RAPUNZEL FRATRICIDE

A nonsense tale, really.

The Princess Rapunzel needed a haircut.

She'd had delicious long locks since the day she'd been born and, in fact, her hair almost got caught up in and tangled with her umbilical cord on that fateful day when she squawked her first.

There was, in the Kingdom, a brash and winsome Prince who always wore the tidiest pair of shorts you ever did see and whose own hair was somewhat lacking. In fact, to say it was somewhat lacking is to under-egg the situation: let's agree that he was bald.

He loved riding on his grey mare from here to there and back again across the countryside. He would pause under horse chestnut trees and lie with his back against their gnarled old trunks and dream of the princess of his dreams.

But every time he chanced upon a princess that almost fitted the bill it was to be rejected because of his baldness.

“What pretty young and desirable princess such as I would want to be seen dead with a baldie such as you?” they would sneer, and tears would enter his eyes and he would move on to the next princess where he received very much he same treatment. It seemed that, even though he had a generous heart and his legs were superior to most legs (which is why he always wore beautifully laundered shorts), princesses throughout the world noticed his lack of follicles. It was as if Nature, in her wisdom, had bestowed such splendour elsewhere.

Back to Rapunzel, the little darling.

She, as has been noted, might have been extinguished during birth due to an entanglement, but she wasn't. The midwife successfully and using the sharpest scissors she could find, managed to extricate her from the womb and deliver her to her mother after a messy hour with rusty forceps.

“What monster have I forced down my birth canal?” shrieked that woman, a surrogate mother (the Princess Rapunzel's biological mother not wanting to spoil her waistline with something as messy as pregnancy). The Queen, who had bestowed an egg on that wretched surrogate, immediately ordered that she be beheaded for producing such a dire monstrosity from so perfect a maternal egg. The King (a generous enough fellow anyway), took the poor woman to the woods, had his wicked way with her without telling the Queen " at least a dozen times if the truth is to be told - and paid for her to dwell in a woodcutter's hut where she gave birth to a son, learned to speak fluent Portuguese and sailed overseas quite a few years later.

But, to all intents and purposes, the Princess Rapunzel was a hideous creature. It wasn't just her interminable locks and the way they waved around as if each strand had a twitching muscle of its own. She was cross-eyed, had a huge mole on her nose (which itself was a deformity of the most cruel kind) - and she was incontinent.

She was locked in the highest room in the tallest tower in the kingdom where no mortal eye would catch the least glimpse of her ugliness, and there, it was decided, she would stay for the remainder of her days. She was fed and watered by an automatic system involving valves and pulleys and her other needs were similarly catered for in such a way that no living eye caught the least glimpse of her..

And so the years began to pass. Out in the forest and before her embarkation to Portugal the surrogate mother gave birth a second time (she had been visited clandestinely by the King more than once over the years), this time to a perfect infant with shining eyes and hardly any hair, and so perfect was her b*****d child that he was adopted by a neighbouring King and called Prince after that monarch's favourite dog.

Many, many years started passing.

The Princess Rapunzel reached the dizzy age of seventeen without seeing another mortal being, and believed (as would anyone in her isolated situation) that she was the only person in the Universe. And as the years passed and she reached that marvellous age her hair grew even longer whilst her features that had made all declare that she was uglier than a frog after it has been run over by a steel-rimmed carriage wheel gradually became more normal. She wasn't to know it, but then she wasn't to know anything, but those birth defects that had caused all to hold their hands high in horror were more the consequence of the aforementioned rusted forceps at birth than innate wretchedness on her part.

And the bald Prince rode by.

He noted the tower, the tallest he had ever seen, and he also noted there was a high room at the top,

“Is anyone there?” he bellowed.

She heard his voice and went to the high window in the high room and stuck her head out of it.

She called out in a loud, clear voice, but the sounds she made were, of course, unrelated to any language under the sun because she had never been provided with sufficient company for verbal communication to be achievable.

Then she did the impossible. Or at least improbable. Or possibly most unlikely.

She allowed long fibrous tresses of her hair to descend down the outside of the tower until they somehow reached the ground, and the prince, not knowing they were the beautiful princess's hair, set about climbing up them.

It was quite a job, forcing his way into the high cell where the princess had been incarcerated, but he managed, and without saying a word to her he cut off a huge armful of her hair and fashioned himself a wig out of it. Then he preened and posed himself in front of a looking glass, and smiled and winked and made all manner of facial ticks that signified approval of his brand new wig.

On her part, she watched, aghast. Her hair was being mutilated! Her beauty was being stolen! Of all the cheek!

And she leapt upon the once-bald Prince, dug her long and sinewy nails into his flesh neck, and killed him there and then.

And so Rapunzel remained where she was, unrescued. Sad, really.

And the bald Prince rotted in a corner, creating quite a stink if the truth were to be told, and she never did discover the truth, that genetically the poor soul had been her half-brother, son of a King and a surrogate mother now living in Portugal with a beau and a half.

Reviews

[Chinmay]

The END !!!??? What happened in the end ! That was so not expected.

[Peter Rogerson]

Sometimes I set a scene for my readers to finish as they please.