I penned the following short story for a friend of mine who, frustrated with her failed efforts to put her children to bed at night, put out an open call for new bedtime stories. Being a writer, I, of course, rose to the challenge, and quickly put together this very Grimm-esque fairy tale:
There were once two children who would not go to sleep at night. Their mother, frustrated by her own lack of sleep, decided instead to try a different approach:
'Fine,' she exclaimed, 'Do what you will! From this point forward, you can stay up as late as you want to stay up, so long as your lack of sleep in no way negatively impacts what you have to do during the next day.'
The children, thinking that this was a fair deal jumped for joy!
'No more bedtime?" the children asked, amazed at their mother's magnanimity, 'This can't possibly be real!'
'It's very real,' the mother said, smugly. 'But, if your lack of sleep begins to impair your daily performance, the consequences will be dire for you both.'
The children, caught unawares by what they thought had been a deal too good to be true, asked their mother what the consequences would be.
'You think your father and I are mean for making you go to sleep, and maybe we are,' the mother calmly began, 'There are, however, those who profit from children how don't sleep, and frankly, you two cost us more money than you're really worth. So, if your performance starts to lag during the day from your lack of sleep, your father and I have decided to sell you to a Chinese businessman who has shown interest in your workload potential. He thinks you'd make an excellent addition to his sweatshop.'
The children sat in their bed aghast at the thought of being sold to a sweatshop owner in China, but they were confident in their ability to stay awake at night and still be attentive and productive the next day, and so, with little thought, they agreed to their mother's offer.
What folly!
For the first week, the children managed to live up to their part of the bargain. They never went to sleep at night, so much as they eventually passed out from exhaustion, tired from their long days and nights of cavorting, galavanting, and generally bawdy romping.
The second week, however, things began to change for the worse. The children, certain that their mother had been joking about her end of the bargain, continued with their experiment, despite their failure to stay active, attentive, and productive.
And lo and behold, much to their dismay, after the third week of their experiment, the children came home one evening to find that their parents had a visitor - a strange man, dressed in a black cape and a grey suit, with a sharp looking wooden cane and shoes shined so brightly that the glare from the overhead lamp temporarily blinded the children...which was unfortunate, as they failed to see the money exchanging hands.
With little ado, the parents, satisfied with the deal they had struck with the strange and sinister looking man, unceremoniously stripped the children of their nice, store-bought clothes, and outfitted them with the thin, dirty cotton rags they had once used to dust the house and clean the kitchen, each rag sewn together to form two makeshift tunics cinched in the middle with a thin piece of cord. Taken away were the nice, expensive shoes so lovingly selected at the children's shoe store, and the children were left standing in their bare feet on their parents' nicely waxed hardwood floor. Even the glasses given to the eldest child to correct his eyesight were ripped off his face, leaving his vision blurry, so that he couldn't make out the difference between the sinister stranger and his former parents.
The stranger, pleased with his purchase, barked orders at the children in Chinese, but as they were unfamiliar with the language, they stared dumbly at him, and wondered aloud to no one in particular, 'What did he just say?'
Incensed that his two new acquisitions were showing recalcitrance, the stranger brandished his cane and proceeded to beat the children unmercifully, ignoring their screams of agony as he used the cane to herd them out the front door and into the trunk of his limousine.
Their parents, though saddened by the unfortunate sale of their two former children, took yet another opportunity to count the $20,000 paid for each of them, piling the money into neatly stacked and properly faced stacks of $1,000 until they had 40 sets of equally valuable bills spread out across their coffee table.
'Do you think we should have sold the children to that awful, yet generously compensating Chinese businessman,' the father, who had always been the Good Cop asked.
'Perhaps not,' acquiesced the mother, 'But, they had to learn the error of their ways, eventually. Nothing in life is certain; not for any of us. A long, hard slog in an un-air conditioned factory may be the best thing for them. I know that we, certainly, will finally be able to get some sleep, at night.'
The father, initially awestruck by his wife's blunt response, took a few moments to consider her justification of the sale, and eventually took her hand and said, 'That's true. And let's face it, we made out like bandits off this sale! If we'd kept them, we would've had to spend 200 times the amount of money we made off their sale just to raise them and send them to college!'
His wife, and former mother of the two soon-to-be-sleep deprived sweatshop workers, burst out in gleeful laughter at the thought of all the money to be saved from selling off their two largest deficits.
And thus ends the story of the children who wouldn't go to sleep at night, and their parents who, unlike their former children, will get to live happily ever after.
No comments:
Post a Comment