Goblins, ghouls, and little creatures that make funny noises and skitter around at night: they’re all real, I saw one once. He was a little green guy, about two-and-a-half-feet-tall, wearing a child-sized Dallas Cowboys onesie, a pair of cheap star-shaped sunglasses, and he was smoking a gas-station cigar that smelled like my grandfather’s fingernails.
He smiled at me. His nose was longer than his cigar, and his teeth looked like someone had stuffed his mouth full with a bunch of broken saltines. His ears were long and curved like scimitars, and his black hair was shiny like all those guys I’d seen in The Godfather when I’d watched it with my dad. Around his neck was a gold chain that went down to his waist.
He gave me the middle finger and flicked cigar ashes onto my shoes before disappearing through a sewer grate.
I saw him again one time, at a convenience store ripping open a 12 pack of canned beers he hadn’t paid for. I just watched and drank my soda; watched as he pried open each and every can, and dumped the contents onto the floor. He would then crumple the empty cans into discs, and eat them like rice cakes, and once he’d finished the cans he ate the cardboard.
I glanced back at the store clerk, who seemed blind to the whole ordeal.
Once the little Goblin or Ghoul was finished with the box, he excitedly made for the door, but slipped in a puddle of beer and crashed into the wall.
He let out a scream that nearly made my ears bleed, and a long green tongue lashed out from his mouth like an angry snake. When he popped up from the floor his nose was missing.
I tripped, and this happened, he said, holding his nose like an unripe banana in one hand, Fix it?
I didn’t move, but in an instant, he was standing in front of me, and he wrapped my fingers around the length of his nose, moving my hand to his face, and sticking it right back where it had come from.
Thanks! He said, and he grabbed a bag of yogurt-covered raisins from the shelf and threw them at me. I caught them, and before I realized neither of us had paid for them or could pay for them he was gone, and all I was left with was the ringing of the bell above the door.
I saw him again in my house.
My dad had just called me to go and help rake up the wet leaves that had gathered like a damp carpet in our yard, and I reluctantly threw open my closet door for my jacket.
I wasn’t surprised to see him sitting there in the dark, this time wearing a child-sized Adidas tracksuit and gambler’s sunglasses that hid his eyes. In his hands he held an empty paper plate. Don’t say anything, he said, I was just sitting here eating a large collection of black spiders and bugs. I asked him to leave, and he made like he was about to scream, but instead he lowered his head and shamefully shuffled out of the room.
Once he left I saw that he’d left a three-dollar-bill on my desk, and later that day I told my dad I’d found it on the sidewalk, but he told me it wasn’t real and someone just thought they were being funny.
I didn’t see him for years after that, not until I had a yard of my own.
I was lost in my own world, my senses dulled by the earmuffs I had donned as I piloted my John Deere lawn mower around my stretch of grass backing up to the nearby woods. At first I thought he was a squirrel, and I was about to swerve when I saw a familiar green face that froze my foot. The last I saw of him was his tiny body wrapped in a plastic Red Sox poncho, strangling a garter snake. Then the lawnmower lurched forward and there was the sound of a knife on steel, and I leapt from the machine in a panic only to see it trailing a glowing green goop that I tracked back to a writhing mass. I buried the little ghoul, and had a cry over him, and a beer. I even nibbled at the can in his honor, though I felt like a fucking idiot for it.