Pot of Cold

Pot of Cold
By Scott Wilson
Word Count: 342

“If you follow these instructions, detail by detail, I guarantee you will find a pot, at the end of the rainbow.”

“I thought that once you caught a leprechaun, that was it, he had to give you the gold?”

“No, no, no,” the leprechaun said. “Everybody knows how much leprechaun’s drink. It’s not that hard to catch us outside the pub and night of the week. If that was it, we’d all be too bloody poor, wouldn’t we.”

Jimmy looked at the five-page list of instruction of how to find the end of the rainbow and the location of the pot of gold. He scratched his head and carelessly loosened the grip on the drunken leprechaun. The leprechaun wiggled from Jimmy’s grasp and staggered away.

“Hey, don’t you go anywhere until I’ve got your gold.”

Jimmy easily caught the leprechaun as he stumbled into the bushes on the side of the road.

“I can’t take you there,” the leprechaun said, burping into Jimmy’s face. “It’s a magical safeguard. A leprechaun’s pot of gold will not appear unless he or a person of his choice performs the rituals by himself.”

Jimmy shoved the leprechaun into his esky and began following the instructions on the pages. The writing was smudged and slurred as much as the leprechaun did in his drunken state. It took the remainder of the day to carry out the detailed instructions and reach the end of the rainbow.

“You little ripper,” Jimmy said, seeing the large, black pot filled with gold pieces.

It began to fade as Jimmy walked closer to it, finally disappearing when he reached where it should be. He opened the esky and found the leprechaun frozen to death with a scrunched up piece of paper in his hand.

“You fool,” the paper read. “It’s bloody freezing in here. The gold dies if the leprechaun dies. You have killed me and lost your fortune.”

THE END