Proppian Fairy Tale Generator
It is said in the place where I live the soil is made of our people. People who toiled, sweat, cried, and screamed all bled into the ground and made us who we are today.
My father warned me never to enter the woods alone.
That sweltering afternoon day I opened the trunk my grandmother forbade me to open. Inside were a pair of leather bottomed shoes, a cap, and an empty canvas bag.
The man smelled my skin and laughed. “You smell like fresh meat,” he said. “You smell like you expect to be killed and eaten alive. What kind of boy would run around this fog like that?”
“What weighs you down will make you drown,” he said with a loud crescent shaped grin. I believed him. I may have been a fool but with my head thrown asunder by the crashing tides of water I took off my shoes and bag and threw them across the stream on the other bank.
Under my feet I felt the rhythm of aches and sighs breathe with each step I took. I felt like I was walking on quicksand. And indeed, when I tried to move my feet I could not feel my toes but only the inability to move them on the surface of palpable danger. When I turned to ask for his help he only laughed. Then I began to think it was he who was making my feet turn to stone.
Inside my head lived a frightened little boy who nibbled at his nails whenever a strange man glanced at him. I could not leave that fright alone.
From the mountainside I watched a giant crane fly down beside me and place two of its feathers onto my feet for flight.
“Let me go to find what I seek,” I said.
I never strayed too far from home because the thought of father returning home always came back to me. But when air blew away the last remnant of his scent I knew he would not return. So I set out, again, watching my mother’s stomach sink into the floor. I did not turn my head as I heard the people pull her into the ground.
When I walked far enough I saw my father’s body lying in the field of haze. In the side of his neck he wore a needle five inches long and three hairs thick. But before the final breaths left his throat he said, “Promise me, promise that you will take my bones and find them a good place to rest.” I promised this as his eyes shut for their last slumber.
After I took the needle from its place, I pryed my father’s bones from the floor and put them in my satchel.
The mists grew heavy. When I stretched my arm out I could not see past my hand, but it did not matter. When I closed my eyes my feet moved along with the rhythm of the mountain and its soils. Faster and faster I could almost feel myself fly.
A foreigner stopped me on my rise toward the mountaintop. He had one eye and loose skin that folded around his body like paper cloth. Laid before him was a set of colored tablets and sticks. “Stay for a game,” he said to me. “After you win your game with me I’ll let you go on your way.”
The blade struck me against my face and left a blood spot in the shape of a star.
I saw the familiar clearing with my father’s chopping block and the axe he used for splitting wood on the ground beside it. Home. I ran through the trees, the wind in my ears, my breath leaving my throat in heavy huffs, my feet slapping the earth beneath the trees of these woods, these woods that had stood between myself and my home for so long.
In my path stood a young pear tree, that, on first appearance looked wretched and covered with soil. But the second time I looked at it the sapling had already blossomed into a maturity. It grew pears the size of my mother’s hands. It waved to me with its branches, beckoning me towards the sweet fruit. As I attempted to climb the three, the leaves enclosed me and stung my skin with nectar.
I called out,”Help, please, help!” The white crane grazed the skin of my pursuer and held my shirt between its beak.
“If you are my son then where are your father’s leather bottomed shoes and ring?”
Everyone then stared through the guise of the false man beside me. The person, who acted as a substitute for my accomplishments, began to bite his nails in a rampant manner.
The needle from my tongue flung towards the lying man and struck him in the heart. It gave him poison at the place where it would hurt the most, and soon the man became a limp purple figure of stone.
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