� 2001-2006 by Shiloh
�
blankThirteenth installment of the Faraway Tree adventure.
"No wonder her Muse refused to visit! Did you see how smoky her creative house was?" demanded one elf as the team the secretary of the Creative Dusting Service had sent out hours earlier returned to the company offices finally.
"I bet you she's burnt the midnight oil one too many times, or has been trying to crank out as many creative works as she can!" he concluded darkly. "Poor Zoë! She left because she was overworked! There should be a union for Muses."
"And all that dust!" said a second elf with distaste, clearly entertaining visions of a very thick layer of dust and grime coating every conceivable surface. She shuddered. "I couldn't believe she's never cleaned her house before!"
"Not to mention the cobwebs and burned-out bulbs in the lamps," added a third elf.
"Or the clutter and mess everywhere!" chimed in a fourth. "Thank goodness we're magical and relatively small, or it would have taken us days to just organize her place! Let alone clean it!"
"She sure left it till the last minute, hoping we could have it done so she could decorate for the Chinese New Year," noted a fifth.
The team plunked their buckets loaded with cleaners, rags and other supplies, along with their mops and brooms down on the floor or against the reception room's wall. Tired and worn out they collapsed into the chairs or onto the sofa arranged in a way that allowed for easy conversation amongst clients or elves waiting for job interviews.
The reception area was small by most business standards--it was a cleaning service, after all, where its employees traveled to clients' creative homes, so there was no need for a bigger waiting area. The walls were painted a nice harvest peach, and along the wall to the right of the door (frosted with the company's logo) hung three watercolor land or seascapes. Area rugs in peach, rust, green and a sea green covered the light wood paneled floor. Several feet from the conversational grouping was the reception desk with a counter made of the same light wood as the floor. A closed door marked "Private" was two feet to the right from the reception counter. This, of course, led to the inner office and the offices of the owner and business manager.
"I don't think she had ever realized she has a creative house," mused the third elf. "Not many humans are aware they have them and need to keep them clean. She was, after all, quite surprised that our company actually exists and isn't merely a gimmick."
As he reminded his comrades of this the door used by employees only opened and out walked Cornelius Pinchhammer, the owner of Creative Dusting Service. He was a round, stout little man, barely over five feet tall, with shrewd denim blue eyes, a balding pate of graying red hair and a thick, bushy handlebar moustache. His pointy ears and shortness in stature were the only elf-like things about him, for he wore a gray pinstripe business suit (the jacket of which he'd doffed earlier in the day). His matching vest was undone, as were the first three buttons of his pink dress shirt, and he'd rolled his sleeves up a bit. The knot of his gray silk tie had also been loosened sometime earlier in the afternoon and the tie hung slightly askew around his thick, fleshy neck.
Taking in the sight of his exhausted, dirty crew and then glancing at his original Timeline wristwatch, Cornelius said in his bass voice, "A firt-timer huh?"
"Yeah boss," said the third elf, sitting up straighter in his chair, his feet not quite touching the floor anymore. "It was something! Not quite as bad as we've had in the past, but still a heavy-duty job. And it was some time before she believed we weren't an hallucination."
"It was horrid!" asserted the second elf, leaning forward and nodding her small head forcefully, her flame-red curls bouncing energetically, punctuating that last word.
"Now, now, Hildy," Cornelius soothed. "It's over and done with, and hopefully she's the kind of human who will keep her creative house clean?" At this he looked inquiringly at the third elf, the leader of this particular cleaning team.
"I think she's better than some humans when it comes to housekeeping, but she'll need our services from time to time." he answered, thinking of the projects in various stages of completion around the house and the unecessary clutter their newest client had had.
"So we have a new client... Good, good!" Cornelius smiled broadly, looking well pleased. "You guys--and gal--have earned a vacation. Elvis, take your team anywhere you wanna go; you have a week off," he said magnaminously.
"Thanks boss!" Elvis and his team said gratefully, tiredly getting up from their chairs and the sofa they'd occupied to stow away their buckets and supplies in the supply closet near the business manager's office before filing out of the cleaning service's headquarers.
There are actually real elves. Real elves who creatively clean actual creative houses! And I have one! A creative house that was so embarrassingly filthy and disorganized I wanted to crawl into a tiny, tiny hole and disappear once I got over thinking I'd finally gone 'round the bend and was imagining the five short creatures with pointy ears in royal purple coveralls. They had varying expressions crossing their faces, horror, dispair, disbelief and resignation.
The leader was called Elvis and he spent some time trying to calm me down, trying to help me see I wasn't really hallucinating. It took some doing. "After all," he pointed out, "you did call the company for us to come clean this place. You must believe--at least a little--in the unexplainable, in magic, in elves."
I just blinked, swallowed, nodded and smiled weakly at him. Sighing, yet giving me a commiserating look, he said bracingly, "Not very many people believe we're out in the world still. They think we only exist in fairy stories. You're actually handling this rather well." And with that he joined his coworkers and started cleaning a house I never knew I had.
It looks like an open-faced three-storey dollhouse that could sit on one side of a desk. A replica of a Victorian house painted a sunny yellow with azure blue shutters, I never realized I had it before till the elven leader opened my closet door and seemingly pulled it down (out of thin air) from a shelf.
Already in a state of consternation and bewilderment at their appearance, I asked dumbly, "What is that? Where did it come from?"
"It's your creative house," Elvis informed me as he set it on one side of my desk.
There was a gasp of dismay and horror and a groan as he stepped back. Every tiny room was smoky, cluttered, dark, dusty and grimy, and decorated with milky cobwebs. My jaw dropped open. I had a creative house--and it looked like this? Hot embarrassment infused my body, coursing through my veins and staining my skin pink.
"Let's get to work," Elvis suggested, rubbing his finger under his nose twice. On the last pass his crew shrunk and somehow appeared in the dollhouse's dirty, neglected kitchen.
They set to work. Though they were obviously magical, it still took them some time before they had the house spotless and organized and decluttered. They left very late, very tired and grungy looking. As payment I was to create some work (either a graphic or a written piece) as a thank you they could hang or read and enjoy. I was also to tell other creative people about their unique service.
I was now ready to decorate for the Chinese New Year.
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moon phase |
