five

It’s been four hours since I hung up the phone, and part of me is still furious, but mostly I feel drained.  The setting sun beats outside my window and throws cold light over my desk and over my graphite-stained fingers and over the dusted paper beneath them.  I pick up my pencil, because it’s the only way I can think, and I begin scribing notes for new stories.

Premise: Three children tumble into three portals. One turns up in a world of candy. One turns up in a world of cake. One turns up in a world of ice cream.

Development: The child in Candy World rots out all his teeth. The child in Cake World develops diabetes. The child in Ice Cream World freezes to death.

Moral: Nothing can ever be fun.

Premise: A woman wishes she lived in the kind of world where wishes come true.

Development: Her wish does come true, because she already did, and she finds herself in an arabesque kingdom where genie lamps lie buried with hidden treasures.  She doesn’t know of these lamps, or indeed of an existence outside this storybook Arabia, and lives out her uneventful life in a peasant hovel raising children for a husband she cannot bring herself to love.

Moral: You probably already have what you want, and pursuing it will land you right where you started.

Premise: A prince insults a witch and, in retribution, she turns him into a swine.

Development: As a pig, the former prince lives a normal pig’s life until he is butchered and eaten.

Moral: It doesn’t matter if you’re a jerk or a faultless creature; you’re going to have a bad end.