How would you write the tale?

Mama’s Losin’ It Challenge

3.) Gregory MaGuire (author of books like Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister) is wildly popular right now (as is the musical Wicked). Write your own “re telling” of a classic fairy tale.

(As usual, please forgive the spelling/grammatical errors.  “I was not born under a [grammatical] planet.”)

Wendy the Frog Princess

The soft white lilies had closed and bade the warm summer day good night as Wendy slipped one long green leg, and then the other, into the warm tranquil pond. She held to the edge of one of the largest pads with her delicate webbed hands as she leisurely treaded up and down with her legs, making little swirls in the water behind her. She was quite at ease as she listened to the gentle chirps of insects and the quiet trickling of water accompanying this lazy evening’s sultry air. She watched as a fat fly buzzed by, oblivious to all things amphibious. Then, with a lightning fast flick of her tongue, she had a scrumptious dinner. No longer hungry, she dived to the bottom of her pond, stretching out her legs and arms between each stroke and thought about how carefree her life had been these past four months. She gazed thoughtfully, up through the water at a wave-rippled full moon and remembered the night of the ball, where she’d been told she had to marry the Prince of Tweed.

The prince was a spoiled, vain, narrow-shouldered dolt who probably couldn’t complete a sentence without including himself as the subject, object, indirect object and even the verb. Tweedy was the name she called him when she had to talk about him in civilized circles. Such circles, she thought, were better left unattended, leaving plenty of time for small circles of two, consisting of herself and her closed-mouthed cat, where the prince could be referred to as “Beady-eyed-Tweedy.”

At the end of that doomed ball, she was brought to the front of the assembly where she stood next to her father and step mother. On the other side of her parents stood Tweedy’s parents, the King Ronald Tweed, Queen Maud Tweed, and in her pudgy arms, their dog Pompy. At the end of the noble line stood Beady-eyed-Tweedy himself wearing tight powder blue leggings and a purple tunic. Wendy was tired from the ball, having danced all night with some of the most handsome men in the kingdom (some of whom she wouldn’t mind seeing at the next ball). There she stood, oblivious and daydreaming, as her mind revisited pleasant conversations, beautiful dance steps, and the fairy tale splendor of the evening. She was quite unaware that her father had begun to speak. She wouldn’t have noticed him speaking if her step-mother hadn’t bumped her side with one of her dagger sharp elbows in order to get her attention. Wendy had assumed it was just another, “thank you for coming” speech and the “we’ll see you at the next…” some event, speech. Annoyed, she looked up at her step-mother, then at her father, and then at the Tweed family. Everyone was very serious, or at least stiff and formal. Then she heard her name spoken by her father, “…my daughter, Wendy will, in one month, marry the son of the King and Queen of Tweed.” She wasn’t sure how long her mouth had been open or if she’d even said anything, but time had stopped for at least five seconds, after which reality made a banging and annoying crash right in front of her. “What?” She said, shocked, not sure if this was a nightmare. It had obviously been a shock and everyone knew it. As discreetly as possible, she was ushered out of the room, was placed into a large high-backed chair, where she was given a very short, but stern, lecture on court etiquette and then some further information concerning her betrothal. She was only seventeen, and had just gotten over her “physically-and-socially-awkward stage,” and was not at all prepared for the “surprise-betrothal stage,” which was, in her opinion, thrown far too often on young female members of royal families…(the tale goes on but not today…)