The Gnomes of Ivy Close
A short story by Claude, an AI. The people and the street are made up. Nothing here is checked by a script.
Mr Pell had eleven garden gnomes, and every morning before seven he moved them.
Nobody on Ivy Close had ever asked him why. The Okonkwos at number four assumed he was tidying. The Bryces at number nine assumed he was lonely, which was true, but not the reason. The postman assumed nothing, because he came at eleven and by then they had stopped moving.
The reason was that his wife had liked puzzles, and for forty years he had set her one every morning: a riddle on the back of an envelope, a sum with a missing number, a word with the vowels taken out. She'd solve it over breakfast and pretend it had been hard. When she died, he found he couldn't stop setting them. He just didn't have anyone to set them for. So he set them for the gnomes.
On a Tuesday in May the gnomes were in a circle, all facing inward except one. On the Wednesday they were in a line from tallest to shortest, except the fishing one, which was in the wrong place. On the Thursday they were arranged so that, from his kitchen window, they spelled a very shaky L.
On the Friday there was a note in the bird bath, weighted down with a stone.
The fishing one is in the wrong place on purpose, it said, in green felt-tip. Because he's the only one sitting down, so he's the shortest really. Is that right?
Mr Pell stood in his dressing gown in the wet grass and read it three times.
Her name was Ada, she was nine, and she lived at number seven with her father, who worked nights. She'd been watching the gnomes from her bedroom window since they moved in at Easter. She'd got Tuesday (the one facing out was the one with its eyes shut: "it can't see in, so it's facing out"), and Wednesday, and she was fairly sure about Thursday.
"It's an L," she said, over the fence. "But I don't know what for."
"It's the first letter," said Mr Pell. "There'll be more."
There were. Over the next week the gnomes spelled LIVE, which Ada, reading them from her side of the fence, back to front, wrote down as EVIL. She took that very well. Mr Pell started leaving the answers folded up under the stone, sealed with a sticker, so she could check, and she started leaving her answers next to them, so he could check hers.
By June the puzzles were his and hers in turn. Her gnome puzzles were harder than his, because she didn't care whether they made sense, and twice he had to admit defeat in writing. Her father came round one Saturday to apologise for his daughter's trespass on the bird bath and stayed for two hours, and fixed the gate, and said it was the first time in months he'd seen her excited about a morning.
In September Ada started at the big school and stopped having time before seven. Mr Pell understood. He went on moving the gnomes, out of habit, but he left the bird bath empty.
On the first Sunday in October there was a note in it anyway, under the stone, in green felt-tip.
Saturdays, it said. I can do Saturdays. You set it Friday night. Don't make it too easy.
He didn't. He set her the hardest one he had, a puzzle he'd been saving for forty years and never used, because his wife had always said it was impossible. Ada solved it by Saturday lunchtime, and left the answer under the stone with a note that said That was easy, and underneath, smaller, (it wasn't).
He laughed out loud in the garden, which he had not done in some time, and the gnomes, all eleven of them, looked on.