Way off in icy Norway
lived a queen bulldog. This queen was
quite an insecure dog, as you
might guess, considering she was a bulldog in Norway, spending her life
surrounded by graceful Norwegian elkhounds.
So it was not surprising that she wanted to have nothing to do
with
mirrors, even magic ones. She did,
however, have quite a nice magic dog bowl that talked to her from time
to time,
when it didn’t have food in its mouth (which was, unfortunately, most
of the
time).
This magic dog
bowl not only had the power of
speech, but it also was capable of performing incredible feats (not
quite of
the jumping-through-a-hoop variety), so one day the queen got it in her
mind
that she wanted a dogter, and she asked the bowl for one: “Magic Dog
Bowl, I
want a dogter. I want a beautiful
dogter, with lips as black as poop, fur as white as…um…parasitic worms,
and a
nose as brown as…(she thought long and hard)…poop!
She sighed as she said this, because she would have given her
eyeteeth (which were her canine teeth, which were all
her teeth) to have fur as white as intestinal worms.
The magic dog bowl
responded in verse, “Uml gencha
gonga, ymfafhu ngongl pfang—Umgle-ee ma bumb bl, ma bumb bl cendu!” Clearly it had food in its mouth again.
Fortunately the
queen was accustomed to listening to
her dog bowl’s diction, and she translated, “You will get your dogter,
and
that’s a solid fact—she we will be so beautiful, more beautiful than
you!” What the queen didn’t know is that
the dog
bowl finished off under its breath, “how couldn’t she be?,” and what
the dog
bowl didn’t know is that the queen was thinking she really had to get a
magic
dog bowl that could rhyme better.
Nonetheless,
the queen soon got her dogter. She called
her Snow Black-White-and-Brown,
and loved her with all her heart. For a
little while. But soon she got tired of
her puppy and told one of the humans in the castle to take her out to
the pond
and drown her. This was, naturally, a
perfectly acceptable means of disposing of unwanted children.
This particular
castle human was particularly
malicious, and would not have hesitated to drown little Snowy, had he
ever
managed to get to the pond in the first place.
As it was, Snowy’s incessant whimpering drove him mad, and he
dropped
her, running off into the woods mumbling and raving.
Poor Snowy!
Her sense of direction was as bad as a dog’s could be, and she
couldn’t
find her way back to the castle no matter how loud she whimpered. She ended up wandering farther and farther
away from her home, until she came upon a little mansion in the woods. She marked it as hers and then went right
in.
There was no one
inside, but there were seven little
beds lined up along the wall. The first
one had a name on the headboard: “Sleepy.”
So did the second one; it was labeled “Sleepy” too.
The third was labeled “Sleepy,” and the
fourth and fifth were labeled “Sleepy” and “Sleepy,” respectively. The name on the sixth bed was “Sleepy,” and
the last bed featured the name, “Sleepy.”
Snowy sat on the
floor in confusion, and pretty soon
the door opened and in strolled seven cats, singing a little ditty:
“Why should
we bother to work? Do do do do do do
doo! Who said anything about work? Do do do do do do doo!”
“Well, hello,
what’s this?” said the one that Snowy
thought might be named Sleepy.
“It’s a dog,” said
another.
“Hey, dog,” said
one that might have been called
Sleepy. “Fetch, would ya?”
Upon this, Snowy leapt into action, chasing
manically around the room, fetching whatever looked like it might be
useful.
After they got
Snowy calmed down, the seven cats
decided that she could be a valuable tool, and so they tolerated her
presence
in their mansion. Snowy liked it just
fine, except that she could never remember their names.
Meanwhile, back at the castle…
The queen had decided it was time for
another
puppy. “Dog bowl, dog bowl, on the
floor, please furnish me with a dogter once more.”
“You know, my queen,
I’d be glad to give, but I
can’t while your Snowy still doth exist.”
“What!?” yelped the
queen. “Snowy’s still alive!?”
The queen was very much offended and decided to kill Snowy once
and for
all. Disguising herself as an ugly old
beggar (it didn’t take much disguising, considering she was a bulldog),
she
laced a dog brush with poison and set out to find Snowy.
“Combs for sale, brushes for sale!” she
called out, pacing around the cats’ mansion.
“Combs for sale, brushes for sale!”
Snowy hated being brushed, and she wouldn’t have bought one at
all, but
the peddler wasn’t showing any signs of leaving, so finally Snowy went
out and
bought the poisoned brush. The queen
went home happy, thinking that her dogter would surely be dead when she
got
there. Snowy went back into the mansion
and threw the brush in the garbage.
So that plan didn’t work.
When the queen got home and asked the
dog bowl for a
dogter, she got the following response: “You know, my queen, that I
love you,
but that task I simply cannot execute.”
The dog bowl finished under its breath, “I wish she’d leave me
alone!”
The queen was getting quite irritated
because, not
only could her magic dog bowl never rhyme, but her dogter was still
alive, and
furthermore, she hated to hear any word with “cute” in it, seeing as
she was so
ugly herself!
Again she disguised herself as a
peasant, and this
time she thought up a foolproof plan and enchanted a dog biscuit for
Snowy’s
consumption. She went to the mansion,
called out her wares, and Snowy was out the door before she could say,
“Biscuits for sale” the second time.
Snowy scarfed down the biscuit so fast that she nearly
asphyxiated
herself, but since it was enchanted and incapacitated her anyways, that
wasn’t
a big issue. In fact, the biscuit saved
her from choking to death by holding her in suspended animation.
When the cats got home from another hard
day of
eating and napping, they saw Snowy on the floor and thought she was
dead. They put her in a glass coffin so
they could
watch her decompose, which they thought would be very amusing, but
since she
was in suspended animation, she didn’t do anything of the sort. She just sort of sat there, which bored the
cats to no end.
Meanwhile, the queen
persisted in asking her dog bowl
for another dogter. The dog bowl, which
felt quite irritable, snapped, “I can’t do that; that is known…so you
stupid
queen, just leave me by myself!”
“You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you!”
shrieked the
queen. “You really can give me a
dogter, but you just don’t want to!”
And she stalked off. As well as
a bulldog can stalk.
Years passed.
One year a prince happened to be passing through the forest on
his way
home from his first aid class, and he stopped at the mansion to pass
the night.
“Zowie!” he yelped when he saw Snowy.
“That beautiful princess is…suffocating to
death!” And he opened the glass coffin
and performed the Heimlich maneuver on her.
Out popped the biscuit and open popped Snowy’s eyes. She and the prince got married right away.
When the dog bowl (which had fallen into
disuse
after its fight with the queen) learned of this, it instantly called to
her,
“Queen, oh queen, I wish to tell…Your sweetest Snowy’s alive and
kicking!”
“Shut up, dog bowl,” said the queen.
“I hate you, you hate me, and everyone knows
your rhyming bites.”
“Oh, yeah?” retorted the dog bowl.
“Well, take this!” And he smacked
the queen over the nose with a rolled-up
newspaper.
The cats found this extremely boring.
