Post 48

So. I'm cleaning my room (meaning that I'm desperately searching for something I've lost and finding all kinds of stuff that I never thought to look for), and I found a little note I jotted down while subbing in a high school one day.

On that particular day, I was subbing an English class. I had them read an ironic twist on a classic fairy tale, and then we all went to the computer lab for them to create their own ironic twists on classic fairy tales. They typed and printed and turned them in, and I, having nothing else to do, read them while I sat there. Some were good; some were not so good. One in particular, though, stands out in my memory, and this note is an excerpt I jotted down with the express purpose of blogging about it. The story was entitled "Pinocchio." It's been several months since I read it, but I will do my best to tell you how it went:

There was an old puppet maker who made wonderful puppets. And then he died. His widow--um--I forget--got lonely or something. Anyway, she decided to make a puppet to keep her company, so she went to a forest where gnomes were cutting down trees. She asked them if they would cut her some wood, and she did her best to keep her eyes averted as she spoke to them because everyone knows that looking a gnome in the eyes will make you die. The gnomes told her that she didn't want any of that wood because it was cursed, and then they left, refusing to give her any wood at all. But it just so happened that the gnomes accidentally left behind a piece of wood that was the perfect size for making a puppet [deus ex machina]. She took this piece of wood home, carved it into a puppet, and went to bed. When she awoke in the morning, the puppet was staring over the edge of her bed at her. She was surprised to see that the puppet had come to life, but the puppet lamented that he was not a real boy. She asked what it would take to make him a real boy, and he told her that just a little bit of pixie dust would do the trick. It just so happened that the woman's deceased husband kept a little pixie dust on hand [deus ex machina], so the widow took it out of the cupboard, sprinkled some on the puppet, and watched as it turned into "a little boy pale in skin and rosy in cheeks."

As I was reading, I was mildly amused by all the deus ex machina being flung around (the italics and the bracketed notations are my thoughts not what was actually written). What I have paraphrased above took me right to the bottom of the page, but there was a second page. I flipped to it and saw a small paragraph. I fully expected it to say something about how the woman and the puppet lived happily thereafter, but instead, this is what I read:

"So two things happened that day. The puppet became a real being and the old widow learned to never give a puppet made of cursed wood pixie dust to come to life, otherwise you have a vampire on your hands."

Haha. Not very eloquently expressed, but that totally makes all that deus ex machina worth it!