Odd Prompts: Come Home for Dinner

This is a flash piece, just something playing around the concept the prompt gave me.  

Come Home for Dinner

"I'm telling you, an elf was stalking me!"

I looked down at my brother. He was lying  at my feet, having covered himself in a heap of dead, dried up old brown leaves. I had been trying to find him for close to an hour. Mama had sent me to get him for dinner, after he didn't come when she hollered. It was rule number one: mama calls, you better show up. He'd be in for a switching, and that was if I didn't give him a piece of it before he even got back to face mama's wrath. I'd been walking around in our usual spots calling his name, starting to get a little worried I couldn't find him. That was, until I practically fell over him when I'd heard him sort of whisper yelling back in response as I shouted for him. I hadn't meant to step on his leg, but while I was trying to figure out where the heck he was, I'd walked into the leaves, and he was under them. He doubled up, popping up out of there like a jack box. Which made me yelp a little, then back up real quick.

I looked down at him in exasperation, "if an elf was stalking you, you'd never even hear it."

He looked up at me, still sitting on the ground, his blue eyes round and wide with fear. Something about the look on his face made the amusement leak out of me like balloon with a pinhole. He wasn't joking. He was honestly afraid, he really thought… I didn't know what he thought. He lifted one hand and pointed at the tree we were under.

"I tripped. When I got back up, I saw that."

I looked in the direction he was pointing, at the tree trunk, roughly head height to where he'd be if he'd been standing up all the way. There in the trunk, very deep, was an arrow. Sure enough, he really had been scared enough to just lay down and cover-up with leaves.

I walked over to take a closer look at this elf arrow. Right up until this very second, elves were something make-believe, something that we made up, to give a little spice to our plays in the woods. Sometimes we were cowboys and Indians, sometimes we were on the run from the cops having robbed a bank or such, and sometimes... I leaned forward until I could see the arrowhead clearly.

I turned around, a smirk on my face. "You big dummy. Get up here and look at this."

He looked around, paranoid, but then he got up, leaves hanging off of him and a couple of twigs stuck in his hair, he came over and looked at the arrow. The feathers the fletched it were bedraggled, and I didn't recognize what were they were from, other than 'white.' It was the gleaming silver of the arrowhead that I was pointing at.

"Does it look fresh to you?"

"Well, I don't know." He answered speaking very slowly. 

"No it does not, bark doesn't grow like that if something is just been stuck in it, it only bubbles up around like that when it's been in it for, I don't know, years!"

His shoulders went down as he heaved a huge sigh of relief. "So there's not an elf stalking me."

"Oh, you can still be scared," I told him, shaking my head. "Mama was calling you, and she sent me out, so you better be scared."

This didn't have quite the effect I was expecting it to, instead he grabbed the shaft of the arrow and tried to pull the arrow out of the tree.

"What are you doing?"

"Imma take it to mama, show her that I thought an elf was after me, she won't be mad. And then we can have evidence for the Guinness Book of World Records there was an elf here."

I felt my jaw drop open. I always known that my brother wasn't the smartest bulb on the tree, but this was new even for him. "There are no such thing as elves, they are made up, and this is from some hunter."

He may not be brainy, but my brother is strong, with a grunt and his feet braced against the tree, he almost fell over backwards with that arrow in his hand. Probably would have, if I hadn't been in his way, and kinda caught him. We both flailed around for a minute and then came up. him holding the arrow up triumphantly. 

"Look at that! it's glowin'."

I wasn't scared o' mama no more. As I stared at that thing with its unearthly blue light, I stopped worrying about whether or not we'd get home for dinner that night.

***

I was prompted this week by Fiona Grey, with “I’m telling you, that elf is stalking me!” and I prompted Kat Ross with "The man in the skull mask slowly held up his gun, and his other hand, empty. Then he dropped the gun…" 

Read the responses, and find out more about the Odd Prompts challenge, over at More Odds Than Ends. Join in, it's fun!