My seventeenth Patty's Day

It was mine to have, that day, when so little else was.  Small American town, my little life, untransplanted for the next few months before my family packed up to move yet again.  And so I marked it as such. I found a little book full of modern Irish stories in the Barnes & Nobles on Veteran’s Parkway (our silly excuse for a highway), and bought a delicious bottled drink from the Paneras across the  street.  The weather was enjoying my strange mood: the beautiful sunshine completely bamboozled the marble grey cloud cover, tricking physics by lighting up every crevice though I couldn’t easily find the break in the cloud cover.  And the day had a weird, in-the-moment electricity about it.  I could feel a buzz in the air.
The day was even more my own because my family decided to abscond to Godknowswhere—I’m sure my younger brothers just found some friends to play with and mom was meeting a friend at the foofoo country club in our neighborhood—and I had the house to myself.  So I curled up in my room and read my stories and gulped my pink juice.  I got maybe three-fourths of the way through the novelette, navigating my way through monsters and demons and leprechauns and all, but fell asleep in spite of myself.  I think the milk-and-fruitjuice-and-corned-beef mixture musta cooked a little in my stomach, though, cause boy did I ever wake up to a strange place.

Well sure, it was still my yellow plain Jane bedroom.  That wasn’t different.  None of the structures around me had changed physically at all—everything was just different.  Different like all that electric possibility had built up and finally exploded.  The colors were sizzling with their vibrancy, and I had an urge to jump up and down and shout or something.  Skipping downstairs into the living room, I looked out the front window and Jesucristo, the little tree was glowing young neon green!  It only added to the oddness that the outdoors was brighter than it had been all day, though by this point it was seven or eight in the evening, and the rain was lightly sprinkling again.  Beaded drops added sparkle to everything.  And then, a flash of lightning. 

Drawing close to the window, god, the lightning was just suspended up there!  Even with the weird atmosphere it was a hard thing to see; I can’t imagine the roiling plasma of a lightning bolt being content to just sit there confined against its mercurial nature.  My ruminations on the lightning’s state of mind were sadly interrupted, however, when a new visual phenomena presented itself to my very confused eyes.  Little green dots, traversing the line, bobbing with happy rhythm, lining the scary white-yellow.  And then the lightning was stretching itself toward me through space (or were the spatial dimensions collapsing?)  and the dots became specks and the specks became blobs and the blobs were…

Leprechauns.

Lucky Charms got something right after all.

To be continued... after author gets some needed rest.