A small smile graced her cherubic face and she stared at me with that spaced out expression in her big Stepfordian eyes. But I could tell she wasn’t sweet. There was nothing cheerful or kind or compassionate about her, in spite of her colorful attire and red little u-shaped mouth. She was pure evil, an odious succubus from the foul pits of Temptation, Hades.

“Get out of my study!” I demanded, watching her rock back and forth, swinging the basket of flowers in her chubby, peach-colored arms. “DID YOU HEAR ME?!”

She spoke not a single word, but I could read her grill all the same, and her face said, “C’mon, ya fuckin’ burnout! Bring it on! I’ve tangled with your type before and I always come out triumphant! Let’s see how tough you are.”

That was all I needed to hear. I picked her up in my mighty left hand and held her at eye level, offering her the creepiest, most serious face I could muster.

“Look,” I said in the hushest yet deepest tone I could manage. “It would only take one block of concrete to send you crashing into oblivion. Is that what you really want?”

“Surely, you jest,” her eyes seemed to reply. “A geek like you capable of smashing me into a fine dust? You’d just as soon crack yourself on the cement.”

I could hear her cackling from the depths of her wooden soul. So I laughed too, just to jargoggle her a little bit, throw her off guard.

“Well,” I chortled. “I think it’s high time I snuff you in the skull! Ha! Ha!”

Now she wasn’t laughing anymore. She didn’t make any sound at all. I had silenced her, alright. I could see sadness leaking out of her paintjob, some kind of solemn secret radiating from her acrylic blue eyeballs.

“You’re crying,” I said. “Why?”

“Simple,” I thought I heard her say. “I was coming to ask your hand in marriage.”

If I didn’t look like some befuddled manchild before, I surely did now. My jaw literally ached from dropping open so fast.

“Come again?”

“I came to elope,” she said. “The stories of your adventures have traveled far and wide in the gnome community.”

“Yeah, but then why would you want any part of me, you superfreak?”

“I heard one such story yesterday, on the eve of my wedding to Leon The Lawn Jockey. Grandfather related the story to me. He said, ‘Lula, you remember Uncle Patrick?’ Naturally, I did. ‘Well, he fell ill a couple of years ago and you know how these mean people are. They’ll keep you on their front lawn long after your paint has chipped away and you’ve grown spores on your boots.

‘But once upon a time, a brave young man came along with a bushy case of bed head. And he took your great uncle in the middle of the night…the way a songbird or an angel might. And he took your uncle, frail and sickly as he was, and jumped into a getaway car. Nearly got caught by the sadistic bastards who live in this castle. When the coast was clear and the master and his wife had lost sight of him, this Spartan defender of garden gnomes took your uncle and threw him out of a moving car, severing his head and letting his body crumble into a million tiny shards.’”

I continued to look confused. Surely, the murder of one’s uncle wouldn’t turn someone on, even an inanimate someone with a pointy hat. But she recalled this story with a grand degree of love in her words.

“Don’t you see?” she exclaimed. “You put him out of his misery!”

“Oh…so? That doesn’t mean I’m gonna marry a seven inch tall lawn ornament. Imagine what my neighbors would say!”

“Very well,” she said with more than a smidgeon of disappointment in her voice.

“Then sell my tiny body to K-Mart and use the money to buy yourself a prostitute of reasonable stature.”

The moral of this story: Where’s there’s a gnome, there’s a good time. Respect your lawn ornaments.