Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales Read online

  Eventually the king got married again, this time to a body-building gorilla from the suburbs. The new queen was fond of So What for about two minutes. Then she got over it.

  “You and I are going to get along or I’ll break your little neck,” she told him.

  “So what?” said So What.

  “So then you’ll have to wear a neck brace like a huge peppermint LifeSaver.”

  “So what?”

  “Say another word, So What, and so help me…”

  “So help you what?” he said.

  The gorilla queen threw a lamp across the room. She didn’t throw it at So What. She just threw it to release a little nervous energy. So What scampered away, laughing wickedly.

  In the days to come So What delighted in goading his stepmother into throwing lamps. She became quite good at it. Soon, if she got a decent head of steam up, she could heave a standing floor lamp a distance of a hundred fifty feet.

  But So What got on her nerves, and the king was lost in a fog of permanent deafness. He was constantly tooling conch shells into new hearing aids that So What stomped on. Between the smashing of lamps and the stomping on conch shells, it was one noisy castle.

  Finally the gorilla queen had had enough. She wrote a letter to the editor of Baboons’ Home Journal and asked for advice. The editor printed her letter (but in order to protect her privacy, changed her name from “Gorilla Queen” to “Worried in the Royal Castle”). The editor suggested hiring a local hunter to take the little troublemaker out into the woods, kill him, and cut his heart out and bring it back. “Check last month’s issue for delicious recipes, at just pennies a serving!” she concluded.

  The gorilla hired a hunter. He was a human being. Humans are good at hunting. But when the human being got So What to the clearing in the forest, So What fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness. “Please don’t kill me,” he cried. “I can’t help being nasty. It’s the way I am.”

  “Everyone can help how they are,” said the hunter firmly. But some humans are good at kindness as well as hunting. This hunter was one of those. He took pity on the little chimp and said, “Run for your life, So What, for that gorilla stepmother of yours doesn’t put up with any nonsense. If she finds I haven’t killed you, she’ll come after you and throw a lamp at you or something. One of these days the lamp will still be plugged in and you’ll get electrocuted. Run, run, I say, and I’ll buy a piece of chicken liver in the supermarket on the way home and tell her it’s your heart.”

  “You would do that for me?” said So What.

  “Humans are good at lying,” said the hunter. “Besides, a chicken liver is a tiny thing, and that’s about how big your heart is so far. I hope you learn some manners, my boy. If you were my chimp, I’d put you over my knee and give you a good spanking.”

  “So what,” said the chimp.

  “So long,” said the hunter, and he made good his promise. When the queen saw the chicken liver lying in a little Styrofoam carton, she cooked it up with onions and sherry and ate it for a snack. Then she went to tell her husband that their little boy seemed to have run away. The king got a flashlight and went to hunt in the hedges, but he couldn’t find his boy.

  Meanwhile, So What wandered in the forest looking for someone to annoy. He considered throwing stones at squirrels, or throwing squirrels at stones, but he could only find stones. It was too dark and gloomy in the forest for right-thinking squirrels.

  So What wasn’t used to being on his own and he became bored with no one to pester. But just before night fell, he wandered into a clearing in the middle of the big woods. There he saw the strangest house. It had a roof of straw and beautiful diamond-paned windows that badly wanted cleaning with a solution of water and ammonia. It had an overgrown flower garden in the front. And the whole thing was about as tall as a high school gymnasium.

  “Welcome to the Land of the Giants,” whispered So What to himself, and because he was curious and hungry, he crept closer.

  He opened the door, which was tall enough to carry a Christmas tree through without clipping the top branches.

  Inside, So What found a terrible mess. There were seven hooks high on the wall—much too high for him to reach, as he was only a little chimp. There was a table with seven enormously tall chairs, almost like seven stepladders. In another corner of the room there were seven long beds beside each other; they looked like seven lanes in a bowling alley. Except they were not made.

  “What a mess!” said So What. “Whoever lives here is a bunch of slobs!”

  So What looked for something to eat. The icebox was filled with about a hundred heads of lettuce. Then, because he was so bored, he began to trash the place. But since it was such a mess already, he couldn’t make it much worse. It wasn’t much fun.

  After a while he grew tired, and he fell asleep at the foot of one of the seven beds.

  He didn’t hear the noise of hooves tripping through the forest when evening came. But before long the door opened, and the owners of the tall house in the big woods came home.

  They were seven giraffes who worked at a nearby circus. Their names were Pumpkin, Goldskin, Jackielantern, Orangelight, Nimble, Limber, and Kimberly.

  “Someone has been trashing our house,” said Goldskin.

  “Who would bother?” said Nimble.

  “Someone has been thrashing and mashing our lettuces,” said Pumpkin.

  “Who would care?” said Limber.

  “Someone has been jumping on our sofa,” said Orangelight.

  “Someone has been thumping through our garden,” said Jackielantern.

  “Someone has been rumpling up the blankets on my bed, and here he is!” said Kimberly. “Isn’t he an ugly little thing!”

  Just then So What woke up to find the seven giraffes looking over him. They were still dressed in their work clothes: spangles, capes, tights, and caps with brightly colored ostrich feathers.

  So What had never been to the circus, and he had never seen giraffes before. He screamed like a psycho chimp.

  “Someone has a powerful set of lungs,” said Kimberly.

  “There, there, my dear. What brings you to our tall home in the forest?”

  When So What calmed down, he told them that his wicked stepmother had wanted to cut his heart out and eat it.

  “That reminds me, what are we having for supper?” said Goldskin.

  “Lettuce,” said her six sisters.

  “This is a horror story,” said Jackielantern to So What. “We giraffes will protect you. Would you like to stay with us and be our houseboy? We need some help. We work too hard to do housework at the end of a long day, and besides, we hate it. Life Is Too Short to Vacuum Every Day! That’s my motto.”

  “Work? Me work?” said So What. “Lady, you’re out of your gourd.”

  “It’s either work or walk,” said Jackielantern. “We’ll protect you if you keep our home as neat as a pin. If you don’t like the deal, find yourself somewhere else to hole up. We’re not the Witness Protection Bureau. Sisters, am I right? Back me up here!”

  The other giraffes agreed, and therefore So What was allowed to stay on in the tall house. Though he griped and whined about it, he learned how to do housework when the giraffe sisters were out at work in the circus every day. He got pretty good at folding crisp hospital corners in the bedsheets and keeping the very tall toilet spotlessly clean, with the help of a toilet scrubber the size of a floor lamp.

  So What begged to be allowed to come along, but the giraffes always said, “What if your gorilla stepmother comes to the circus one day and sees you there? That would be the end of you. No, my boy, stay home and polish the silver. And weed the vegetables. And clean the windows. And vacuum. And so on.”

  Though he still talked big, So What found he was glad he hadn’t been killed by a hunter and his heart served up as an hors d’oeuvre. He really rather liked being alive. From a mail-order catalog, So What bought a pair of stilts so he could hang up the giraffes’ circus clothes when
they came home and flopped into bed, one after the other, like a whole stand of pine trees being felled by a chain saw.

  Back at the castle, the king could hear better now that no one was around to stomp on his ear trumpets. He began to listen to what his new wife was saying, and he realized that he had made a mistake choosing her for a wife. But she had developed such a powerful arm with that lamp-throwing business that he was afraid to cross her. So he stayed in his throne room most of the day, reading the paper.

  The gorilla queen bought a full-length mirror at a garage sale. Every morning after breakfast she went to her boudoir and gazed at herself. She practiced making muscles. One day, making “I’m the champion!” victory signs at herself, she said,

  “Mirror mirror on the wall,

  Who’s the strongest of them all?”

  To her surprise, the mirror spoke back to her. It said,

  “Gorilla Queen, Gorilla Queen,

  You’re the strongest I’ve ever seen.”

  “Well, fancy that, a chatty mirror,” said the gorilla. “And one that tells the truth, too. Thank you, mirror.” Then she kissed the mirror, but she was really kissing herself.

  One day, however, the gorilla said,

  “Mirror mirror on the wall,

  Who’s the strongest of them all?”

  This time the mirror answered,

  “Gorilla Queen, you preen and strut.

  You’re not the strongest, though. So what?”

  “So What!” seethed the gorilla. “Do you mean that little twerp is still alive?”

  “Unless you talk in simple rhyme,

  You’re simply wasting both our time,”

  said the mirror.

  The gorilla queen clenched her teeth and tried again:

  “Where does he live? Is he near? Is he far?

  Tell me, you stupid flat-faced mirror!”

  The mirror thought for a bit. Far and mirror aren’t really rhymes, and the scansion was dicey. But at the expression of the gorilla, the mirror decided to let it pass. It replied,

  “In a house with seven lady giraffes,

  He is the houseboy. How’s that for laughs!”

  The gorilla queen lost no time in firing the hunter who had given her the chicken liver. He found another job as the ringmaster at the same circus the giraffes worked for.

  The gorilla queen looked up the giraffes’ address in the phone book. Then she sat down and thought how she could kill So What. She wanted to be the strongest of them all. Down into her exercise dungeon she went and did a hundred push-ups for inspiration.

  Finally she had an idea. She could poison him! If he was so strong, he must be a mighty eater.

  She raced to the market and bought a bunch of bananas, and then she barreled into the library and looked up how to poison them.

  It was but the work of an afternoon to coat the banana with a very special yellow poison that looked just like the skin of a banana. The fact that it smelled like a slice of toxic salami was a bit worrying. But the gorilla queen disguised herself as a Merry Maid of the Forest and sprayed on eight ounces of Jungle Spirit, a new cologne she’d read about in Baboons’ Home Journal. She went bounding like a triathlete through the forest, carrying a basket of bananas with her.

  When she found the tall house in the forest, she pounded on the door until So What came to see what the racket was. He was still a little chimp. He didn’t look so very strong. But she couldn’t take any chances.

  “Pardon me, kind sir. I’m selling fresh bananas,” she said in her sweetest voice.

  “So what?” said So What.

  “Would you like to buy one?”

  “No,” said So What, “I’m in training. I hope to get a job in the circus someday, so I’m doing my housework as fast as I can and working out for the rest of the day. Besides, I don’t have any money.”

  “This one doesn’t cost anything,” said the gorilla queen. She threw the poison banana at him with the deadly accuracy for which she was so well known. It slid right down So What’s throat. “Yum,” said So What, making a face at the smell, and he fell over on the floor.

  When the seven giraffes came back that evening, they found So What in a dead faint. Jackielantern called the trauma center, and over the phone the nurse explained how to do the Heimlich maneuver.

  Orangelight held So What’s arms, and Limber held his legs, and the others counted to three, and Kimberly crossed her delicate legs across So What’s chest and pulled with all her might. The lump of poison banana shot out.

  “Yuck,” said the giraffes.

  “I’m alive again!” cried So What.

  “When you’re feeling a little better, clean up that mess,” said Pumpkin. “That’s what comes of snacking between meals.”

  “But this banana was poisoned!” cried Nimble, who was sniffing at the banana with her nimble nose. “Where did you get it?”

  So What explained about the Merry Maid of the Forest selling bananas.

  “This sounds suspicious to me,” said Goldskin.

  “Better not answer the door again unless one of us is here to protect you,” said Kimberly. “You may be getting stronger, So What, but you’re still young and immature and a little stupid. Though in a pleasant way,” she added, when she saw how hurt he looked.

  The next day the gorilla queen spoke to her mirror again. She said,

  “Mirror mirror on the wall,

  Who’s the strongest of them all?”

  The mirror answered,

  “Your mighty arms and chest and butt

  Are not the strongest now. So what?”

  “That little creep is a disaster area waiting to be declared!” cried the gorilla queen. She flipped through old volumes of Baboons’ Home Journal and looked for sewing patterns. She found a design for a pair of fancy silk athletic shorts. She wasn’t much for sewing, but she bought some material and a needle the size of a hypodermic and stitched together a dazzling pair of athletic trunks with silver sequins and a peekaboo slit on the left thigh. Then she dressed herself up as a Dizzy Dame of the Forest and went sprinting through the woods.

  When she got to the tall house in the clearing, she hammered on the door and said, “Attention inside! You may have won this smart pair of athletic shorts! Would you like to answer one simple question and see if you’ve won?”

  “No,” cried So What through the window.

  “That’s the correct answer! You’ve won first prize!” cried the gorilla queen. “Open up the door and try these on for size, big boy!”

  So What knew he shouldn’t open the door, but the snazzy shorts looked so terrific that he couldn’t help himself. He came outside and admired the fine needlework on the shorts. “If my friends ever take me to the circus, I could wear these when I’m shot from the cannon!” he said. “It sort of turns my stomach to talk to someone as hideous as you, but may I try them on?”

  “They’re yours; do what you like,” said the gorilla queen.

  So What took off his apron and his yellow plastic gloves and dropped the toilet bowl brush with which he’d been scrubbing. He put on the shorts. They looked swell. “Here, let me tie them for you,” said the gorilla queen, and she reached for the strings around the waistband. “Breathe in.”

  So What breathed in, but not enough. The gorilla queen yanked those strings so hard that his breath left him entirely, and he fell down in a dead faint. Then the gorilla queen tied the strings in a double trouble sailor-boy knot and sealed it with glue and sealing wax and a small bit of quick-drying cement she carried in her purse, so the knot wouldn’t come undone. Then she vaulted away, cackling like a witch.

  When the giraffes came home, they saw So What by the front door. He was nearly gray with lack of air.

  The seven giraffes had strong teeth from all that lettuce nibbling. Besides, Pumpkin and Goldskin were excellent trapeze artists and, daily, hung from a rope by their teeth at the highest point of the big top. So all seven of them set to work on the waistband.

  Fina
lly they had nibbled it through, and the waistband relaxed. So What breathed in such a big breath that all the furniture inside the house came rushing from the suction and got stuck in a clot in the doorway.

  When he could speak again, he said, “Aren’t these the best shorts you ever saw?”

  “They need a new waistband,” said Nimble. “Where did you get them, So What?”

  “From a pretty sorry-looking Dizzy Dame of the Forest,” said So What, but he bowed his head in shame when they told him he had almost been murdered once more.

  “You misbehaved again,” said Orangelight. “Do you know how we would feel if we lost you, dear boy?”

  “So what,” he muttered, but really he felt terrible. “I wouldn’t be doing this if you’d let me come to the circus with you!” he cried. “I’m sick of all the housework!”

  “No, the wicked gorilla queen might see you there,” said the giraffes. “It’s too risky. You must stay home and you must stay inside until you grow even stronger and better able to take care of yourself. You’re a good strong chimp, but are you any match for a gorilla? We think not. Behave yourself, now.”

  The next morning the gorilla queen said to her mirror,

  “Mirror mirror on the wall,

  Who’s the strongest one of all?

  You’re lying if you name that chimp.

  Compared to me, he’s a wilting wimp.”

  The mirror said,

  “Why do you want eternal youth?

  Why shouldn’t furniture tell the truth?

  Queen, you’re stuck in a dismal rut.

  Who cares who’s strongest now? So what?”

  The queen was so furious that she threw a floor lamp at the mirror and broke it into a million pieces. It never offered another opinion again.

  Then the queen had an idea. She got some handcuffs and a blindfold and some rope and she dressed herself like a policewoman and went swinging through the jungle. When she got to the tall house in the big woods, she let herself slam against the front door and she cried out in a huge and horrible voice, “This is the police! We have you surrounded. Open up!”