A Short Story for PP
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
The wind howled through the trees. Granted, wind howls through trees a lot, but this wind has a purpose. It's starting this story. The wind continued to twist it's way through the tree's, briefly accompanied by a flash of lightening and the downfall of rain. Thunder heralded the winds entrance into the clearing.
It howled some more, then noticed a small camp fire on the outskirts of the clearing. A solitary figure huddled round it for warmth. The wind giggled, that's a high pitched, wobbly howl to anyone but another bit of wind, then rushed towards the camp fire.
The figure swore when the fire was blown out. He wasn't having too much luck so far today. On top of everything he'd had to suffer through for the past few weeks, he now had to deal with being cold, wet and lonely.
He didn't *like* being cold, wet and lonely. He positively hated it, but there was bugger all he could do about it at the moment.
He stood up, his boots squelching at him in complaint. There wasn't any point in his sitting there staring at a fire if there wasn't a fire to stare into.
Looking around for his horse he realised it had gone. One minute it had been there, the next, too-da-loo horsey..."bugger" thought the man. That meant he was going to have to walk. Not that he knew where he was going of course, now he was totally lost in the forest. He did have a map though, shame all the ink had run in the rain. Nevertheless he got it out and stared at it pointlessly for a moment. Then, after a few moments of contemplation, he walked out of the clearing.
He was definately lost. He didn't have the faintest idea of where he was going. Then, just as the rain decided to get that little bit heavier, he saw a light through the trees. He didn't care what it was, it was a light, and it gave him some sense of going somewhere.
Five minutes later he was standing in front of a gingerbread cottage, and despite all the tales he'd been told about gingerbread cottages and their occupants he knocked on the door. What did he have to fear? He wasn't a liitle kid that someone could have for supper was he?
The door opened a crack and, what a surprise, an old-ish woman poked her head round the corner.
"Who are you?" she asked, a faintly wobbly voice with a hint of iron in it.
"I'm Beamish. I'm also cold, wet, hungry and as an added bonus I carry the burdens of the world around on my shoulders."
The old woman eyed Beamish up and down. He was a little big for her oven, but she was sure that if she was clever she could *just* fit him in. Of course she'd have to lay off the seasonings if she was to have a hope of doing it, and he might be a little tough when he's done...
She invited him in.
Beamish stepped inside, out of the rain. He stood there dripping, a pool of water steadily growing by his feet. The old woman shut the door behind him and told him to sit down. Beamish walked towards the table, noticed just a smidgen too late that there was beams across the ceiling, bumped his head, and sat down. The old woman wandered off into the kitchen, to make him a cup off tea, of course.
Beamish leaned slightly over on his chair so that he could watch the old woman in the kitchen, he was slightly suspicious. After all, he thought, there has to be something starnge about her if she could live in a gingerbread house and *not* eat it. Sure enough, she put the kettle on, just like she said she would, then turned the oven on and got out a *huge* baking tray. Beamish eyed the oven up for size. It was a *big* oven...
...oh bugger, thought Beamish, why did he always have to wander in on these things. First, he goes into a old abandoned castle and finds a girl fast asleep, pricks himself on her spinning wheel, wakes up a while later, (thankfully he wasn't royalty so it didn't have that much of an affect on him) gets home, finds out that his girlfriend has just taken off with seven dwarves, then comes here just in time to be dinner.
He thought his ever so popular thought once more, bugger.
The old woman walked back into the living room and sat down opposite him at the table, teapot in hand. "I'm Lalage. Good, now you know my name and I know yours we're no longer, technically anyway, strangers. Tea?"
Crumbs, thought Beamish, she has it all worked out doesn't she. Beamish looked at the old womans face. Anyone who hadn't seen her firing up the oven wouldn't have had the faintest idea. Lucky for him, he *had* seen her fire up the oven. He thought it wisest not to drink the tea. "No thanks, I'm more of a coffee person myself."
"Coffee? Eugh, can't stand the stuff, so I don't have any in." Beamish noticed that although she'd brought 2 cups in, she wasn't drining the tea she'd pored out for herself either.
He wanted to get out of there, he didn't want to *be* dinner. He wouldn't mind *having* dinner though, he hadn't eaten in a long while, and he also wouldn't mind hidig out here in the gingerbread cottage until it stopped raining and he'd had a chance to dry out. He weighed up the odds. On one hand, there was the risk that he'd be eaten, on the other, there was a chance of getting dry again, asking for directions, sleeping a bit, eating something (though he hated to think what the woman had in her cupboards), and having someone to complain too.
He was willing to risk being eaten.
The old woman was a bit disappointed that he didn't want any tea. It wasn't as if it was drugged or anything, she'd even fished out the cockroaches in it for him. She'd decided not to have some herself when she realised that the liitle black things in the teapot had originated from the mouse tat had been hiding inside the teapot - but what *he* didn't know wouldn't harm him.
Beamish thought that the old woman wasn't really living up to her name, after all, if his Greek was any good at all, her name mean't chattering, and he wasn't hearing much of that right now.
Silence bore down upon the room. Beamish watched the old womans fingers twitch in anticipation. Perhaps if he got the ball rolling she'd talk, then forget about eating him.
"So, erm, are you married?"
Something about the way the woman looked at him changed. "I am. My husbands out in the forest right now, chopping some wood for the fire I presume."
"So he'll be along shortly, I tkae it? Axe in tow?" Beamish started to develop a nervous twitch around his right eye.
"An axe! Oh no, my husbands just invented this new thing, it's so much easier to use than an axe. He's called it a 'chain-saw' because it's a sort of chain which saws through things I suppose."
The twitch around Beamish's eye got more noticeable. He looked out of the window to see if it had stopped raining yet. It hadn't. So it was still, he supposed, more favourable for him to stay here...
The old woman continued the conversaton. "Are *you* married?" she asked, was that a hopeful glint he could see in her eyes?
"Err, no. My girlfriend just, sort of, ran off today."
"With another man?"
"No, with several other men. I suppose I had it coming to me, she'd been accusing me of spending far too much time with the shepherd on the other side of the valley..."
The old woman was clearly interested now, there was a bright glint in her eye. Beamish recognised it. It was the same look his Snow White had gotten every time she'd heard a bit of particularly juicy gossip. "She accused you of having an affair with a *shepherd*, not a shepher*dess*, but a shepherd?"
"Not, exactly...she accused me of having an affair with the shepherds, ermm, sheep."
"What?!"
"Well, they're just so fluffy, and soft, and - hey, there was NOTHING going on between me and those sheep!"
"Of course not dear." Beamish got the impression that the old woman was thinking the total opposite of what he'd just said.
"Anyway, I'm better off without her." he said defiantly. He didn't need Snow White, he could get along just fine withot her.
"I'm sure you don't mean that, you're just upset, that's all, that she could find seven other men more attractive than staying with you."
"No, I mean it. I think she was going a bit insane. She kept talking about a queen coming and getting her because she was the *most beautiful in all the land* - take it from me, Snow White was NOT the most beautiful girl in all the land. She wasn't hideously deformed, no, she was pretty, but she was also *far* to vain for her own good." Beamish tried to look innocent as he added "Believe me, I've seen *far* more beautiful women than her..." Beamish caught himself, "not that I've ever done anything with them of course."
He must have said it too quickly, because the old woman's eyes brightened even further. She stared at him until he gave in. "Well, I've NEVER done anything with seven of them at once, okay!"
Beamish thought, from the gleam in the old womans eyes, that she found him far too interesting to eat. Well, at least for as long as he could keep the gossip coming anyway...
The old woman was thinking exactly the same thing, almost. She didn't want to have to cook the young man, not when there was obviously plenty more gossip coming, but she alos didn't want to disappoint her husband. She didn't *want* to cook anyone, was it really *her* fault that her husband liked his meals to have some *body* in them. She despised doing it. He didn't have to hear them plead for help when they were inside. It had put her off the thought of eating meat for the rest of her life. So now she was a devout vegetarian, in the hopes that it would somehow make up for it all. But what else could she do. She couldn't leave her husband over his eating habits, she loved him too much, but neither could she persuade him that the *incident* with his sister and the 2 kids was no accident. The old woman had always wondered what kind of childhood her husband had, had. Not that she ever dared to ask.
The old woman encouraged Beamish to continue. "Surely, a little misunderstanding over some sheep couldn't have been all there was too it."
"I don't know. I just don't have any luck with women." Beamish thought about just how true that was, after all, pretty soon a woman would end up shoving him into an oven. "My last girlfriend was just the same. Well, she ran off wih a prince in the end, and she had a habit of leaving her shoes everwhere. I'm not joking, you'd walk down the stairs one morning and there would be one of her shoes. I think she even stole some of them. Not joking, I found a pair of crystal slippers in her wardrobe, and there was NO way she could have *ever* afforded them."
"What were you doing in her wardrobe?"
"Just looking, she had some *nice* dressess you know."
"Oh yeah?" Beamish got what the old woman was inting at.
"Look, I only tried them on that one time, OK, and it's not as if she was there to see it." Beamish was digging himself into a REALLY big hole. He could tell. "Look, what Cinderella didn't know never hurt her - well, it didn't until I ripped one of the seams trying to get out of it in a hurry..."
The old woman raised her eyebrows.
"I mean, what is it with princes and my girlfriends. You'd think every prince out there had a homing beacon that says 'Beamish has another lass, move in now and steal her'" Beamish gave a resigned sigh. "And if it's not princes, then it's always something else. Once, a few years back, I ended up in a right fix in the middle of another forest. I hadn't eaten for days, I'd ended up growing a huge beard, my hair was all straggly, then I found a cottage there. I knocked on the door, and an old woman answered. She said I could come in and get cleaned up, but I had to be quick because her granddaughter was coming over soon. I walked into her bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and fainted from the shock of it. I hadn't realised just how bad I looked. I looked like a hairy monster. Anyway, the old woman put me in her bed, and when I came round there's this little girl standing there with a basket in her hands. She was wearing this *lovely* red cloak, and I asked her if she'd come closer so that I could feel it. She was so cute, this little girl, you could have eaten her alive" Beamish winced at his bad choice of words "and I said so, not thinking she'd take me literally. She ran out screaming that a wolf, i.e. me, had eaten her grandmother and now wanted to eat her. Next thing I know, there's this man runs in at me with an axe, I barely had time to jump through the window and run away."
The old woman was hoping her husband didn't come back early so she could hear some more of the man's gossip. She was starting to feel sorry for him, not a good thing to feel about someone you're planning on cooking for your husbands dinner.
"And then," Beamish continued, he couldn't stop himself from talking, "there was this girl I was going out with a just before that, she was why I was in such a sorry state in the first place. Her name was Goldilocks, and I'm not joking, that girl could eat your entire house and then ask for seconds. She couldn't even go past a bowl of porridge without having to eat it. Well, that ended in tears, cos she started breaking into homes in order to eat their food and ended up in prison. I was sort of glad about that though, I was afraid that if I broke up with her she'd eat *me* alive." yet another bad choice of words.
The old woman was starting to pity him. Good, thought Beamish, perhaps she won't eat me.
"You poor, poor, man. You really don't have much luck, do you?"
"Nope." He knew as soon as he'd said it that his luck would get worse and that the old womans husband would choose that moment to walk through the door. He had his 'chain-saw' in one of his hands. It was still running.
Thankfully, because the door was open, Beamish could see that it had stopped raining. There were now far more advantages in not being in the gingerbread cottage. He lept for the door, thankfully being very experienced at avoiding other women's husbands, and bolted into the forest. He heard the woman shout after him "If you have any more gossip to tell me, please write. And YOU," Beamish gathered that she was scolding her husband, "how dare you stay out so late. You made me worry. You go galavanting off into the woods all day to *chop firewood* and expect me to cook any hapless soul for your dinner! I slave away here day and night -"
Beamish, now thankfully out of earshot, gathered that her names meaning only applied when scolding her husband. After a while he stopped running. That had been close.
He looked around. Now that the rain had stopped he could see further ahead, and the sky was a lot clearer. The moon revealed, in the distance, a castle on a hill. Hmm, thought Beamish, perhaps I can get my revenge on all those princes out there and steal *their* girlfriends for a change...
The End?
Not likely! The story continues at http://www.h2g2.com/A251641
There you go PP, it's not much, but it's all I can come up with at the moment. I know it's not the most original thing in the world, but I was pushed for ideas.
Hope you liked it!
8-)
It howled some more, then noticed a small camp fire on the outskirts of the clearing. A solitary figure huddled round it for warmth. The wind giggled, that's a high pitched, wobbly howl to anyone but another bit of wind, then rushed towards the camp fire.
The figure swore when the fire was blown out. He wasn't having too much luck so far today. On top of everything he'd had to suffer through for the past few weeks, he now had to deal with being cold, wet and lonely.
He didn't *like* being cold, wet and lonely. He positively hated it, but there was bugger all he could do about it at the moment.
He stood up, his boots squelching at him in complaint. There wasn't any point in his sitting there staring at a fire if there wasn't a fire to stare into.
Looking around for his horse he realised it had gone. One minute it had been there, the next, too-da-loo horsey..."bugger" thought the man. That meant he was going to have to walk. Not that he knew where he was going of course, now he was totally lost in the forest. He did have a map though, shame all the ink had run in the rain. Nevertheless he got it out and stared at it pointlessly for a moment. Then, after a few moments of contemplation, he walked out of the clearing.
He was definately lost. He didn't have the faintest idea of where he was going. Then, just as the rain decided to get that little bit heavier, he saw a light through the trees. He didn't care what it was, it was a light, and it gave him some sense of going somewhere.
Five minutes later he was standing in front of a gingerbread cottage, and despite all the tales he'd been told about gingerbread cottages and their occupants he knocked on the door. What did he have to fear? He wasn't a liitle kid that someone could have for supper was he?
The door opened a crack and, what a surprise, an old-ish woman poked her head round the corner.
"Who are you?" she asked, a faintly wobbly voice with a hint of iron in it.
"I'm Beamish. I'm also cold, wet, hungry and as an added bonus I carry the burdens of the world around on my shoulders."
The old woman eyed Beamish up and down. He was a little big for her oven, but she was sure that if she was clever she could *just* fit him in. Of course she'd have to lay off the seasonings if she was to have a hope of doing it, and he might be a little tough when he's done...
She invited him in.
Beamish stepped inside, out of the rain. He stood there dripping, a pool of water steadily growing by his feet. The old woman shut the door behind him and told him to sit down. Beamish walked towards the table, noticed just a smidgen too late that there was beams across the ceiling, bumped his head, and sat down. The old woman wandered off into the kitchen, to make him a cup off tea, of course.
Beamish leaned slightly over on his chair so that he could watch the old woman in the kitchen, he was slightly suspicious. After all, he thought, there has to be something starnge about her if she could live in a gingerbread house and *not* eat it. Sure enough, she put the kettle on, just like she said she would, then turned the oven on and got out a *huge* baking tray. Beamish eyed the oven up for size. It was a *big* oven...
...oh bugger, thought Beamish, why did he always have to wander in on these things. First, he goes into a old abandoned castle and finds a girl fast asleep, pricks himself on her spinning wheel, wakes up a while later, (thankfully he wasn't royalty so it didn't have that much of an affect on him) gets home, finds out that his girlfriend has just taken off with seven dwarves, then comes here just in time to be dinner.
He thought his ever so popular thought once more, bugger.
The old woman walked back into the living room and sat down opposite him at the table, teapot in hand. "I'm Lalage. Good, now you know my name and I know yours we're no longer, technically anyway, strangers. Tea?"
Crumbs, thought Beamish, she has it all worked out doesn't she. Beamish looked at the old womans face. Anyone who hadn't seen her firing up the oven wouldn't have had the faintest idea. Lucky for him, he *had* seen her fire up the oven. He thought it wisest not to drink the tea. "No thanks, I'm more of a coffee person myself."
"Coffee? Eugh, can't stand the stuff, so I don't have any in." Beamish noticed that although she'd brought 2 cups in, she wasn't drining the tea she'd pored out for herself either.
He wanted to get out of there, he didn't want to *be* dinner. He wouldn't mind *having* dinner though, he hadn't eaten in a long while, and he also wouldn't mind hidig out here in the gingerbread cottage until it stopped raining and he'd had a chance to dry out. He weighed up the odds. On one hand, there was the risk that he'd be eaten, on the other, there was a chance of getting dry again, asking for directions, sleeping a bit, eating something (though he hated to think what the woman had in her cupboards), and having someone to complain too.
He was willing to risk being eaten.
The old woman was a bit disappointed that he didn't want any tea. It wasn't as if it was drugged or anything, she'd even fished out the cockroaches in it for him. She'd decided not to have some herself when she realised that the liitle black things in the teapot had originated from the mouse tat had been hiding inside the teapot - but what *he* didn't know wouldn't harm him.
Beamish thought that the old woman wasn't really living up to her name, after all, if his Greek was any good at all, her name mean't chattering, and he wasn't hearing much of that right now.
Silence bore down upon the room. Beamish watched the old womans fingers twitch in anticipation. Perhaps if he got the ball rolling she'd talk, then forget about eating him.
"So, erm, are you married?"
Something about the way the woman looked at him changed. "I am. My husbands out in the forest right now, chopping some wood for the fire I presume."
"So he'll be along shortly, I tkae it? Axe in tow?" Beamish started to develop a nervous twitch around his right eye.
"An axe! Oh no, my husbands just invented this new thing, it's so much easier to use than an axe. He's called it a 'chain-saw' because it's a sort of chain which saws through things I suppose."
The twitch around Beamish's eye got more noticeable. He looked out of the window to see if it had stopped raining yet. It hadn't. So it was still, he supposed, more favourable for him to stay here...
The old woman continued the conversaton. "Are *you* married?" she asked, was that a hopeful glint he could see in her eyes?
"Err, no. My girlfriend just, sort of, ran off today."
"With another man?"
"No, with several other men. I suppose I had it coming to me, she'd been accusing me of spending far too much time with the shepherd on the other side of the valley..."
The old woman was clearly interested now, there was a bright glint in her eye. Beamish recognised it. It was the same look his Snow White had gotten every time she'd heard a bit of particularly juicy gossip. "She accused you of having an affair with a *shepherd*, not a shepher*dess*, but a shepherd?"
"Not, exactly...she accused me of having an affair with the shepherds, ermm, sheep."
"What?!"
"Well, they're just so fluffy, and soft, and - hey, there was NOTHING going on between me and those sheep!"
"Of course not dear." Beamish got the impression that the old woman was thinking the total opposite of what he'd just said.
"Anyway, I'm better off without her." he said defiantly. He didn't need Snow White, he could get along just fine withot her.
"I'm sure you don't mean that, you're just upset, that's all, that she could find seven other men more attractive than staying with you."
"No, I mean it. I think she was going a bit insane. She kept talking about a queen coming and getting her because she was the *most beautiful in all the land* - take it from me, Snow White was NOT the most beautiful girl in all the land. She wasn't hideously deformed, no, she was pretty, but she was also *far* to vain for her own good." Beamish tried to look innocent as he added "Believe me, I've seen *far* more beautiful women than her..." Beamish caught himself, "not that I've ever done anything with them of course."
He must have said it too quickly, because the old woman's eyes brightened even further. She stared at him until he gave in. "Well, I've NEVER done anything with seven of them at once, okay!"
Beamish thought, from the gleam in the old womans eyes, that she found him far too interesting to eat. Well, at least for as long as he could keep the gossip coming anyway...
The old woman was thinking exactly the same thing, almost. She didn't want to have to cook the young man, not when there was obviously plenty more gossip coming, but she alos didn't want to disappoint her husband. She didn't *want* to cook anyone, was it really *her* fault that her husband liked his meals to have some *body* in them. She despised doing it. He didn't have to hear them plead for help when they were inside. It had put her off the thought of eating meat for the rest of her life. So now she was a devout vegetarian, in the hopes that it would somehow make up for it all. But what else could she do. She couldn't leave her husband over his eating habits, she loved him too much, but neither could she persuade him that the *incident* with his sister and the 2 kids was no accident. The old woman had always wondered what kind of childhood her husband had, had. Not that she ever dared to ask.
The old woman encouraged Beamish to continue. "Surely, a little misunderstanding over some sheep couldn't have been all there was too it."
"I don't know. I just don't have any luck with women." Beamish thought about just how true that was, after all, pretty soon a woman would end up shoving him into an oven. "My last girlfriend was just the same. Well, she ran off wih a prince in the end, and she had a habit of leaving her shoes everwhere. I'm not joking, you'd walk down the stairs one morning and there would be one of her shoes. I think she even stole some of them. Not joking, I found a pair of crystal slippers in her wardrobe, and there was NO way she could have *ever* afforded them."
"What were you doing in her wardrobe?"
"Just looking, she had some *nice* dressess you know."
"Oh yeah?" Beamish got what the old woman was inting at.
"Look, I only tried them on that one time, OK, and it's not as if she was there to see it." Beamish was digging himself into a REALLY big hole. He could tell. "Look, what Cinderella didn't know never hurt her - well, it didn't until I ripped one of the seams trying to get out of it in a hurry..."
The old woman raised her eyebrows.
"I mean, what is it with princes and my girlfriends. You'd think every prince out there had a homing beacon that says 'Beamish has another lass, move in now and steal her'" Beamish gave a resigned sigh. "And if it's not princes, then it's always something else. Once, a few years back, I ended up in a right fix in the middle of another forest. I hadn't eaten for days, I'd ended up growing a huge beard, my hair was all straggly, then I found a cottage there. I knocked on the door, and an old woman answered. She said I could come in and get cleaned up, but I had to be quick because her granddaughter was coming over soon. I walked into her bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and fainted from the shock of it. I hadn't realised just how bad I looked. I looked like a hairy monster. Anyway, the old woman put me in her bed, and when I came round there's this little girl standing there with a basket in her hands. She was wearing this *lovely* red cloak, and I asked her if she'd come closer so that I could feel it. She was so cute, this little girl, you could have eaten her alive" Beamish winced at his bad choice of words "and I said so, not thinking she'd take me literally. She ran out screaming that a wolf, i.e. me, had eaten her grandmother and now wanted to eat her. Next thing I know, there's this man runs in at me with an axe, I barely had time to jump through the window and run away."
The old woman was hoping her husband didn't come back early so she could hear some more of the man's gossip. She was starting to feel sorry for him, not a good thing to feel about someone you're planning on cooking for your husbands dinner.
"And then," Beamish continued, he couldn't stop himself from talking, "there was this girl I was going out with a just before that, she was why I was in such a sorry state in the first place. Her name was Goldilocks, and I'm not joking, that girl could eat your entire house and then ask for seconds. She couldn't even go past a bowl of porridge without having to eat it. Well, that ended in tears, cos she started breaking into homes in order to eat their food and ended up in prison. I was sort of glad about that though, I was afraid that if I broke up with her she'd eat *me* alive." yet another bad choice of words.
The old woman was starting to pity him. Good, thought Beamish, perhaps she won't eat me.
"You poor, poor, man. You really don't have much luck, do you?"
"Nope." He knew as soon as he'd said it that his luck would get worse and that the old womans husband would choose that moment to walk through the door. He had his 'chain-saw' in one of his hands. It was still running.
Thankfully, because the door was open, Beamish could see that it had stopped raining. There were now far more advantages in not being in the gingerbread cottage. He lept for the door, thankfully being very experienced at avoiding other women's husbands, and bolted into the forest. He heard the woman shout after him "If you have any more gossip to tell me, please write. And YOU," Beamish gathered that she was scolding her husband, "how dare you stay out so late. You made me worry. You go galavanting off into the woods all day to *chop firewood* and expect me to cook any hapless soul for your dinner! I slave away here day and night -"
Beamish, now thankfully out of earshot, gathered that her names meaning only applied when scolding her husband. After a while he stopped running. That had been close.
He looked around. Now that the rain had stopped he could see further ahead, and the sky was a lot clearer. The moon revealed, in the distance, a castle on a hill. Hmm, thought Beamish, perhaps I can get my revenge on all those princes out there and steal *their* girlfriends for a change...
The End?
Not likely! The story continues at http://www.h2g2.com/A251641
There you go PP, it's not much, but it's all I can come up with at the moment. I know it's not the most original thing in the world, but I was pushed for ideas.
Hope you liked it!
8-)
