Short short?
Posted 7th May 2010 at 06:32 PM by chrispenycate
I've been straining to hang on to very small ideas recently (takes a very fine strainer). Why? Just in case they can be squeezed down to seventy five words, obviously.
So, 'that's a nice little idea. I wonder how long it'll be when I write it out?'
As I passed the hundred word mark, I wasn't worried; there's always some dead wood to be pruned. The five hundred mark was more alarming, and the story had the bit between its metaphorical teeth, heading for the horizon. A thousand, still going; it's obvious this has no place in the Writing Challenge; indeed, no place anywhere really, but I wasn't going to stop now.
Then what? It's not something to use later, or critique.
So, here it is; somebody might like it.
So, 'that's a nice little idea. I wonder how long it'll be when I write it out?'
As I passed the hundred word mark, I wasn't worried; there's always some dead wood to be pruned. The five hundred mark was more alarming, and the story had the bit between its metaphorical teeth, heading for the horizon. A thousand, still going; it's obvious this has no place in the Writing Challenge; indeed, no place anywhere really, but I wasn't going to stop now.
Then what? It's not something to use later, or critique.
So, here it is; somebody might like it.
Total Comments 6
Comments
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"Twice upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here…"
"But there aren't any kingdoms around these parts." Notice, no word about the timing; it was well known that when Nunka Cee read a bedtime story, it came out differently from when other grownups used the same book.
"When you learn history you'll find out almost everywhere was kingdom, back then. A few principalities and grand duchies, that were just too small to manage real royalty, but even the negligible spattering of republics and the like were organised on a basically aristocratic model. The only real alternative was a theocracy." That at least stopped them, and nobody raised the dreaded cry "what's a…" for fear I might explain. "Besides, this is a fairy story, and fairies are sticklers for the old forms of Government. Perhaps because they live such a long time change is even worse for them than us, even if all the fairies I've known have been working class, mend yer shoes for a teaspoon full of butter types, not the poncey aristocrats like Oberon and his party set.
"But Hansel and Gretel weren't royal, were they?" My youngest an favouritest niece, pyjamad and sparkling clean, as was not her wont. There was a silver thread of mischief running through that voice; what was lacking was the slightest trace of drowsiness. The sparkling eyes on the faces round her showed no sign of glazing, or eyelid droop, either; there had not been enough applied exhaustion during the afternoon, and it looked like being a long read.
My silver-voiced princess had sold my talents as a raconteur to all her sleep-in guests, so I was liberating a whole street of elder siblings and parents to go to the town hall dance – a great sacrifice. My brother was playing, and I knew that, had I accepted the invitation, by the end of the evening I'd have been up there singing with him; something my sister-in law claims should be banned by international treaty.
"Two children; you can think of them as Johnny and Peggy."
"Why, if that's not their names?" One of the visitors. I had been introduced to everybody, but my name centre had gone into meltdown, crash and burn."
"It is, really. In German, 'John' becomes 'Johann', and gets shortened to 'Hans'. The 'el' at the end just means 'little', though we say 'diminutive' just to sound posh. The same goes for his sister Margaret."
Good lord, German grammar and they're still not bored; I should have students like these.
"Their mother died when they were very little – that still happens, but was more often back then – and their father had to work all day, so couldn't spend his time keeping them under control. They had grown up with no more discipline than wild animals; indeed, a mother fox keeps her brood more polite. So when their father came back from the local dance – very much like the one your bigguns have gone to, with the music slightly better played…" This earned me a slight laugh; they all knew who was playing, "with a brand new bride, they were not entirely delighted. When it turned out she had been raised in a household where you were switched (that's hit with a thin, whippy stick, not what you were thinking) for talking out of turn, and thought that this was how children were supposed to be brought up, their enthusiasm fell to new depths."
"This was the wicked stepmother?"
"Wicked? She was fifteen when she moved in. She did what she could for a pair of unruly animals while barely more than a child herself. Then, when she was with child and couldn't chase them any more…"
"She got preggers?"
"Oh, yes; she took her marriage very seriously, as the twins knew; there was only one sleeping room and, even if they waited for the kids to sleep, she enjoyed it and was hardly silent."
"Like my sister," giggled one of the girls. Not my business; I assumed she was sensible enough to take precautions.
"Anyway, the coming baby gave them back part of their freedom – their stepmother made them up a lunch basket and sent them out to play – but at the same time it was competition for the little attention their father, big Hans, could give them.
"They knew they shouldn't go into the forest…"
"You mean their parents didn't take them into the forest and leave them there?"
"While she was swelling up as if she'd eaten a football, and he was working by touch after the sun had gone down? That's just what they told the investigator, and by then their stepmother was dead, and their father had followed her. It wasn't really a village, hardly a community at all, widely separated families seasoning wood and making furniture, or burning it for charcoal; the neighbours didn't know anything.
The trick with the white pebbles is true, though, and they were hard enough to find that the fact they used balls of bread the second day, and got thoroughly lost. There wasn't really much danger; there hadn't been any wolf attacks in these woods in decades, and it was late spring, so no risk of freezing to death. The worst that was likely to happen was a twisted ankle, or poisoning from a toadstool, and the sensible thing to have done would to have stayed where they were as soon as they realised they didn't know where they were, but they panicked, and kept on further, hoping to find something they recognised, all the time thinking they had, and getting further lost.Posted 7th May 2010 at 06:34 PM by chrispenycate
- *
The cottage they finally stumbled on was neatly painted, clean and orderly. Not quite gingerbread, but giving the impression that, if you opened the roof a music box would start tinkling and a very large porcelain doll turning. Surrounded by a neat, organised garden where grew herbs and vegetables, and a bright row of marigolds, which shouldn't have been in bloom this early. A clearly marked path led to the world outside; they could have followed it, happy that nothing worse than a damp, supperless night had punished their disobedience. But they were footsore and hungry; the lunch basket was long empty.
There was no lock on the door, just a bar that could only be put in place from inside, the usual arrangement. Inside was a single room, dark because nobody could afford glass for windows; that was reserved for the rich, and the shutters were tight closed. Still enough light spilled round them through the half open door that they could see the brick-built oven that made up one whole wall. A bread oven? That would mean there was almost certainly something to eat.
They went in, hand in hand, There wasn't much to search; a chest holding some woman's clothing, a palette with a blanket, and a spare neatly folded at its foot, shelves with earthenware pots and pegs from which hung bundles, reasonably secure from wildlife, a table with a marble top, on which rested bowls of rising dough – they weren't quite hungry enough to eat that yet –, a couple of stools their father might have made, clean bowls stacked in a corner, the barrel of flour…
The heavy iron oven door – carrying that out here through the woods must have been an effort – creaked as they investigated the hot, airless interior, in case it had been pies baking, but the shelves were empty. Coals glowed in the sudden draught.
*
The woman who came in, iron-haired and stooped, was in no way a witch. As well as making the bread for this sprinkling of humanity since her husband had died, she was the nearest thing they had to a healer. She knew herbs, bone setting, sewing up the gashes that were the most common problems woodworkers and foresters suffered from, and was the midwife whenever that service was needed – as it was now. She knew the twins – she'd brought them into the world – but she hadn't seen them for some time, as their house was a bit distant, and she preferred to leave the bread with a nearly neighbour to be collected; the round she travelled with her little hand cart come rain or shine was long enough as it was.
But she'd been to their house today, and had chatted to their expecting stepmother about their disobedience, and their absence. So she didn't expect them to what she told them to.
They hadn't heard her cart arriving on the mossy path, and were checking out the oven, as if she'd ever go out and leave bread baking. Rising, yes, and the growing lumps in the bowls under the damp cloths showed they hadn't been up to any mischief there as, fast as her arthritis would let her, she moved across her little room to stop them escaping, make sure they got home.
*
I like to think it was panic gripped them.
That, after they had tripped her so she fell into the oven, and dropped the catch on the heavy door that nobody'd thought to design a way to open from inside, they ran off past the few minor buildings that defined the village, such as it was, and back home to be scolded. That they didn't stand holding hands, listening between terror and delight to her screaming and hammering on the door as she slowly cooked to death.
*
When the bread didn't arrive – oh, not the next day, they weren't expecting daily bread, three days later – the group of locals who had gone out to see if she was sick didn't think of looking in the oven. It wasn't until they decided that someone needed to bake they discovered the desiccated mummy. And when their stepmother went into a difficult labour, Big Hans borrowed the donkey cart they used to transport sacks of charcoal, and set off to town to attempt to find a medic.
She died before they got there, and he drove back, handed the vehicle over to its owners, and quietly hanged himself, which suggests he knew very well what his children had done.
*
The church investigators, looking into the case a few months later, wanted nothing better than to find witchcraft in this tiny community, surviving without the guiding hand of a priest and unable to take communion each Sunday. They accepted the children's story verbatim, with no interest in checking the evidence, which is how that is the version that ended up in this book." I waved the volume, and saw that none of them had fallen asleep, despite the fact that my vocabulary had drifted out of the 'suitable for small children' zone a good while before. "The locals may not have felt that justice had been done, with the most helpful and selfless of them branded as something thou should not suffer to live, but they hadn't got the stomach to let two seven year-olds hand for premeditated murder, either, and knew that it was the demons who left as heroes with the Church delegation, and that their way of life was finished.
Johann rose high in the Church, and remained a consummate liar, while Margaret married, and died in childbirth; which could have argued for some form of justice had it not been that so many guiltless women shared her fate. Nobody, to my knowledge, lived happily ever after, unless 'ever' was a much shorter time than I consider it. And, considering time, it's time you were all asleep."
"Nunka Cee?"
"Yes, Princess?"
"You said that, back then, all the family slept in one bed?"
"That's not quite what I said – the children generally slept on a palette on the floor. But sometimes in the winter, to keep out the cold and the wolfsong outside the door, they would all share blankets, yes."
"Don't you think you could go to bed and we could all sort of, you know?"
"Princess, the world has changed. Now the wolves walk on two legs, and I have no desire to be classed in their number. Which is what would happen if they heard about us doing what you very carefully didn't suggest.
Deal. I'll turn the main light off and do some writing on my computer, so I'm here. The wolves have never got past me yet."
I watched the assent flash between small faces – oh, of course they weren't afraid, it was only a story.
And, as the room was plunged into obscurity, and I settled by the gentle screen glow, I reflected that the story might be telling us that the wolves had long walked upright, and the nature of truth and justice had not changed that much in the intervening centuries, either.Posted 7th May 2010 at 06:35 PM by chrispenycate -
Absolutely love it! fantastic turn, not twist, on an age-old fairy tale.
How you ever hoped to get this into 75 words . . . .
Posted 8th May 2010 at 01:13 PM by StormFeather - Well, I wasn't intending to tell the whole story; just the end, where a couple of kids killed an old woman in a particularly nasty way, then succeeded in lying themselves out of punishment.Quote:How you ever hoped to get this into 75 words . . . .
But the story didn't want to be cut down, and it would have been too close to Mouse's escape one, anyway, so I just let it spread, and possibly demonstrate why nobody asks me to babysit…Posted 9th May 2010 at 10:57 PM by chrispenycate -
Very fine, very fine. Sucked me right in. Fix it up and get it published!Posted 12th May 2010 at 10:05 AM by The Procrastinator - Oh, I think my kids could cope with that kind of babysitting - and opening up their minds to question what they've been told is quite invaluable . . . . except when I'm doing the telling and don't want to be questionedQuote:Originally Posted by chrispenycate
But the story didn't want to be cut down, and it would have been too close to Mouse's escape one, anyway, so I just let it spread, and possibly demonstrate why nobody asks me to babysit…Posted 12th May 2010 at 04:16 PM by StormFeather
