When I started my senior year of high school, my parents told me that I could have any graduation present I wanted if I got all A’s that last year. I said that I wanted to go on a backpacking trip across Ireland.
Well, I got all A’s; I made sure of that, and I got accepted at a good university. On graduation day, my parents presented me with the plane tickets to Ireland, and off I went.
God, but Ireland is a beautiful place! I hiked all over, enjoying the people, the scenery, the ale and the music. Sometimes I slept in picturesque little inns, and sometimes I slept in the fields. Sometimes I slept in the cottages of farmers and was their guest for a meal or two.
It was almost the end of summer, and I was gradually making my way back towards Dublin when I passed through a particularly wild area on the west coast. I was sitting on a stone wall eating a sandwich when I was approached by an old man. He and I chatted for awhile, and then he said, “Now, me laddie, and don’t you be goin’ into yonder glen. It’s full up of the little people.” And then he leaned close and whispered, “Leprechauns!”
This was just too much: an old geezer with an almost incomprehensible brogue warning me about leprechauns! It was all I could do to keep from laughing. But I promised the old man that I would be careful, and then I turned off the road to follow a footpath to “yonder glen.”
It was a beautiful valley with a stream flowing through it, mostly meadowland, but with a small copse at one end. I hiked down to the stream and sat on a rock to rest. And after a few minutes of sitting quietly, I saw them! The leprechauns!
They’re not nearly as big as they are depicted in most drawings. They’re only about three inches tall, about the size of a big praying mantis. In fact, when I got a close look, I saw that they were not people at all, but insects. Their little green coats were wing cases.
Yet they were incredibly human-like. Their faces, aside from being slightly bug-eyed, looked like human faces. But most amazing of all, they could talk!
They were very friendly. They clustered around me, and one little fellow stood on my knee, bowed deeply, and said, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye.” The others all repeated this greeting, over and over. They said other things, too, in their high, chirring voices, that I wasn’t able to catch. Since then, I have spent hours pondering the encounter, and I now believe that “Top o’ the morning’ to ye” is all they actually say. But at the time, I had a sense of a buzzing conversation going on all around me that I would be able to understand if I could only listen hard enough.
I talked to them, telling them who I was, and they laughed and jumped up and down, clapping their peculiar little hands together. They chattered away, with me straining to understand them. Then they all lined up and started dancing up the hill, gesturing for me to follow them.
They led me to a dry, grassy spot on a gentle slope, and then they sat down in a circle around me. It seemed to me that they wanted me to sit, too, so I did. Then they all jumped up and began to dance in their circle. As they danced, they sang incomprehensible songs in their high little voices. Some of them made musical sounds like fiddles and pipes. They created an eerie and beautiful music.
A glorious smell rose up around me. It’s hard to describe, but this was like the smell of a northern forest in autumn, of lichens on hot rocks, and the sweet odor of fog, all combined.
I don’t know what happened next. I was too excited to have just fallen asleep, and yet, that’s what I must have done. Perhaps I was drugged by their smell. But I woke up early in the morning, just at sunrise, soaking wet with dew and covered with mosquito bites. There was no sign of the leprechauns.
A week later I was in the airport in Dublin, waiting for my flight to be called. An old man walked by me, glanced at me, and then did a double-take. He looked me up and down with a disapproving frown, and said, “You’re after spendin’ the night with the little people.” He walked off quickly before I could say anything. I wondered what he had seen on me.
The mosquito bites had pretty much faded by then, and I looked more or less like I always did, except that my complexion was acting up a little. I had had bad acne when I was in my early teens, and once in awhile it would flare up, especially if I ate a lot of greasy food.
After I returned home, the acne continued to worsen. My face was covered with blackheads, white heads, boils, all kinds of zits. It was the worst it had been since I was fifteen. “Your metabolism is out of kilter from all your traveling,” Mother said. All I wanted was for it to clear up before I went off to college.
The day before I left for college, I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom, grimly surveying my face. I knew better than to squeeze zits, but I was so damn frustrated! The medications hadn’t been helping at all.
I hooked my fingernails around the biggest zit, the one in the middle of my forehead. I squeezed, and the pus flew out, splattering against the mirror. But it wasn’t all pus. There was something dark on my fingernail, and it was moving. Appalled, I looked closer. It was a leprechaun! A tiny leprechaun, only about a quarter of an inch long. It waved its little arm at me. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye!” it cried. Then it hopped off my finger and skittered away.
The little bastards had laid their eggs in me.
Afterward I sprayed the whole bathroom with Raid and hoped I got them all.