"Dude, don't do this. You're gonna get cursed or something. You don't wanna mess around with a duende. They're fucking dangerous," my friend Amy said seriously as I filled my pack with what few supplies I would need for the evening. a few stencils, a multi-tool, some spray paint, and a few other things I would need for my art final.
"They're also not fucking real. Fucking duendes, of all things," I answered her plainly. Amy was my best friend, but she was also a big believer in the paranormal. I could deal with her talk about Bigfoot, and aliens, but her recent obsession was the duende. It was the dumbest possible thing to believe in. Gnomes, pointy-hatted garden gnomes, the kind right out of a storybook or an old woman's garden. She had shown me dozens of grainy, shaky, 144p videos of duende sightings. Supposed proof of the existence of little forest spirits living in Latin America. And for whatever reason, my friend Amy believed that one lived here, in our little American flyover state suburb.
"I told you, I saw it! For reals!" Amy said with genuine concern in her voice. She often saw unbelievable things. To date she had seen two sasquatches, a thunderbird, a flatwoods alien, and now, a duende. "I saw the pointy hat, and she walked right through a wall! I'm not joking! She was like two feet tall!" she said, tugging at my sleeve to try and sell her genuine concern for my safety.
"It was probably just a raccoon you saw. I'm going to go to that house and prove that nothing lives there," I said to her with a roll of my eyes. Amy wasn't lying to me. She genuinely believed that these things existed. It was probably stupid for me to indulge her even to this extent, but she was my best friend, and I had to try and get her to see the light about her stupid conspiracy theories. It was all she ever wanted to talk about, and it was starting to drive me crazy. "You can come with me if you want. You know I'm mostly just going so I can get some pictures of the abandoned house for my art final," I said to her as I threw a couple of bottles of water in my pack.
"No way. You go, but don't come crying to me when you get cursed. Duendes are fickle as fuck, dude. If I were you, I'd at least bring a good gift to appease it... I hear that they like booze." Amy said as she crossed her arms, apparently disapproving of my nonchalant attitude towards evil South American garden gnomes.
***
An hour later I found myself standing in front of the supposed lair of the duende. It was a long abandoned two-story house that sat at the somewhat forested western edge of town. Graffiti covered the entirety of the outside, and every window had long since been smashed out. It had once been a respectable family home, now reduced to crumbling walls and mossy floors that stank of mildew and black rot. A den that not even a hobo would eagerly choose. The scariest thing that I was likely to see inside was a skunk, or maybe a rat... possibly the odd used condom. I got my camera ready, double checked that it was recording, and headed into the inky black interior of the abandoned domicile.
The inside was as one might expect of a long abandoned suburban home. The walls were covered in graffiti, and the floor was littered with years of detritus. Old pens, spent firecrackers, broken bottles, and a thousand other items cluttered up the floors in an unavoidable mess that crunched under my sneakers. I made sure to get a few good shots of the entryway as I made my way inside. "Anybody home?!" I called out, not wanting to surprise any vagrants that might have been sheltering here, though it seemed like the place hadn't been lived in in quite some time. I slowly made my way through the bottom floor, making sure to make myself known as I scoped out the derelict rooms.
"Any duendes in here? duendes are like, super dumb and stuff!" I called out as I climbed up to the second floor of the house. Mostly this was just for my friend Amy. I had to do everything that I could to disprove her ridiculous belief in Mexican gnomes, or whatever the hell a duende was actually supposed to be. As I came to the first room on the second story, my firmly held disbelief was suddenly shaken. Someone had set up what looked to be a miniature home on the second floor of the abandoned house. A collection of roughly hewn wooden furniture made up a small living room, and someone had hung dried flowers along the walls in an obvious attempt to liven up the crumbling space. In stark contrast to the wreck that was the first floor, the second floor seemed rather comfy... save for the fact that everything was miniature. There was a tiny table, a tiny couch, tiny chairs, and more. An entire tiny apartment, tactfully arranged among the half-ruined floors of the crumbling home. "What in the hell..." I said softly as I wondered who had set up the tiny furniture, and for what purpose.
"Hey! Don't you know that it's rude to come into someone's house without asking!?" a shrill, heavily accented voice called from directly behind me as I stared the tiny furniture around me. I nearly dropped my camera as I spun around. I turned, only to find that there was no one there. What was worse, however, was that the staircase that I had just climbed was gone. Only half-rotted floorboards remained where the stairs had just been. My mind panicked blindly for a second and my eyes darted around as I searched for the staircase that should have been just feet behind me. It was impossible, but it was completely gone.
"Hey! I'm talking to you!" the high, feminine voice said once again from behind me. Again I spun around, this time to find that there was a very small woman sitting on the tiny couch in the middle of the room. An impossibly small woman. My heart beat hard at the scare of her sudden appearance, but it softened a bit as I realized that she was no more than three feet tall. Uncannily small. Tiny, even for someone with dwarfism, and with no visible deformities.
"No fucking way..." I said in disbelief as I stared, mouth agape, at the tiny woman. A stare that only deepened when I spotted the tufted tail that stuck out from under her dress.
The tiny woman stared daggers at me as she looked me up and down with big, bright yellow eyes. She seemed to appraise me like one would judge an opponent before a fight. "Pinche humana! You think it's alright to just stomp into my fucking house with those big, stupid, tacky ass Wal-Mart shoes!? You fucked up, Pendejo," she said as she got to her feet and gave me a proper look at her form.
The woman stood under three feet tall, and her frame seemed sort of squashed to compensate. Her head was big, and her eyes even bigger. Her skin was dusky, like toasted vanilla, and smooth. Her hair was long, straight, and inky black. It hung like flowing silk over her shoulders. Despite her short stature, her hips were wide, flared, and her chest was rather full. She wore an obviously handmade dress that clung to her curves... and a pointed red hat that seemed intentionally folded to one side. I hated to admit it, but she was the spitting image of the creature that Amy had said that she had seen, right down to the tatty dress. She couldn't really be a duende though, right? Yet even as I stared at her, I found it harder and harder to deny. Pointed ears stuck out from beneath her silky hair, and that tufted tail was impossible to ignore. Even the conical red hat, folded over as it was, was accurate. Either I was going crazy, or I had come face to face with a gnome right out of a storybook. Well, a storybook written in a barrio of East L.A.
"What!? Whatchu looking at, Puta!?" the tiny, very confrontational girl said as she raised one tiny hand and snapped her fingers. In an instant I found myself on the floor, lying flat on my back. I'm not even sure how she did it, but the girl floored me with a simple gesture. It didn't even hurt. One moment I was standing, and in the blink of an eye I was flat on my back on the dusty wood floor.
I was still reeling from the surreality of the situation as I tried to sit up. Not only did it seem that fucking keebler elves were real, but I had apparently pissed one off... and she spoke like some ghetto chola. I tried to speak, but whatever I had wanted to say got lost in my befuddled brain. What came out was a stupid line from one of the Duende videos Amy had shown me. "La Creatura... la Duende," I said, my voice just a hair above silence.
"What the fuck did you just call me!?" the girl said in boisterous fury as she walked over and leaned over my face. Her admittedly pretty face was twisted in obvious and overt fury, and I could feel her anger radiating down onto me. Her hoop earrings and heavy breasts hung just above my face, swaying with her angry hand motions. For such a tiny thing, she really was quite stacked. Her heavy breasts strained at the coarse cloth of her tight dress as she proceeded to berate me. "Cuz I KNOW that your dumb ass did not just call me a fucking duende. My family is from Iceland, Puta. I'm Huldufolk. You can call me a pixie, a fairy, a brownie, a gnome, a elf, or whatever, but don't call me a fucking duende. I ain't no dirty jungle monkey, you got that? Pendejo!?" she asked in a very thick Latino accent. She sounded like she had come fresh off of the streets of Los Angeles.
She snapped her fingers again, and I found myself suddenly dangling upside down from the ceiling. My feet were seemingly anchored to the chipped plaster of the ceiling. Despite my half hearted efforts, I found that I could not move them even an inch. Hanging from the ceiling, I was almost eye to eye with the thick little Latina gremlin.
"Sorry. My mistake," I said carefully, not wanting to upset her further. Despite what common sense told me, it seemed that I was in the presence of a very disagreeable, and very magical little woman. Even as the dusky-skinned gnome glared at me, I tried to remember all of the stupid stuff that Amy told me about these things. I knew that they were fickle, and hated having their stuff touched. I thought that I remembered that some are kinda good? maybe? and I knew that they liked gifts, especially expensive ones. "What should I call you?" I asked the little fey, trying to steer the conversation away from myself and her anger.
The Elf sucked her teeth and looked away from me in annoyance, almost like she wanted me to try and fight with her, and was disappointed that I was trying to be nice. Her long bangs were straight-cut and hid her eyebrows, but I could still tell that her expression softened just a bit. "Ugh, people call me Dimes, I guess," she said, voice tinged with annoyance, but lacking the anger it previously held.
"Well, Dimes, I'm sorry for disturbing your home," I said to her honestly. "I mostly came here to take some pictures of the abandoned house. Never knew anyone was living here."
"fuckin, whatever... I guess it's o.k. I am pretty new in town, so I can't expect everyone to know about me just yet. I'll forgive you, as long as you brought me a good gift," she said as she snapped her fingers and vanished in a puff of glittery smoke. In a moment she reappeared, sitting on the edge of her table. Her long, straight, black hair cascaded down her back and spilled over the sides of the table. She fixed me with a suddenly excited grin. "No one in town has brought me any gifts yet, so I hope you got something good."
"Gift, right..." I said as I realized that I really didn't have much to offer the little delinquent gnome. I had some water in my pack, my phone, a few bucks in my wallet, but I wasn't sure that any of that was going to be enough to appease the little goblin.
"You know, the last person who disturbed my home ended up as a Squirrel. Pretty sure I saw a big hawk carrying her off the other day," Dimes said as she leaned back and gave me a playful, if catlike, smile. She seems more amicable than she did a minute ago, but the threat was more than clear. I needed to find some kind of gift that I could use to make the little chola duende happy... or else end up cursed, or worse.
"Alright. I don't have much to give, but I do have this