The closet door banged open. “Well,” he said triumphantly. He then had to pause and catch his breath; he’d just chased his quarry off of a busy city street, into a skyscraper, and up five floors of stairs after all. “I’ve found…what?”
His speech skidded to a stop. The little figure that stood grimly before him defied all his expectations. Completely taken aback, he blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You’re not wearing green!”
“No,” said the little man, “I’m not. You humans got it all wrong from the get-go, didn’t you. Let’s get this over with, why don’t we? Yes, I am wearing a red jacket, not a green one, and no, I am not sitting on a toadstool. As it so happens I’m allergic. Now, as you’ve gone to the trouble of hunting me to ground in this lovely little building here I suppose you’ll be wanting something. Well, you’re half right. I don’t have a pot of gold and there’s no rainbow, but I can give you three wishes. Will that satisfy you?”
“Sure,” the man said. “Uh, my name's-”
“And why do you think I care?” the leprechaun said. “Just make your wishes and be done with it.”
“Oh,” the man said. “Well. Okay. My first wish, um, is for a million dollars.”
“Fine,” the leprechaun said. “You’ve got it. It’s in your bank account right now.”
The man started to smile. Then he realized that the leprechaun wasn’t done talking. “Also, you should know that a deposit of that size, especially coming quite literally out of nowhere, triggered some sort of alert in your bank’s computer system. I understand the Internal Revenue Service has already been notified and has dispatched a whole team of agents. They’ll be here any minute.”
“But… you can’t! I didn’t wish for that!”
The leprechaun shrugged. “That’s consequences, my lad. You get those whether you wish for them or not.”
The man, terrified, broke and ran, tearing off and away into the stairwell. The leprechaun sniffed, and closed the closet door. “That’ll teach you to interrupt my mid-morning nap.”
The fact that it was late afternoon heading towards evening was a subject neither the leprechaun, nor anybody else, thought worth mentioning.
This story inspired by the below prompt from
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