The Sorrow of Elves. Brian Bouldrey

      for Scott, Lynn, Cate, and Lily

      gelato, gelato, gelato, gelato.

      ONE

      Here Comes the Sun King

      First, all you can see is darkness. Then, with a blaze of blue fire, a face appears, like a sun in a black sky. It is our hero. His face is so bright in this flame, it makes the world behind him seem even darker than it was before he lit the stove.

      You know what a hero is. A hero does brave deeds. In the old stories, the hero does not want things to change. The hero wants things to go back to the way things were, the way they were in the good old days. Back in the good old days, it was easy to know what the good old days were. These days, it is hard to tell what the good old days look like until they are long gone, gone to a place where we can not go any more. A place where heroes saw the dentist twice a year, bathed weekly, fed the dog every day, and never, ever swore.

      These days, we do not always know what a hero looks like. Modest, they used to wear armor that covered all those muscles. They said nice things to ladies. These days, not only is it hard to see a hero for what he is, but it is hard to say what a lady is. You only use the word lady when a woman is a bad driver. “Lady, didn’t you see that stop sign?” Or you use the word lady when she is a … you know … lady of the night. “Lady” is a four-letter word. We don’t use the word “lady” sincerely, the way they used to. We say it with a bit of a smirk. Everybody, these days, has a smirk for a smile. Oh, for the old days, when ladies were ladies, when the hero was strong and never smirked or swore, when there was always beer in the fridge, when every day was a perfect magical summer day, and you had to brush flower petals off the dog, just to take him for a walk.

      But there are still heroes, and there are still good people, and bad people, and magic, and my job is to tell you about a man who believed in that place that was before, and wants to get back to that place. He is the hero of this story. But he does not look like the old heroes. It is my job to point out the heroes, and the ladies, and the magic, and the journey the hero makes, the quest, which every hero must take on, if he is to be a hero.

      Our hero is Walace Weiss. He is not big on armor or muscles. But you can tell that he is different because he chose to remove one of the l’s from his name, “Wallace” to “Walace,” in order to stand out from the rest of us. He may look like a normal person, but on the page, he is not normal.

      Walace looks like a squat turkey, the sort that stands in the road just waiting for a car to hit him. It doesn’t help that I present him here, for the first time, bending over a glowing blue gas ring with Cal. He looks even more like a fat bird as he tries not to burn his eyebrows as he takes an offered pipe from Cal, which may be short for California, or Caliban, or Calorie, depending on what Cal tells him from day to day.

      “It is too hot,” Cal tells Walace.

      “The pipe, or the fire?” Walace does not usually draw on such pipes. He finds it bad for the lungs.

      The pipe is not an ordinary pipe, made of corncob or walnut. It is a special pipe, made of clear, perfect glass. Glass is odd, you know. It is not a solid. It is always a liquid. If you have ever been to a very old church and looked at the stained glass pictures, you can see the glass sag into teardrops inside the leading. Cal’s pipe sags like this. But that is probably because of the heat of the gas ring.

      “Let it cool,” says Walace. Cal does not want to let it cool. If he could, he would sit at the gas ring all day and draw on the pipe. In fact, he leans in again. Then Walace says, “Your baseball cap is on fire.”

      Cal’s shoulders jerk, and he runs to and fro, saying that he is looking for a “fire distinguisher.” You will see that Cal uses the wrong word at times. But that makes Walace happy. Cal is like a jester to Walace. Do not trust that Cal says the right thing all the time. Walace pulls him to the kitchen sink and turns on the spigot.

      When Cal runs the cold water, it splashes like a brook over a dozen dirty plates and spoons and forks and pools with old food into half-empty cups. Neither of them has cleaned the kitchen in more than a week. It smells that way. There is a brief sizzle when the hat fire goes out. Walace says nothing.

      Cal knows what he is thinking. “You got yourself a regular drug attic, don’t you?”

      Cal is also Walace’s fix-it man. He fixes things around Walace’s large house. He even fixes things that Walace did not know needed fixing. Cal is not a hero; if he were in one of the old tales, he would be the trickster guy, the naughty half-brother who might do something nice for you, or might do something nice for your enemy. He can work magic on an engine, or a broken stove, or a dead car battery. With a car battery, Cal can turn cold medicine into a potion that makes our hero feel young, strong, and brave. Our hero is still silent. Cal says, “You don’t like me, do you?” Cal has said this often in the five weeks since he has moved into Walace’s house with many bedrooms.

      This time, after our hero turns off the stove and the kitchen is dark again, Walace says, “Of course I like you. You remind me of my Uncle Davis. I saw that when you had your face so close to the fire.

      “Uncle Davis loved cigars. He had a house on a lake, and I would visit him when I was a kid. He would get up very early, before the sun, the way we are up before the sun now. He would light his first cigar off the fire on the stove, and I would see his face in that light. I would see it the way I see your face in the light now. Then he would go to the bathroom. He would sit on the toilet and smoke the whole cigar and let the ash drop into the bowl between his legs. By the time he came out of the bathroom, he had something to talk to me about. He liked me because I was a smart boy. He would have a math problem or a word game for me to solve. The day before he died, he told me that there were only six big words in the dictionary that had no vowels. One was syzygy. It was my job to find the other five words. Then he died.”

      “How did he die?” Cal asks, putting scotch tape on the burnt bill of his hat so that the cloth does not curl up. It has the mascot of the local college team on it—a bull.

      “He did not see that the ashes from his cigar fell into his pubic hair and they caught on fire and he burned his house down.”

      Cal, who feels the effects of the pipe, laughs at this. “He