Hope you like TVs, because we got ourselves a Sell-Off! Today we’re selling one TV after another, starting with the biggest screens and shrinking down to the little ones. But what on Earth is going on with the writeups?

I guess I’d been walking for half a day when I saw the smoke. Just then, I wasn’t sure I wanted help. Might be just another thing to go wrong. I’d had to get out of Sparklewood after a bloody misunderstanding with a couple of marshmallow miners. Princess, the best butterfly I’d ever had, up and died after a couple days’ hard riding on the range. And my magic wand had jammed when I was trying to kill a ladybug for food. Way things were going, whoever made that fire was as likely to shoot me as feed me.

But I was powerful hungry. And I sure missed hearing the sound of another fairy voice. So I set my pointy slippers toward the source of the sweet, pink smoke. First I thought there wasn’t nobody around. But as I got closer, a figure revealed itself to me. It was a man, sitting down, with long black hair and no shirt: a wild pixie. While us fairies were taming the land, building towns and digging fields, the pixies still lived in tents and moved with the beetle herds. Still as he was, I’d have taken him for a statue. But when I was still a couple of hundred yards off, he opened his eyes and looked at me. I hadn’t even known his eyes were closed.

“Stranger,” he called to me as I drew near. Lucky thing I spoke pixie. “Welcome.” He raised one hand.

“Thanking you kindly. Could I please trouble you for something to eat?”

“I have only tubble-tubble,” he said, pointing to a scrubby pile of flowers. We called them loco daisies. Pixies ate them to see God.

I wasn’t in the mood for a religious experience, but at least it would be something on the stomach. “Tubble-tubble sounds right delicious to me. Should I just take one, or what?”

He sighed and handed me a small handful of flowers. “Eat these. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m trying to get a meditation thing going on here.”

I nodded, thanked him, and wandered on. Never come between a pixie and his savage God. Soon as I crossed a ridge and he was out of sight, I sat on a rock and stuffed the flowers into my mouth. Couldn’t say much for the taste. It felt good to tear something between my teeth, at least.

But that wasn’t the only feeling. I hadn’t been there ten minutes when everything changed, somehow. It felt like the world was sliding away from me, like the clouds were falling down, like the scrubgrass was fur on the back of a giant unicorn. I lay flat on the ground and closed my eyes. Pictures danced before me, people and creatures I’d never seen, just as clear as if I’d been watching them on a 37”, 720p LCD HDTV. Some kind of huge monkeys were hugging and kissing. Then a different monkey came up and started punching on the first two. I saw a mighty warrior – a “badass private dick”, I somehow knew – tied up and floating among the stars. Arcane words came unbidden to my lips: Viewsonic…1366×768…50,000 hour lamp life…8ms response time. Was I melting? On fire? Flying through the universe? I laughed and wept and never knew when one turned to the other.

I don’t know for how long I lay there. An hour, a day, a week? Could be. When I came out of it, my lips were cracked and my throat was parched. The last few drops of dew in my acorn canteen didn’t do much to help. The visions had fled, and their memories were soon to follow. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just one small part of a story that was finally turning toward its end.

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