Cynical Tales for Cynical Children Read online

  “It was particularly rich” the queen mother observed with a smile “and yet my court buzzes with whispers saying I've been fooled and what I took such pleasure in tonight was nothing more than beef dressed and disguised”

  “It's a load of bull!” the cook protested “Do not, I implore you, listen to those spiteful wasps. If they say I've attempted to fool you in any way then I demand they produce evidence which supports their accusations. You've ordered me to take care of the children and serve the Queen all of which I've done. In fact I made certain to include a little something extra as a hidden treat.

  “You mean this little thing?” the queen mother held the necklace up in front of the court “I did wonder at its purpose very well, my clever cook, you may go. I'll be sure to call on your services soon enough”

  Over the course of the next few days the queen mother got on with the actual business of ruling the kingdom until one fateful evening she was walking nonchalantly about in the hopes of hearing any unguarded whispers or coming across an equally unguarded child and as she loitered about in the shadows she looked through the window of the cooks house and saw the Prince Day crying because he'd broken a clay pot and Princess Morning was crying because she'd needed the clay pot for the royal tea party24.

  24 A tea party held without any hint of human flesh. It's possibly not the most important note in this story and is included to assure readers of a gentle disposition that there was at least one meal in this castle which was served sans long pig.

  The cook, his wife and the royal family were arrested within the hour and brought before the throne where the queen mother met them with a deep scowl.

  “You lied to me! Three times in this room you dared to offer substandard offal to your ruler”

  “The dishes I prepared were of the highest quality” the cook shouted back “it's not my fault you have no palate to speak off and insist on drowning everything in sauce”

  “It's Sauce Robert!”

  “It's Sauce Terrible!”

  “I gave thought to sparing you, if only you would take up your knife”

  “I've already made my choice. I spared the lives of the rightful queen and her children, the proper heirs to the kingdom. How will you explain their absence to the king when he returns?”

  “The war goes badly for my son and when he does return I'll be there to support him after I tell him about how his wife and children were seized upon by wolves and eaten whole. None of you will get to see it though since I see you'd all leave a bad taste in my mouth! To the dungeons with you until I think of some manner of disposal”

  Early the next day the prisoners were dragged to the main courtyard where a huge tub seethed will all manner of toads, vipers, vermin and the traditional 'orrible 'airy 'spiders who weren't strictly speaking poisonous although they were creepy and quite difficult to get at such short notice25.

  “You know what I'm thinking Princess? I'm thinking if we get out of this I'm going to take great pleasure in turning everything in there into dinner”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Ask me tomorrow when you're addressing a plate of spider drumsticks”

  “We get out of this and you'll be knighted” the queen promised “I'd knight your wife as well only she's already my sister and I'll gladly make it official”

  “You do us great honour my queen”

  “Ahem. If you lot don't mind” the queen mother interrupted “It was quite a job to get everything ready so quickly and while you might be the most important people on the list don't make the mistake of thinking you're the last” she gestured at her guards who stood silently over a small collection of servants and lesser nobles who were bound hand and foot. “these ones thought to speak against me and disloyalty to the throne is disloyalty to the king himself!”

  “You're not the king!”

  “I speak with his voice Princess Sleepy!”

  “I think you'll find I speak with his voice” The king, sporting an eye-patch, covered in blood, fresh from battle and completely unexpected pushed his heavy charger through the crowd “we won by the way and I thought to surprise my wife and family. Who wants to be the first to tell me what's going on?”

  “They're traitors!” the queen mother shouted madly “all of them! I'm only doing what your father was always too weak to do”

  “My children are traitors?”

  “She wanted to eat us dad!” the children cried

  “Even now they lie. Lie like the little bastards they are!” the queen mother ignored the gasp which swept through the entire court26 “little mongrel children whelped by a bitch princess who thinks she can. ”

  Nobody present found out what she could do because the queen had seized the opportunity to push the mad queen into her own tub where it was only a few moments before she suffered a series of envenomed bites and quickly met her death.

  25 Elsewhere in the castle the royal accountant breathed a sigh of relief. Although death by vermin [assorted] [venomous]

  was a horrible way to go it wasn't as ruinously expensive as some of the other methods which might have been utilized.

  26 It’s nice to see there’s a line the court won’t cross. Cannibalism is one thing but bad manners simply won’t be tolerated it seems.

  It almost goes without saying that the king released the innocent and, once he'd gotten the full story from his wife, the cook and the apprentice pot scrubber who had been his agent the whole time, punished the guilty.

  Out of all the people in the castle he was the only one to mourn the loss of his mother and the madness which had overtaken her. His family were there to comfort him though, the country needed a leader and the spoils of war needed to be tallied which meant the king was neither willing or able to grieve for long.

  EXCOGITATION

  •

  Why didn't the king just have another gold plate made especially for the elder fairy?

  Granted it would have required some stalling on the Olympic level however we need to remember this is all taking place in a room full of people who have managed to survive the brutal world of royal politics and with some fast paced handling it's possible there would have been enough time to place a rush order.

  Even if the stalling option had gone off without a hitch its fairly obvious someone was going to take offense at something and it wouldn’t have been long before everything kicked off, this party has that kind of feel to it.

  Also, we’re kind of at the beginning of the story so if nobody gets offended then it gets a whole lot shorter and way more boring.

  •

  Exactly why was the old woman spinning when it was punishable by death?

  In researching this story I discovered this particular character doesn't have such a large part since she's only there to for the princess to encounter the spinning wheel. The explanation we're given for her actions is she she didn't know spinning was illegal and it didn't make into this version because I personally find it slightly dubious since the king has sent out messengers, made proclamations all over the place and we've just had to sit through a two paragraph description of the great burning in which it was pointed out the death sentence applies to anyone and everyone who even looks as though they might be contemplating a touch of spinning. For this old woman not to know about any of this shows she is staggeringly far out of the loop.

  Of course, there could be another explanation. Human nature being what it is whenever there's a shortage of anything it isn't long before a black market for illicit goods springs up and after sixteen years of no spinning there is clearly a thriving underground spinning movement whose presence showed they were only growing more emboldened27.

  Naturally I lay no claim to exactly what the criminal minds in charge of all this were thinking when they actually set up shop in the actual royal castle unless it was some sort of final initiation before being granted access into the inner workings of the Illumikniti and it is somewhat more plausible than “Lawks I'm just an old woman who didn't know spin
ning wheels were banned”

  The fact we hear nothing more about the old woman after the princess goes to sleep gives us two options. Either she was captured and put to death for the crime of spinning or the other members of Sewing Club have managed to spirit her away in the middle of the night28.

  •

  So how far away is Matakin?

  The part of the story where it's specifically mentioned Matakin is 12,000 leagues away and the fairy is contacted by a dwarf who wears 7 league boots sounds as though it might have been a late contribution by a particularly literate mathematics teacher.

  27 The first rule of sewing club is, somewhat predictably, “you don't talk about sewing club”.

  28 I'll leave the ultimate decision of her fate up to you as I dislike making sweeping statements with little evidence to go on.

  DISTANCE

  LEAGUE

  MILES

  KILOMETRES

  Matakin

  12000

  36000

  57936.38

  Leagues

  1

  3

  4.83

  Seven League Boots

  7

  201

  323.48

  Dragonback (per hour)

  200

  600

  965.61

  •

  How angry would you be if you'd been put in the stocks for some minor crime like stealing bread and then the fairy sent everyone off to sleep?

  There you are waking up after a hundred years because the princess got a little sleepy and yet the guards still insist you remain in the stocks just to make certain you recognize the severity of your crime.

  There ain't no justice.

  RATIOCINATION

  The big question of whether the story of Sleeping Beauty really has been broken in two is a matter of some debate because in the collections of books aimed at children it all ends with the kiss which wakes up the sleeping princess whereas in the more serious collections they include the mother-in-law and her predilection towards eating family members.

  It's not entirely inconceivable parts one and two are completely different stories which got mashed together I suspect once upon a time29, someone was telling the story to a difficult audience and when they got to the end someone at the back shouted out “and then what?” which led to some hasty rewriting and the oft overlooked part two.

  The big lesson one can take away from this story is

  “As long as you’re the chosen one then the entire world is going to bend to your

  every whim”

  In this case the chosen one is the prince who just happened to turn up on the right day and was in the right place when the spell ended and the princess woke up. Of course nobody in the castle cared to bring up this fact because [a] they were all too busy celebrating and [b] people who start suggesting royalty isn't necessary tend to disappear with little warning.

  29 A turn of phrase that I’m sure will never catch on.

  SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

  In which we learn of the consequences of being pretty.

  Beauty. There are many types available to us and those who consider themselves to be among the beautiful people must be wary of handling such a two edged sword because the simple truth is kindness and beauty don't always walk hand in hand.

  More often than not the beautiful people concern themselves with the actions of those they consider to be less beautiful when what they should be doing is keeping an eye on the other beautiful people who see everyone else as a potential rival since to acknowledge them as an actual rival would be to admit there is the possibility of someone else in the world who is just as beautiful as them, if not more so.

  This is why the story of Snow White exists. It isn't, as some would have you believe, a heartwarming story about true love being found in the direst of situations. In reality it's a cautionary tale of beauty, terror and apples most poisoned.

  lright then lets see what we've got to work with. There was once a castle, a fact which surprises exactly zero people. In that castle was a young woman who held the rank of princess. The fact this young woman was also beautiful is only ever going to be news to the Atourists and the three people who haven't taken the time to read the introduction.1

  We may now reveal a pertinent fact and major plot point. The young princess had a stepmother who held the rank of queen and was also considered to be a great beauty yet the major difference between the royal pair was her total insecurity about the whole beauty issue as it pertained to her being considered to be the absolute pinnacle of beauty, not just in the castle but also across the face of the entire kingdom.

  In order to obtain this seemingly impossible title each day she would uncover her magical mirror2 in order to ask it a deceptively simple question.

  “Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?”

  Having learned long ago of the dangers in giving a wrong answer the magical mirror would quickly review the triple password encoded section of the local internet reserved specifically for the beautiful people3 and then return a truthful response.

  “It's you. You're the most beautiful person in the whole kingdom”

  “Anything else to report?”

  “Everyone knows who's the fairest in the land, although many try they may never climb to the lofty heights of pure attractiveness on which you sit. I can give you a list of the runners up if you want”

  Whenever she heard this the queen would smile in a certain way because there was no point in being the most beautiful if everyone didn't know about it.

  Life continued in this way for a while and then Snow White reached a certain age and, well, we could say she blossomed although I'd like to think we're all above such obvious metaphor4.

  1

  You know who you are.

  2

  Which was hanging in her bedroom and gives rise to more questions than I get paid to answer.

  3

  Don't ask me for an invite. I tend to stick with the regular pages where the people are ugly although considerably more interesting.

  4

  Spoiler alert. We're not.

  Of course the stepmother found out about it because otherwise what's the point of having an entire paragraph explaining how the magic mirror works?

  To completely understate the situation she was slightly miffed, it also didn't help that Snow had the kind nature so often found in Disney Princess's which only served to irk her stepmother even more.

  However you don’t stay Queen without making certain you’ve always got a few aces up your sleeve and this particular ace was a servant who was loyal to the royal personage thanks to a large sack marked loot. All he had to do obtain said loot was to take Snow White out into the forest and kill her in a manner most horrible.

  If he'd gone through with the deed the story would have ended right here with a questionable, yet sensible, moral of

  “Don't be prettier than the queen or else”

  He didn't go through with it though, at the last moment his courage failed him and he ran off, leaving Snow White sitting beside a tree in the middle of the forest and wondering exactly what happened to her escort.

  Night came5. Snow White began to tremble and cry at the thought of all the terrible eyes spying on her and the strange sounds which made her heart thump. Eventually, after much stumbling about and jumping at EVERY. LITTLE. THING she curled up under a tree and went to sleep.

  When dawn awoke the forest to the song of the birds Snow White reached over and hit the snooze button. Except the alarm clock turned out to be a squirrel and after she had managed to fend off the angry rodent she found she was a lot more awake than before.

  The problem was she had no real idea of where to go although after forming the logical conclusion of anywhere being better than wherever here was she picked a direction at random and didn't stop walking until she'd found a tiny path which eventually merged with a more well traveled road, all of which ultimately led her to a cle
aring with a strange looking cottage.

  There was a tiny door, tiny windows and a tiny chimney in fact everything about this place could be described in diminutive terms as Snow White quickly realized.

  “How tiny everything is!” She declared as she wandered around the house she'd just broken into “it's almost as if this place were built for people who were smaller than the average citizen”

  “Oh right” the Dwarfs collectively muttered from off stage “ha ha ha. We''ll just read a magazine while she gets all the short jokes out of her system”

  “Actually” Snow continued as if she hadn't been interrupted at all “If I make these people dinner then when they come home they'll be glad to find a meal ready”

  After sunset seven tiny men marched home singing as much of the traditional Hi Ho song as they could get away with before they attracted the vile attentions of the highly territorial copyright lawyers

  and to their surprise they found the house had been cleaned, the pot of squirrel soup was bubbling away nicely and the worst burglar in the history of ever was asleep on one of the beds

  “Well” the chief decided after he'd woken her up and heard her story6 “I think you'd better stay with us.

  I mean we're Dwarfs and if there’s one thing all fantasy writers agree on its that you can't go wrong with us on your side”

  “What about the Elves?” Snow asked "they live in forests as well don't they?"

  At the mention of their unwelcome neighbours the Dwarfs whiskers bristled so violently it looked like a group of hedgehogs at their first orgy "Don't talk to us about those guys. If there's one thing you shouldn't do its go to the Elves”

  “Are you sure? I've heard so many stories about how they help people”

  5

  A short sentence with all manner of unfortunate connotations 6

  It's a little like this one only much less sarcastic.

  “You mean to say you actually listen to their propaganda? Believe me, they're not the hippie tree huggers you think they are"

  “All right then I'll stay”

  This was the cue for a party7 and in the morning the dwarfs left for the mine with little more than the usual drunken sway to their step.