Oison's Underpants

Oison's Underpants. Object Post 13

Oison Seekjoy was a modest young man, but as a traditional leprechaun gossoon, he didn’t wear underpants. Instead, he favoured a tunic and britches with nothing underneath.

Leprechaun men seldom came through the gates to the human realm because their greenish olive skin meant they couldn’t pass in the human masquerade. The fair-skinned colleens could, and usually did, which sometimes led to a population imbalance if the colleens married out and decided to live human. Mostly, though, it wasn’t a problem. Leprechaun gossoons had an intense interest in family and tradition, and so they seldom wasted time on regretting their inability to pass. Some went so far as to take pride in it.

As Ryl Skipton told her betrothed Tom Merriweather… “Leppies don’t conjure, and they don’t use glamours. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. They’re proud of their heritage. The greener the gossoon, the more attractive he is—in his opinion. The greener the gossoon, the further back he can tell his ancestors. They call it telling the names and do they ever tell them!”

Nevertheless, Oison Seekjoy was lured to spend time at the Over Here B&B. Alexander Peckerdale brought him there, and Oison enjoyed himself… even when Tom’s mother Kay spotted him.

“We saw a boy with green skin at the B&B,” Kay said. "He was coming out of the kitchen.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Top o’ the marnin’ indade, indade,” Russ muttered.

“He did not. He said, Greet you Mistress…at least, I think that’s what he said. He was in his underpants with a black cat in his arms, so I was a bit distracted.”

“I expect that was Oison,” Tom said.

Tom later took the matter up with Ryl.

“Mum met Oison when she came over in February. She said he was wearing his underpants.”

Ryl grinned. “If he was, it was probably a glamour. Oison doesn’t have underpants. Leppies don’t.”

“I thought leprechauns didn’t do glamours?”

“They don’t. Alex did it. He always swore he wouldn’t, but I expect he thought underpants didn’t really count.”

So, Oison’s underpants were a matter of convenience to avoid upsetting Kay, whom he would view as a quite close by-love connection. After all, he was with Alexander, who was Ryl’s uncle. Tom was betrothed to Ryl, and Kay was Tom’s mother. There was no way Oison would want to upset the mother of the betrothed of the niece of the pixie man who had brought him over here.

Oison’s underpants, or lack thereof, appear in TheKissing Ring

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of May 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places and objects. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!