There was once a sad Queen whose infant twin daughters had been taken off by the Feathered Dragon. The Queen spent her afternoons sighing in the palace garden. She could be soothed only by the singing of Melodia, one of her young handmaidens. So beautiful was Melodia’s voice that songbirds from all the world over […]
Once deep down in the underground kitchen of a great palace a little sculger toiled for all she was worth day after day after day. The sculger, being the lowest servant possible, didn’t even have a name. The cook ordered her about with ‘Here, you!’ or ‘Hurry up with that, you!’ The sculger, up early […]
‘Go to the beach,’ her grandmother told her. ‘Sit on our favorite bench,’ her grandmother told her. ‘Here’s a sandwich. Wait there until noon,’ her grandmother told her. ‘And then watch closely,’ her grandmother told her. Ambelinda followed her grandmother’s instructions without hesitation. For her grandmother was wonderful, magical, enchanting, and she had raised Ambelinda […]
A long time ago a maid by the name of Hanna tended the three cows of the master, milking them, taking them to pasture in season, and returning with them to the byre each evening, where Hanna ate her gruel and then bedded down on straw in the loft. She was content with her lot, […]
Once before the world was as it is now, an old man and an old woman tended their sheep and worked at their looms to make a poor living as weavers. The couple was childless and often sighed in regret of an evening when the old man filled his pipe for a smoke and the […]
Far ago and long away a grandmother struggled to raise her granddaughter in a tidy cottage next to the windmill by the canal. One night, after a long day’s sweeping and scrubbing, the grandmother sat by the fire resting while Elsa, the granddaughter, prepared the gruel. A knock on the door sounding as if from […]
Once in a town not far from the palace there lived a baker’s apprentice. She toiled from well before dawn to far after dusk every day. She milked the cow, drew water from the well, chopped wood for the oven fire, gathered berries for pies and tarts, mixed the batters, kneaded and shaped the dough, […]
In the meadow at the edge of a great pine forest a tiny mushroom poked its head out of the ground. ‘I’m a mushroom,’ it said, surprising itself. ‘Why, I can talk. What a marvel! Say, green shoots, have you ever met a talking mushroom?’ The green shoots all around said not a thing. A […]
Ragwen, a California mountain elf maiden, lived comfortably in a set of spacious rooms under three boulders in the meadow. Unfortunately she was just the ornament the giant witch from the land of giants was looking for to display in a cage on the window sill close by the giant witch’s favorite cauldron. I say […]
All of the decorations gathered in the closet to discuss what should be done with the broken ornament. The broken ornament waited, trembling in a dark corner. ‘Throw her out of course, but in the nicest possible way,’ twinkled the silver icicles. ‘Broom, are you willing to sweep her outside?’ asked the grand gold globe, […]
