Rumpelstilzchen with a dash of noir

It's fun to write. It's also fun to screw with old fairytales and make them new and fresh again. Ask Chronos, she should know. Politically correct bedtime stories anyone? (I fear for the sanity of her future children.)

Anyhoo, we had to try our hands at rewriting the introduction of Rumpelstiltskin in either epistolary or teen angst genre. Due to a few bad experiences involving novels with letterhead I decided to tackle teen angst. Couldn't be that bad, eh? After all, I'm a teenager. Should come naturally. Should. Funnily enough, it did, and the whole thing came spilling out with barely any blood along the way--although I think we may have lost a peasant here or there. (Pff. Peasants. Nobody gives a toff about them anyways. Er, what are you looking at, Chronos?)

Cue cut, because the "introduction" is massively long, at 793 words. And they only asked for 300. -snickers-

They always go by the book. Beginning, they say, then middle, then end. Or maybe they try to be fancy and slick and go from end to beginning to middle. Me, I don’t try that. I don’t want to pull a quick trick on you and run off laughing after the story’s done. But I don’t want this to be an ordinary story either, because it ain’t, it’s my story and I don’t make much sense of it so it shouldn’t to you either. Let’s start from the middle, eh? Just because.

I’m sitting in a room—a room full of straw—and oh, you had better believe that this is hell. See, I’m allergic to the stuff. Can’t stand it. My nose itches up something awful and I get this terrible urge to unravel my socks. That may sound like a pretty odd allergic reaction but it could be worse is what my papa says. But then again, he says a lot, and that’s what got me in here with this mucky chaff in the first place.

I guess it all started with a beer. It usually does, for my papa. He was sitting in Ye Olde Newe Testamente Tavern talking to the plants on the countertop when I opened the doors. The bartender looked at me sympathetically over his washing-rag and said, “This’ll be his seventh.” I walked right past him. I don’t take sympathy. It’s only an accent away from pity, which is only a misspelling away from spite.

You’ve got to be careful around my papa. When he’s drunk and in a confessing mood he’ll skip the church for anything that stands still long enough—including plastic flowers, telephone poles, the neighbour’s bulldog and occasionally other people. He was in a confessing mood today; I could tell by the way he looked like he was about to cry when I moved the geraniums away. To placate him I leaned in closer, caught his beery whisper in my ear: “I’ve just told the king you can spin straw into gold, m’darling,” my papa confided, and then he sort of fell off the barstool.

So under the circumstances I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a fat man in a cape and a rakishly tilted tinfoil hat waiting for me outside the house when I finally got back from patching Papa up. Took me a moment to see that it was the King. I did a little curtsey because that’s the polite thing to do when badly dressed persons of influence prop themselves up on your fence and greet you with a greedy leer.

“What’s your name, my girl?”

“Ella, your sire.”

“Well, Ellie, I have a proposition for you.”

“If it’s about straw to gold, my King, then I can’t help you there.”

“We can be reasonable about this, can’t we, Ellen?” he said smoothly; and quick and thoughtless as a bee I said, “Well, I can, but nobody’s sure about you.”

He curled his lip a little. It was like watching a snake trying to make faces in the mirror and losing. Then he beckoned his guard over and they picked me up—easy as that—zpicked me right up and popped me in this horrible huge room flooded to the knees with the thickest, softest straw you’d ever seen. My nose started tingling. Goddammit, Papa, why straw of all things? Couldn’t you have said I could boil eggs till they hatched into little diamonds? I could have handled that. I liked eggs fine. But straw… My fingers started twitching, and I knew my socks wouldn’t last long here.

I whirled around to face the king. “What am I here for?” I screamed. “You can’t possibly believe my papa’s rubbish!”

He sneered at me. “I want all this straw spun into gold by nine tomorrow morning.”

“I told you, you imbecile, I can’t make anything from straw but beer coasters!”

“By nine AM sharp tomorrow, girl, do you hear me? Or off with you!” And I didn’t think he meant to the seaside, either.

Snick, snick, handle’s turned, key’s gone, king’s gone. And I am all alone in a sea of straw.

***

And, well, here I am. The reason why I started off saying that I’d never tell you anything from end to beginning to middle is because I don’t know my end. It might be tomorrow, from the looks of it, if I can’t spin this blasted straw into gold by the time the king gets his creeping fingers around the door handle at nine o’ bloody clock in the blooming bloody morning.

My right sock is nearly gone. My nose is red. I can’t take this anymore.

I wish someone would just come and help me.

WARNING! RANDOM MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION COMING THROUGH!

I've been meaning to use the name Ella Chapel for a while. Here I got my chance. -evil laughter-

And on that note, adieu for today. You shan't be seeing more from me.

~Mnemosyne