The Tallness Pea
In a far off medieval land, a princess celebrated her fifteenth birthday. One of her gifts was a magic pea, which she ate, and promptly grew to ten times her normal size. The doctors tried to cure her, and the court wizard tried to melt her back to size, but these failures only resulted in embarrassing scars and a couple of beheadings. After a year of being ten times her normal size, the princess gave up all hope of ever being normal-sized again.
She took up knitting, but found it unrewarding, because she had to knit ten times longer than regular people did in order to get a finished product. Jazzercise was likewise useless, because even though she kept in shape, she found that princes were not interested in marrying her. By the second year of being ten times larger than normal, she was in a deep depression. The castle halls had all been heightened so that the princess no longer had to crawl on hands and knees -- instead she only had to duck down into a hunch. This had been a great expense which caused the king to be somewhat resentful, and the king's artist had grown to despise the princess because the widened castle halls were much uglier than the short, attractive halls that had been there before. Likewise, the cook, gardener, horse trainer, and fencing instructor held obvious grudges. The princess, who was shy and had no friends, eventually decided to run away from home. Nobody followed her.
She didn't go far before she found serfs toiling in the field. They ran in terror of her, but she calmly picked up two of their plows and began plowing the earth for them. She was very good at it. In the coming months, the serfs came to call her The Plow Goddess, and though she didn't really make life much easier for them (because she ate so much of what she tilled), she raised their spirits and made them happy, and she felt like she had a purpose in life.
On her eighteenth birthday, she suddenly shrank back to normal size. Her wicked grandmother's curse had run its course. When the king heard, he sent for her to return to the castle at once. The Plow Goddess was no more, but her hands would never be the hands of a princess...
She took up knitting, but found it unrewarding, because she had to knit ten times longer than regular people did in order to get a finished product. Jazzercise was likewise useless, because even though she kept in shape, she found that princes were not interested in marrying her. By the second year of being ten times larger than normal, she was in a deep depression. The castle halls had all been heightened so that the princess no longer had to crawl on hands and knees -- instead she only had to duck down into a hunch. This had been a great expense which caused the king to be somewhat resentful, and the king's artist had grown to despise the princess because the widened castle halls were much uglier than the short, attractive halls that had been there before. Likewise, the cook, gardener, horse trainer, and fencing instructor held obvious grudges. The princess, who was shy and had no friends, eventually decided to run away from home. Nobody followed her.
She didn't go far before she found serfs toiling in the field. They ran in terror of her, but she calmly picked up two of their plows and began plowing the earth for them. She was very good at it. In the coming months, the serfs came to call her The Plow Goddess, and though she didn't really make life much easier for them (because she ate so much of what she tilled), she raised their spirits and made them happy, and she felt like she had a purpose in life.
On her eighteenth birthday, she suddenly shrank back to normal size. Her wicked grandmother's curse had run its course. When the king heard, he sent for her to return to the castle at once. The Plow Goddess was no more, but her hands would never be the hands of a princess...
posted by Eric Heimburg at 11:00 PM
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