SS Say Hello To My Little Friend (v5.0) Read online

  “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but he disappeared long before you came into the bar. If he really was with you.”

  “He was,” WBB said. “Tell her.”

  The little guy shrugged one imprisoned shoulder. The movement looked like it hurt. “It’s my only talent. It’s all I can do. I trained it. Because people always looked at me with pity. I’m short and I’m ugly and you wouldn’t believe the jokes.”

  “So you turned the table on your friend?” I asked. “A man who was going to help you? You played a trick on him?”

  “He promised he wouldn’t,” WBB said. “He promised he’d stay visible.”

  “I did!” The little guy said.

  “To me,” WBB said. “And only me. The man who believed in him. I figured once someone talked to him, she’d want to go out with him. I used to think he was clever.”

  The little guy tried to wipe his nose but WBB held him fast.

  “I believed in him,” WBB said, and dropped him.

  The little guy bounced in the pool of his own blood.

  “Fucking bastard,” WBB said, and left.

  And of course, I never saw him again.

  ***

  His little friend, on the other hand, haunts my bar like an out-of-work Rumplestiltskin. I think he makes his living by winning bar bets.

  Like “betcha I can’t appear and reappear.” Like “I can make a piña colada vanish without even touching it.” Like “I bet a handsome man like you can’t get a woman to give me a second glance.”

  I let him stay. He’s a curiosity. Now that they’re used to him, the regulars place bets right alongside his. The entire place is getting rich.

  Except me.

  Because there’s a part of me that still wants the fairy tale. You know, you help the gorgeous guy, and even though you’re a plain Cinder Ella, he sees through the grime and makes you his princess.

  But WBB hasn’t come back. I haven’t even gotten enough courage to ask his little friend for WBB’s real name.

  I know real life is not a fairy tale.

  But I also know that tiny men who look like Rumplestiltskin can’t disappear at will.

  And yet this one does.

  Somehow that’s not quite enough to overcome my belief in the way the world really works.

  You see, I own a bar. I know that people never change their orientation. And WBB, for all his willingness to help his little friend, was oriented toward beautiful—or at least pretty.

  And no matter how nice I was, and how much I was willing to help him, and how much his pride made him come back to talk to me, to explain he really wasn’t crazy, I knew he wasn’t going home with me.

  I knew he was never going to invite me to spend time with his little friend.

  “Say Hello To My Little Friend,” first published in Imaginary Friends, edited by John Marco and Martin H. Greenberg, Daw Books, 2008.