which_chick | (no subject)

Once upon a time, there was a woman, neither old nor young, who lived in a little house far back in the woods. She heated her house by setting wood on fire, a heating method of prehistoric provenance, but what the hell... she lived in the woods and trees were nearly free. It came to pass, one day, that her yard became full of logs, there being an unseasonal surplus going on. The woman stacked logs busily after work, but more logs kept arriving due to the aforementioned surplus. This particular day, she was tired after a long day's work and had no desire to stack any more logs. However, again due to the aforementioned surplus, there were to be even more logs, a surfeit of logs, arriving the following morning. Unless something got stacked, there would be no place to put the new logs and then the high lord of logs would thunder and lightning his disapproval of the woman's general slacking of stacking the unseasonal surplus of logs. Clearly, that was a fait better left unaccompli, to butcher a phrase. (Looks good on the hook, doesn't it?)

It is at this point, in traditional fairy stories, that the woman waits until evening and then puts out a bowl of milk and hopes for fairies or brownies or smurfs or whatever the hell to actually do the work, which they will, of course, do, provided that the woman is poor-and-goodhearted and not rich-and-cruel. Unfortunately, the woman in our story is a bit more rich-and-cruel than she is poor-and-goodhearted. The odds of her suckering in a brownie or a wood stacking fairy via a bowl of calcium-enriched skim are pretty fucking small assuming that such things (small, helpful woodland folk, not bowls of calcium-enhanced skim) are real. (I'm pretty sure small, helpful woodland folk are not real, a sad fact that drops the odds of succeeding via the bowl of milk strategy beyond infinitesimal even for the poor-and-goodhearted folks.) However, this isn't a traditional fairy story.

If this were a fractured fairy story, the woman would awake the following morning to discover that no wood had been stacked but also that the wood-stacking fairies of Local #72 had disbanded due to habitat loss (overbrowsing by cervids) some years ago and only the secretary remained, to leave explanatory notes as to why wood wasn't stacked following a proper bowl of milk request by a suitably poor-and-goodhearted soul. Either that, or they'd stack the wood and leave an invoice, with union labor rates putting the cost of the job somewhere near the GNP of Poland (188 billion dollars in 2000, see here). This isn't a fractured fairy story, either.

There was no bowl of milk set out.

There was no magically stacked pile of wood the following morning.

There was one unsupernatural stacker of wood who, with evening closing in and the whipporwills cranking up their shrill, repetitive, very loud, entirely unromantic song, stacked all the fucking wood and raked up and removed the wood bits that invariably fall in the yard to kill the grass if they're left to lay.

If anything, this proves that my life is not a fairy story. Big surprise there, I'm sure.