“Ouch; I don't understand. Why do you keep poking me?”
“I am Webster, the Dictionary Gnome, and until you ask for a wish or three in the form of a question, I will continue with the poking, you see.”
The gnome was standing under a toadstool making fencing thrusts with a fallen stem. “Wish,wish, wish if you must even wish for a fish! But, wish!”
“Alright, but if you poke me again I think you'll end up in a heap of horse apples with a Bodark thorn in your butt.”
“Aii – never threaten a dictionary gnome; you'll get crooked grantings, you will. Now wish, wish...”
“Yeah, yea; wish for a fish. I don't think so. Let me think a bit.”
The Dictionary Gnome squinted mightily and dee-dilly-deed a little ditty.
“May I have for my first wish a golden tortoise?”
The gnome harumphed and drew up to his full height of 5 inches and one quarter then popped his eye balls and hollered, “A wish for thee the first of three – tra la.”
Then the gnome ran around his mushroom in several circles and sat to chew his pipe stem.
“Well. Where is it?”
“What's it be, you're askin' me?”
“The golden turtle, imp. My first wish. I asked in a question, so where's my wish?”
“Oh, that. My oh my, look to the sky. Your wish will loom, up in the gloom – high in the sky, tonight the sight, a terrapin hanging high and shining bright with golden star, afar so far. A constellation, my friend, a wish to send.”
Webster danced a jig.
“Why, you.... Okay, ah. Didn't I wish for a golden turtle? I want it closer, here, not a billion light years away. What good will a turtle constellation do me?”
“A query I hear, oh dear. That will do for wish of two, and here it be, a sextant for thee.”
A shiny sea captain's sextant appeared in the man's hand. “No, wait. Gol darn. What did you just do?”
“Hold it up unto yee eye and from the sea you'll see, the golden turtle stars will guide. It'll do, that's true.”
The man yelled at the sky and stuck his hands into his pockets. “How could I have made such worthless requests?”
“Tweedly dee, that's three.”
“What, no, I didn't wish!”
“A question, the third, and it was a turd. More worthless than one, and two that was fun, here is the third and it too comes from the sea and it has legs of more than one two or three, this wish you will hate, many times eight. 'Scuse me, gotta go!”
Webster the gnome ducked into his toadstool, safe inside his mush room, when up from the bubbling loam rose a cascade of frothing mud balls which turned evilly into a cavalcade of writhing arms amid the slashing beak of a tremendous octopus. It folded the man, agog, into its slippery embrace and sunk back into the foaming earth.
Webster inside his little home reached to his shelf and pulled down a tiny copy of the dictionary he had penned himself. “Aye, what is this Bodark thorn he menaced upon my bottom? Oh, wee dee, I see; on page 983, from the Osage Orange...ah um. Damn it.”
Nothing rhymes with orange.