gloves and hats back on and went out to look for the little girl some more.

Melissa began to cry, tears streaming down her face and turning to ice halfway, sobs alternating with shivers wracking her small body. And yet, as the night wore on she held onto the hope that she might still catch a leprechaun and get her father back. She refused to give up her hiding place, even though she knew people were looking for her. She still believed that she could catch a leprechaun and that it was her only chance of getting her father back.

It didn’t take long for the little girl to become overwhelmed by sleepiness again. She slipped into a deep sleep as the snow covered her small body and dozens of people called her name into the night sky surrounding her.

Melissa dreamt of her father. He held her in his arms, stroking her gently and rocking back and forth.

“Did I catch a leprechaun daddy? Is that why you’re here holding me?”

She didn’t remember catching a leprechaun or wishing to have her father back, yet here he was holding her close just like he used to. She didn’t know what else to think.

“Daddy?”

She turned her head to look up at him. He didn’t say anything, but Melissa saw he was crying as he held her closer.

“Why are you crying, Daddy? What’s wrong?” Still no response. “Daddy, why won’t you talk to me?”

Melissa began to panic. Suddenly she realized something wasn’t right. She was colder than she had ever been in her life, and her father was drifting away. She heard voices calling her name, lots of voices, but none of them belonged to her father.

“Daddy! Daddy, I don’t want to leave! Daddy, don’t leave! Don’t leave me, Daddy! I don’t want to go without you!”

Melissa panicked; kicking and screaming against the people who found her as they tried to pick her up and carry her home. The other voices got louder and Melissa heard her mother sobbing above them all. But Melissa’s father was no longer holding her. Suddenly she was wrapped in blankets in her mother’s arms instead. She drifted back into unconsciousness.

Melissa and Nancy sped towards the hospital in Marjorie’s car as quickly as they could, considering the massive downpour of snow. Marjorie’s husband, Dave, was driving, and he stole glances at the duo in the back seat hoping they weren’t too late. The little girl was barely breathing and half-frozen. Everyone had rushed to give up their scarves and jackets in the hopes that they would help the girl as she rushed to the hospital. Nobody wanted to admit it, but at that point, there was almost nothing they could do.

Nancy spent the entire ride to the hospital holding her daughter tightly, begging her to hold on.

“I can’t lose you, too. I need you to be strong for me, baby. Please, I need you to stay with me.”

Nancy tried everything she could to make her daughter fight to survive on that ride to the hospital. But it took too long. Just a little longer than Melissa was able to hold on. Her mother showed up at the doors of the hospital with the dead weight of her daughter in her arms and the look of a woman who lost everything.

The nurses and doctors could only look at her with the look of guarded sadness that those in the medical profession learn to portray. Marjorie and Dave tried to help, but they could never know what she was going through. Nancy knew that no one would ever go through what she had gone through and what she was going through now. Her only chance for happiness was Melissa and her father and they were both dead. Everyone she got close to died.

Someone brought her a cup of coffee. She stared at it in despair, realizing that she couldn’t cry. She knew what had happened, that her daughter was dead, but she couldn’t cry. After her husband’s death, there wasn’t a person in the world who could stop her from crying. But losing Melissa was different. It sent her over the edge; made her numb. She didn’t want to believe it. She couldn’t believe it. Eventually, the doctors, nurses and neighbors had other things to attend to.

After the funeral, Nancy started drinking, more and more every day. Friends and neighbors would stop in to see how she was doing but they didn’t know how to console her and make things better. She had lost everyone. She was alone in the world. None of her neighbors knew that she had lost her parents when she was just a small child and that Melissa’s father had been her knight in shining armor, rescuing her from a life of hell and bringing her into his world of happiness and sunshine.

They also didn’t know that she had been told she would never be able to have a child due to the abuse that had been inflicted upon her in some of her foster homes. Melissa had been a gift, a sweet wonderful gift that she never could have imagined receiving. Only Melissa’s father had known the truth about her past and how much Melissa meant to her.

All the neighbors saw was a woman who could not work her way past her grief. They saw her drown her feelings in alcohol, and after a while they couldn’t help but start to make judgments. These judgments and the fact that they all had their own lives to attend to, meant that they began to visit her less and less until eventually, no one came anymore.

Nancy didn’t mind.

The next year, on St. Patrick’s day, Nancy dreamt that her daughter had never died; that instead the little girl shared the story of the leprechaun with her and they went out to set a trap together.

“Mommy, come here! Come down to the basement! That’s where all the good traps are!”

Melissa led her mother down the stairs into the basement where they picked out a box together.

“No, Mommy, not that one! It’s too small! And we have to paint it green,” she said matter-of-factly. “That way the leprechaun won’t see it.”

Nancy painted the box green as per her daughter’s instructions.

“Come, Mommy, we have to hurry! We have to get the trap set up before the sun comes up!”

Nancy felt Melissa grab her hand as she led her back up the stairs and out to the backyard, through the forest and into the field where they had found her daughter’s body a year before.

Nancy set up the trap and sat in the bushes to wait, with a bottle of whiskey at her side. By evening, she had finished the bottle and felt cold and sleepy. She didn’t fight it as she drifted off into a slumber.

“Mommy? Mommy, it’s you!”

Melissa and her father stood side by side, holding hands.

“Mommy! We wished for you. We caught a leprechaun and we saw how sad you were, so we wished for you to join us. Mommy, please! Come stay with us.”

Nancy looked at her husband, who had tears in his eyes. She could hardly stand the sadness she saw in them.

“I’m sorry, I just wasn’t enough without you. And I can’t keep going alone. Can you forgive me?”

He nodded solemnly and held out his arms. It was all the invitation Nancy needed.

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