Thousand: Five Hundred Four

attraction to gnomes, but every story the friend would tell about her dysfunctional relationships with gnomes, the verbal abuse, the practical jokes, the indifference to human emotion, were examples of what to avoid in life, not what one had to keep going after, hungrily, ever hopeful, dreaming only of the next, surely better connection. The friend, who knows what became of her? If she never gave up her unhealthy obsession with gnomes, nothing good! Gnomes, thinks the woman who is currently trying to close a door on a gnome’s toe, are bad news. With her free hand she grabs a