Dear Readers,
We would like to invite you to take part in a new project called "From Stories to Books".
The Stories for Everyone Team have been, for some time, gathering and selecting books that provide some sort of reflection on the fundamental ethical principles of
our society, such as solidarity, courage, honesty, respect for differences and a sense of justice, matters that have deserved the attention of writers from various
nationalities.
Therefore, the Stories for Everyone Team proposes to send, together with the usual weekly stories,and also free of charge, full texts of selected books.
In case you are interested in receiving each week, by email, a chapter of an extensive reading book, all you have to do is send an email to
books@storiesforeveryone.com or stories4ev@gmail.com by writing the following sentence in the subject field:
"Yes, I am interested in participating in the project From Stories to Books."
Hoping that this new proposal will meet your utmost interest, we look forward to your reply.
The Stories for Everyone Team
The little girl behind the window
Once upon a time, in a grey and cold country, there was a king who loved a little girl.
The girl was so pretty that the king had fallen in love with her. Because he always wanted her beside him, he cast a spell on her and she was transformed into a doll. He offered her necklaces and velvet hairpins and, every night, he spent a long time with her. He lay by her side and caressed her with such passion that the doll almost choke.
When the sun rose, the king went away and the doll was left alone. The room door was not closed. The doll could go out and even run away, but, as she thought the king would be brokenhearted, she dared not do it. Her cotton legs prevented her from walking and, as she had no mouth, she was afraid to get lost and not be able to ask for the way back.
So, when the king left, she sat by the window, her face against the cold glass pane, looking sadly at the street. That´s how her lips eventually disappeared. First, they became transparent, like the glass, and then they vanished completely.
Her days went by, endless and gloomy.
One day, she saw a little boy playing in a garden. How she wished she could go to him! But because she had no mouth, she could not even call him.
With a heavy heart, she spent the following days spying her new neighbour, hidden behind a curtain. In the evening, the king, alarmed by the sadness of the doll, held even tighter and tried to cast away the grief that petrified her long lashes and darkened her eyes. Sometimes, his grip was so strong that she felt deeply frightened.
One day, the little boy felt he was being watched and, climbing the balcony, called out for the doll. At first, the strange little girl behind the curtain refused to show herself. But when he pretended that he was going away, she opened the window with her eyes full of anguish. Although she was dumb, she tried to mime her story. The boy did not understand everything but he guessed the depth of her suffering and understood her most insistent request: the doll wanted a mouth. How could he find such a thing?
Fortunately, the boy´s mother was a fairy. Together, they walked around the winter gardens that were still asleep, and they found out, at the corner a wall, two small violets that were just beginning to blossom. The boy took them gently and the mother put the two buds on the white skin of the doll, one on top of the other.
The doll opened her blue lips and stammered, ´My legs are made of cotton. I need stronger legs to be able to run!´ The boy and her mother made her a pair of legs out of a birch branch. They were thin but solid.
The doll played all day long with her friend. When the evening came, he went home. However, the doll could not make up her mind whether to return to the king´s house. The truth was that she did not want to go back any more...
When the king came home, he looked for her everywhere. While he was looking, his huge shadow cast horrific reflexions on the curtains and his hands looked like claws... Hidden behind a hedge, the doll was trembling. Despair ate at her heart, but fear stopped her from pushing the door open and having to stand the king´s hands and kisses all over her body, as well as his censures.
Filled with cold and with nowhere to go, she nested against the withered bark of an old oak tree. She tried to sleep under a carpet of dead leaves. She was certainly going to die there. The wind cast his frozen fingers all over her and penetrated her skin as snow needles that would certainly kill her before daybreak.
Suddenly, a hand caressed her face. Someone lifted her from the ground and the doll felt she was flying. She landed gently on a bed that seemed like an ocean of feathers, under a wonderfully warm quilt that smelt of lilies and lavender.
She woke up in the morning with the soft hand of the fairy caressing her hair. She stayed there for the rest of the day.
As soon as the sky became black and the stars began to shine, the fairy waited for the king to return. When he arrived home, he sat on a garden bench, where he remained for hours, as if he had been covered by an ice cloak. As soon as the fairy moved towards him, he ran away, hiding his face. That was when she saw that he did not have a mouth either.
(To be continued in the PDF attachment)
Enemy Pie
It should have been a perfect summer. My dad helped me build a tree house in our backyard. My sister was at camp for three whole weeks. And I was on the best baseball team in town. It should have been a perfect summer. But it wasn´t.
It was all good until Jeremy Ross moved into the neighborhood, right next door to my best friend Stanley. I did not like Jeremy Ross. He laughed at me when he struck me out in a baseball game. He had a party on his trampoline, and I wasn´t even invited. But my best friend Stanley was.
Jeremy Ross was the one and only person on my enemy list. I never even had an enemy list until he moved into the neighborhood. But as soon as he came along, I needed one. I hung it up in my tree house, where Jeremy Ross was not allowed to go.
Dad understood stuff like enemies. He told me that when he was my age, he had enemies, too. But he knew of a way to get rid of them. I asked him to tell me how.
"Tell you how? I´ll show you how!" he said. He pulled a really old recipe book off the kitchen shelf. Inside, there was a worn-out scrap of paper with faded writing. Dad held it up and squinted at it.
"Enemy Pie." he said, satisfied.
You may be wondering what exactly is in Enemy Pie. I was wondering, too. But Dad said the recipe was so secret, he couldn´t even tell me. I decided it must be magic. I begged him to tell me something—anything.
"I will tell you this," he said. "Enemy Pie is the fastest known way to get rid of enemies."
Now, of course, this got my mind working. What kinds of things—disgusting things—would I put into a pie for an enemy? I brought Dad some weeds from the garden, but he just shook his head. I brought him earthworms and rocks, but he didn´t think he´d need those. I gave him the gum I´d been chewing on all morning. He gave it right back to me.
I went out to play, alone. I shot baskets until the ball got stuck on the roof.
I threw a boomerang that never came back to me. And all the while, I listened to the sounds of my dad chopping and stirring and blending the ingredients of Enemy Pie. This could be a great summer after all.
Enemy Pie was going to be awful. I tried to imagine how horrible it must smell, or worse yet, what it would look like. But when I was in the backyard, looking for ladybugs, I smelled something really, really, really good. And as far as I could tell, it was coming from our kitchen. I was a bit confused.
I went in to ask Dad what was wrong. Enemy Pie shouldn´t smell this good. But Dad was smart. "If Enemy Pie smelled bad, your enemy would never eat it," he said. I could tell he´d made Enemy Pie before.
The buzzer rang, and Dad put on the oven mitts and pull the pie out of the oven. It looked like plain, old pie. It looked good enough to eat! I was ditching on.
But still. I wasn´t really sure how this Enemy Pie worked. What exactly did it do to enemies? Maybe it made their hair fall out, or their breath stinky. Maybe it made bullies cry. I asked Dad but he was no help. He wouldn´t tell me a thing.
(To be continued in the PDF attachment)
Derek Munson
Enemy Pie
San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2000
Posted by: Stories for Everyone - AS <sg@storiesforeveryone.com>
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