The Gnomes

Is there a way to make this story anything other than interesting or high-concept? It certainly doesn't seem to be very literary, more post-modern, genre-less and deconstructed Frank R. Stockton-esque prose. Enjoy what I have of it.


This is a story about garden gnomes, about love, and about a yellow cravat that fastens with a dolphin brooch. I'm not sure it will make much sense. It didn't to me when it happened.
I used to be a contract killer, a wetworker. I guess this is the part when I'm supposed to say that I've done a lot of things I regret, and that I've changed. The truth is that I'm proud of everything that I've done, and I only quit because my body was slowly betraying me. It was only a matter of time before I wrenched my back and got left on a hill overlooking a Columbian mansion with only a Barrett M82 and a burner phone in the pouring rain, so I quit.
Respectable? Maybe. I live in a housing subdivision, surrounded by McMansions and pretentious CPAs. They send me information about the latest victims of their fascistic housing organization: forced repaint jobs, removed yard flags and window decorations brought down through the militaristic fist of a neighborhood. I've toppled wings of governments less domineering than these white-collar Stalins. The gated community offers peace and some normality, an ironic end to a strange life, so I put up with their shenanigans.
I first met Alexander Ozymandias "call me Oz" Bright on an April day that turned fudgesicles into war paint on the faces of the kids howling after the ice-cream trucks. I was trimming my own lawn with an electric weed-eater, liking the sweeping motion of my torso as I trimmed the grass to a velvety flattop. A convertible white Maserati GranTurismo MC growled into the driveway next to mine, top down. The glare hid the occupants from me, and then they got out. One of them was wearing a skirt the width of a weight belt and a blue top made of material only slightly more concealing than tinted Saran Wrap. She held my attention longer than her companion, a balding man wearing an open white shirt with some sort of gold Chinese brocade pattern and ripped jeans over stoner flip-flops. He shaded his face with a hand, and I saw that he was wearing round glasses, tinted blue.
"Lawnmower break?" He asked. The consort strutted to his side on wedge heels as tall as my hand.
"I like doing it this way." I said. He gave me a thoughtful look.
"In Asia they do it with scissors and a ruler."
"Enlightening." I revved the weed-eater.
"You live here?" He pointed at my house.
"Yes."
"Ah." He pulled the girl closer. What was she? Model? Prostitute? She couldn't have been less than fifteen years younger than him. Hell, me for that matter, and I'm five shy of forty.
"I'm Alexander Ozymandias Bright, but call me Oz." He walked across my freshly mown yard, hand outstretched, and I gritted my teeth. The reason I mow with a weedeater is to avoid tire tracks on my yard, and I didn't want his footprints in my grass. I killed the weedeater and slung it over my bare shoulder, shaking his hand.
"I'm Ward Maxwell."
He shot me a smile. "This a nice neighborhood?"
"Close enough." I examined him. He stood in my yard a moment longer.
"Well, I'll go check out my new pad." He said at last, slightly uncomfortable looking.
"Have fun." I watched him until he left my property, and then resumed weedeating.


I like precision. I always have. When I was nine I spent hours after school at my grandfather's sporting goods store, watching as he showed the rifles and pistols to the customers, liking how the metal parts clicked and slid against each other. The sound of someone racking a shotgun slug into the chamber sent a quiver down my spine; dozens of carefully fashioned metal parts working together in perfect unison to create a weapon of immense power.
I used to make paper airplanes in sheafs, throwing them and marking how far they went. I kept the best ones and destroyed the worst ones with the staple remover, pretending it was eating them. Each new design I would carefully fold making razor-edge folds with an old gift card. After three years I couldn't make them any better, so I boxed them up.
When I entered the Marine Corps their standards of rigid cleanliness I'd already kept since I was thirteen. While other marines got constantly pushed for not shining their boots, leaving out their laundry, not making the bed neatly, the drill sergeants struggled to find something wrong with my area. I pushed for attitude more often than other guys pushed for their mess kits. Silence was seen as a challenge.

The first garden gnome was of epic proportions. I didn't see Oz put it out, but there it sat in the middle of his manicured lawn. It must have been nearly three feet tall, a pot-bellied, boil-nosed monstrosity clad in a diarrhea-green jacket and wearing a pointed cap the chipped color of coagulating blood. It was so profoundly ugly that it must have been intentional. There wasn't another way to explain it.  It stood in the middle of the yard, clutching a hoe and sporting a grin that leaked psychopathy.
There was a knock on my door around nine a.m. I left my MP5 field stripped on the kitchen table and answered the door.
"Hey there, Ward," It was Luke Branson, the head of the Housing Committee. He was blond and broad, the kind of man who wore Armani and Versace to work and Nike and Reebok at home, without exception. He was wearing running shorts, an UnderArmor tank top and shoes so orange they seared my retinas and left a floating afterimage.
"Hello, Branson."
"Have you seen that thing in Alexander Bright's yard?"
"Yes."
He sighed and ran a hand through his fashionably messy hair. "I gotta tell you, man. That's causing housing values to plummet."
"It's a garden gnome, Branson. Give it a rest."
"Ward, come on. Come on, now." He somehow managed to roll his eyes and look condescendingly at me at the same time. "We need him to move that."
"It's his right to decorate."
"It's an affront to humanity," Branson said.
Part of me agreed, and part of me was viciously pleased that the die-cast lives of the suburbanites was being so straightforwardly mocked.
"So look, man. Could you talk to him?"
"Why don't you?"
"You're his neighbor, and I live around the corner. He might be more inclined to listen to you."