In the time of castles a sad queen slipped into the woods on a blue moon midnight. She hurried along the glow of a path lighting up in front of her as she muttered over and over again, ‘Never forever.’ When the cottage appeared under a drapery of vines, as she had been told it […]
The village baker, dusted in flour head to toe, waved his rolling pin high and shouted orders. The Queen had decreed two dozen walnut cookies to be delivered that afternoon in time for a gathering of regal importance. The baker’s wife and daughter raced here and there, down to the cellar, out to the pasture, […]
Long ago, giants stepped down from the sky and moved into the ice caverns on the snowy peak of the high mountain. There they lived content until one day the giants’ daughter, Bredla, stomped into her parents’ chamber. ‘I’m leaving to go see flowers. Fendak, the falcon, told me about flowers. He says they’re pretty […]
Once in Egypt when the pyramids were young two royal beetles scuttled at dawn from the palace to the long and lonely road home to the quarry. ‘Well, Eleanor, I tell you, that certainly was a hard day’s night, and that’s a fact,’ said Robert, the larger beetle, and he sheened a most lovely green. […]
Once upon a time a woodworker’s apprentice named Trundle, troubled yet again once more by murky dreams of sliding darkness, tossed and turned on his bed of wood shavings. A woman, seen below as she appeared to him, loomed in the murk of his dream and sang this song: ‘Bronze to silver, silver to gold, […]
Once it happened that in the dead cold grip of winter a young maiden tended to her failing grandfather, a cobbler no longer able to practice his trade due the long and hard fought victory blindness and its ally arthritis had won over him. Covered with scraps of leather, the grandfather huddled on the hearth […]
The Blue Bingle Chapter One Next to a charming and nasty moat on a pile of sticks lived the blue bingle. It was larger than a hen, but smaller than a forest. In happy desperation one day the blue bingle decided to travel far, wide and narrow in order to satisfy its curiosity about the […]
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 […]
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 […]
