PRINCE CHARMING AND LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

 

“I’ve had enough! Completely and absolutely had enough!” Prince Charming kicked the table leg with such fury that it snapped, turning the tabletop into an inclined plane that served as a slide for the dinnerware. Plates, china, glassware, and silver cutlery tumbled down without restraint, producing a crash worthy of a battlefield.

“And what did I do now?” sobbed the Pink Princess. (In other tales she had other names, but it is not worth mentioning them; this is a matter best left to the reader’s imagination.)

“What didn’t you do?” howled the Prince. The offspring, terrified by their father’s shouting, took refuge among the folds, petticoats, and ruffles of their mother’s dress. “You didn’t wash or iron my shirts; instead of cooking delicacies worthy of my refined palate you keep ordering ready-made food from the kingdom’s delivery services; you claim perpetual migraines at bedtime; and you smell like Hildegard the swineherd. Shouldn’t you bathe once in a while?”

“And how do you know what Hildegard smells like?”

In response, the Prince merely swung his arm overhead, grabbed the Ruger .44 from the gun cabinet, left the palace, and mounted his snow-white steed, galloping off toward the forest.

Minutes later, somewhat calmer at the prospect of venting his irritation on a wolf’s body, he dismounted, tied the reins to a birch tree, and, gripping the weapon firmly, plunged into the undergrowth. Women from hell, muttered the noble knight as he trod the carpet of leaves that autumn had thoughtfully laid beneath his feet. One pampers them, grants them status, treats them like fairy-tale princesses, and they repay you with slights, indifference, neglect. (Not for a moment did it occur to Prince Charming that such chauvinistic demands had been swept aside by the changes human society had undergone in recent decades.)

So absorbed was he in his meditation that he failed to notice that his steps had led him to a cabin set in a clearing, that the door of the humble dwelling stood open, that upon crossing the threshold he stumbled upon a grotesque scene, and that his trained warrior’s reflexes and his man-of-action instincts drove him to aim and fire the Ruger. As a result of this (I shall not linger over details that the reader can surely supply, filling in the gaps my ineptitude leaves in the body of the story), Prince Charming found himself with a dead wolf, a badly injured old woman (who would die hours later in the Kingdom’s Hospital for the Poor, an event recorded in official documents as “collateral damage from an accident”), and a teenage girl wearing a flowered nightgown and a red hood. The girl, Prince Charming determined without hesitation, was of an age to receive the attentions that only a noble-born knight can bestow.

“You saved my life, hunter!” said the girl in the hood. “You’re a hero!”

Prince Charming swallowed, and as he removed his doublet and shirt, told himself there would be time later to explain the misunderstanding and make it perfectly clear that he was no hunter at all.