Hansel and Gretel Get the Word on the Street
You have tried leaving
a trail of bread crumbs
that will take you
back home to father,
but the grackles
eat them as soon
as your little sister
quits shooing them away.
The rest of the story
is scarier. There’s
a witch at the edge of town
who will lock you
in a rabbit hutch.
She plans
to eat you, once
you’re fattened up. After
which, the plot turns
confusing. I’ve
blocked it out
on account of the
violence, but I know
that you are pressured
to eat fast food: French
fries, hamburgers, chocolate
shakes. You’re
required to stick
a bone, rather than
your finger through
the chicken wire.
Of course, only a moron
would confuse
a chicken bone for a finger,
but the word on the street
says you have to fake
your weight-gain. Eventually,
you’ll catch the witch
off-guard. Then,
you slip out of the hutch,
push her in a pot
of boiling canola, and
get this, you eat her
candy house.
The witch, they say,
is mostly blind, probably
in the late stages of
macular degeneration. She has
lost her glasses,
and that’s another part of
the story that I just
can’t digest. The old
lady is shrewd.
She has chewed up little
boys like you for years.
She works chat rooms
for gosh sakes.
She deploys multiple
user-names like Sweet Thing,
Tootsie Roll and Honey Buns. So surely,
a hag that savvy
owns dozens
of Wal-mart reading glasses.
-Al Ortolani
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