EROTIC SEATTLE—land of Brian’s crazy relatives, land of exceptionally delicious gourmet donuts (+ Leah and Dennis).

***

Leah and Dennis welcomed us into their city with open arms and a deserted living space. Just before we returned to the mainland, they had signed the lease for a new apartment, located on Capitol Hill. Here we stayed for the additional nights, shacked up in a warm, narrow room not unlike a miniaturized fun house. With a low ceiling, and two, regular sized doors adjoining the remaining apartment, nothing seemed to be at its proper scale. Such architectural contrasts gave the room a warping feeling, as if it were a big optical illusion. A tall figure, standing in the room’s center, might even seem to diminish the space. Appropriately, when we approached the room our first night, Leah and Dennis remarked, “this is where we keep the Dwarves.”

The phrase haunted me for some nights after leaving Seattle, not simply because it was a creepy thing to say, but because we literally had to sleep with Dwarves.

Albeit not the cheerful variety from David the Gnome—the boring Swedish show on Nick Jr.—but a wretched, positively satanic breed. These were miniature beasts boasting silver nails and teeth—weapons, we came to learn, that required incessant filing long into the night. Their eyes were blank gems that seemed to reflect, somehow, the darkness of the room itself. Even when the lights were off, there appeared, mottled across an infinite void, pairs of glinting motes, staining the dark with sheen.

But it was the rasping of metal on metal, not the glistening eyes, that eventually drove Brian mad, and eventually moved me to steal the Dwarf leader’s life. A mistake, I admit, because it only augmented our original Dwarf troubles.

It had been a rocky start, dealing with these Dwarves, and communication was always an issue.

“I’m Ben, this is Brian, I guess we’ll be sleeping here tonight.”

“Alu-sha naga warem pa na, googa sham,” answered the Dwarf.

“Sure, and how do you go about regulating the temperature of the room?”

“Na sham! Na sham! Ki, Ki, Ki, Ki!”

In addition to language, a second hurdle was interests. I enjoy reading in bed at eleven. The Dwarves, around said time, enjoy colorful masque ceremonies in which they imagine their bloody triumph over humankind. I enjoy sleeping next to a fire, drowsily snuggling under my covers. The Dwarves set fire to my goddamn feet. Also, the Dwarves, who seem to be missing every other tooth but their incisors, work nightly perfecting shark like dentures, grinding away endlessly and screaming of a year long hunger finally reaching its end.

So I decided to kill their leader.

“I was pretty sure it would make me your king,” I explained to a vicious pack of them, afterwards.

Being a reader of Dwarf fan fiction since early high school, I was pretty sure that, in slaying the Dwarf leader, I would rightfully stake my claim as the Dwarves’ next ruler. However plausible this seemed in 9th grade, I now quickly realized that demonic forces living in the recesses of Seattle apartments have no time for online fantasy. (Some revision among Dwarf fan fiction is perhaps in order).

After burying their king, the Dwarves began to encircle Brian’s shivering body, chanting and marching as if he were a slain beast. Sinking into madness against Leah and Dennis’s hardwood floors—which were in great condition by the way—a good hue—Brian moaned something to me about messing up big time.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said, not realizing that he was probably talking about me.

At some point during Brian’s nervous breakdown slander, Spooky entered the fray. Later, Brian would recall the Cat emerging from the wall itself, appearing first as a great cacophony of sparrows that divided, subdivided and finally coalesced into the body of a magnificent feline.

But he was just delirious.

Regardless, Spooky attacked the Dwarves ferociously, and with each tear, perhaps through additional enchantment, transformed the creatures’ dark, fleshy bodies into gossamer strands of ribbon. We watched in awe as the Dwarves unraveled in bright strips of colorful fabric, falling slack and silent on the sheen lacquered floor.

“Wow, that’s great,” I said, “but it doesn’t explain how all of this happened in a single room.”

As I expected, the magic Cat could take on a Dwarf army, but fall flat on a simple question of spatial reality. This is pretty typical of magic entities, I’ve found, and one of the few things fan fiction gets right.

Soon after the ordeal, Brian muttered something about me being an asshole—but I think he was still out of it. The Cat gave us some garbage about following our hearts or whatever, but I was too busy thinking of fan fiction to care.

I imagine there is more here to tell—gourmet donuts fit for royalty, a fantastic modern library that trumped most other architecture witnessed on our trip, or even, perhaps, the genuine hospitality and kindness of Leah and Dennis, who taught us how to play the Settlers of Catan—but nothing quite matches our adventures in Dwarfland.

Stay tuned for Minneapolis.