Welcome to short monday. Where I work my way through short story books, poetry books, and whatever else that can be qualified for a short monday. (Please excuse me while I work out the kinks and find the right path for this.)
To be perfectly honest, I was dreading this book. I'm several stories in now, and, I actually like them. I guess I thought these would be a little more...horrifying. Not to high extremes of blood and guts everywhere, but, well my problem is that I hate even suttle horror. Horror is actually too strong a word here, gross, is more like it. I prefer not to think of it at all, avoiding it whenever I can...I simply hate being grossed out. It's not fun for me in any way, or even slightly amusing. I know it can never be completely avoided, especially in some books. But I digress.
Anyhoo, in this story a mother goat goes out to find food and leaves her seven little baby goats alone, and there is a wolf stalking around the woods that has been trying to eat them. She warns them about him and tries to teach them how to recognize him if he comes to their hut trying to fool them. Being satisfied her babies will be safe, the mother goat leaves and of course, the wolf shows up at their door shortly after. His first attempts do not fool them, but after disguising himself enough to get into the hut, he finds and eats all but one. When the mother goat returns to find her children have been eaten, the youngest one comes out of it's hiding place and tells her what happened. They both run off in sadness and they come upon the very full, sleeping wolf in the meadow. After checking him out, the mother goat notices that his stomach is stirring, believing her children to still be alive inside of him, she runs home to get scissors, a needle, and thread. She returns to the still sleeping wolf, and cuts open his stomach, and amazingly, out pop her six eaten babies. (Oh, boy!) She then tells them to collect large stones to fill his stomach back up so he won't know the difference. Once he awakes, he does know the difference, but he is so thirsty he goes down to the brook to get a drink. But being so heavy with stones, he falls in and drowns, and the goat family literally sings for joy.
I guess ultimately I'm more shocked than grossed out by this book. I'd heard things about these fairy tales that were really gross, but I haven't come across it (yet?). I just have this image of fairy tales in my head...sweet and happily ever after. Basically Disney-fied. (Nothing wrong with that.) But, when you think about it, those come from something that have gross original backgrounds, don't they? Or at least, sad and depressing backgrounds.
Not much else to say, at least until I do my own little history search on fairy tales and how much of a gross factor is usually there.
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