Once upon a time,

There was a boy who lived in a clean room in a messy house.

He lived a moderately exciting life in a moderately exciting manner, though he held a deep desire for something out of the ordinary. Alas, his search for the extraordinary followed very ordinary routes and only connected him to very ordinary people, which was good and well enough for him...with the exception of profound periods and stretches of restlessness.

If anything, he was content being alone in his cleanly ordered room and didn't care much for the rest of the house.

One day, a spritely elf entered his home with a trash bag, a mop and a vacuum. It was the most incredibly strange thing he ever saw.

A sick sense of gladness filled his heart.

The elf fulfilled his paradigm of strangeness, a secret breath of adventure, even before he knew or could visualize what that paradigm was. All he knew was that he was immediately drawn to and fascinated by this odd sort of creature.

For a few brief moments the two stared at each other. In the eyes of the elf, the boy saw new and incredible things flash and dance with his reflection. Even though he'd never met the elf before, it was as if he had known the elf -- or, at the very least, that the elf had known him. Very well. Uncomfortably so.

It was at this moment that the boy suddenly felt very, very awkward.

He did not know what to say to the elf. How to speak its language. The elf appeared to speak his and was equally fascinated by the boy. And yet, every time it hopped forward, the boy jumped back in fear.

Needless to say, the boy felt very ambivalent towards the elf.

So the boy returned to his room and shut the door, returning to his usual routines. But ever so often he would hear the elf puttering around his living room, cooking up unfamiliar but heavenly smells in the kitchen.

This disturbed the boy in his very clean room in his very unclean home. The thing is, even though he did not respect the home outside of his bedroom very much, it was still his home.

Besides, what did the elf want from him? Why was it cleaning his home? What was he going to have to pay the elf in return?

"Just your attention," said the elf.

Oh, now the boy got it. And he got angry. He didn't want to have to pay any attention to the elf at all! Is that what the elf wanted? For the boy to forget about his clean and ordered room and pay all his attention to the elf all day long? For the boy to completely disrupt his way of doing things, his formerly contented existence?

"No and yes. Yes and no. If you give me a moment, I'll explain what I mean."

The boy stalked into his room and slammed the door. For the next few days, he would hear a few noises, here and there, coming from the kitchen. Once in a while there would be a note slipped under his door, quivering with a sense of excitement. The boy made a big show of paying them no mind. After all, he was a very busy boy.

So then came the day when a long breath of silence stretched over his home. Thick and heavy, cloaking over everything outside his bedroom like a dusty shadow.

The boy opened his door a crack and found a pile of dusty notes outside his door. A horrible sense of guilt stained his thoughts.

When he ventured into the kitchen, he found a plate of odd treats that had gone cold.

The boy wished to find some way to thank the elf, but didn't want it back to disrupt the order of his home. Besides, he wouldn't know where anything was anymore. And if the elf were to come back, would it try cleaning his home again? Would it end up uncovering his secret stash of bestiality porn that was lying under some mess somewhere? What would it think then? And if it finished cleaning up the rest of his home, surely the elf would venture into his bedroom, which was OFF LIMITS to all creatures, strange and ordinary.

No, no, the boy was a very busy boy and had no time for elves. Just time enough for all his commitments to the concrete reality of a world he was exerting so much energy to stand out in, though he had no idea why this was so important to him. It was just something that was to be done. Something he had to do in order to feel in control.

Because if he didn't do that, if he didn't make that a priority...

...he didn't know.

The boy sat and contemplated for a moment on how uncertainty was his greatest fear.

As he contemplated, he heard a soft noise outside his door.

After a few, long moments, he opened his door. On the floor was half a cookie and a note, "I ATE THE OTHER HALF. IT WAS TOO DELICIOUS."

The boy returned to his room and worked, worked, worked - and forgotbutnotreally about the elf. By the end of the week, he ventured out into his chronically cluttered kitchen and returned to the cookie - or, half of it - to eat it.

But it had long gone so stale and moldy that he could not even identify what kind of cookie it once was.

In a moment of kindness, he wrote his own note and slipped it under his front door, "WHAT KIND OF COOKIE WAS IT?"

No sooner had he slipped the note that the door popped open. Only this time, the elf stayed outside in the hallway, kicking at an invisible rock. "So..."

The boy opened his mouth to speak, but could not find words enough to say anything that meant anything important. Anxiety, like spider legs, crawled over his beating heart.

His hand touched the edge of the door, undecided as to whether it should close it or open it a crack wider. That's when a new thought entered his thoughts: it never occurred to him what it would be like to see the world through the eyes of an elf.