The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

The Three Lil' Bears - A Twisted Tale

By [Dark Side of the Moon]


We’re all familiar with the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. The bears went out for a morning ramble whilst their porridge cooled and Goldilocks wandered intrepidly into their home, tasted the porridge, sat on the chairs, tried the beds, fell asleep, and awoke to have the bejesus scared out of her when she saw the three of them ogling her as she slept. I think the moral of the story was supposed to be “stay out of houses of strangers”…or some crap like that.


But that wasn’t quite the end of the story, you see.


The next day, Papa Bear was mending Baby Bear’s broken chair whilst Mama Bear cooked another pot of porridge. Baby Bear sat on a stool in the corner with his nose wrinkled up as he watched Mama Bear.


“Why do we always have to eat that stuff?” he asked disgustedly.


“Porridge is full of fiber,” came the answer. “It’s nature’s broom,” she added, with Baby Bear’s whining voice mocking hers.


“Isn’t there a reason why we have claws and fangs?” he protested as Mama Bear scooped porridge into his bowl. He slogged over to the table and sat down in a huff. Papa Bear seated himself and then Mama Bear took her place. Each tasted their porridge in turn.


“Mine’s too hot,” Papa Bear said in annoyance and dropped his spoon into the bowl. “Every morning my porridge is too damn hot to eat.”


“Mine’s too cold,” said Mama Bear after testing hers.


Papa Bear’s eyebrows knitted together. “Well now isn’t that an oddity?” he asked sarcastically. “It comes from the same pot right off the stove and by some anomaly of thermal physics it’s now ice cold.”


Baby Bear studied his porridge for a moment. “Then by process of elimination that means that mine is just right.”


“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” Papa Bear said, holding up one paw. “Some little blonde haired girl is supposed to come in and say all of this.”


“Why can’t we eat some meat?” Baby Bear spouted.


Both parents gave him the “be quiet” look. Baby Bear sat back in his chair, crossed his arms, and glowered at the bowl in front of him.


“My killing instincts are wasted on this crap,” he mumbled sourly.


Papa Bear stood up. “Let’s go for a walk whilst our porridge cools.”


“Mine’s already cold!” Mama Bear protested.


“And mine’s just right!” responded Baby Bear.


“You didn’t want it when your mother was cooking it!” Papa Bear said in great annoyance, as he pointed a claw at his son.


“What about mine?” Mama Bear asked.


“It’ll heat up while we’re gone,” he answered in a surly tone.


“We can’t leave,” his wife said. “Haven’t you learned anything from yesterday?”


“You mean that little shit that came in and ransacked our house?” he asked. “We scared the hell out of her. She won’t come back.”


Papa Bear turned to the door and grabbed his hat from the hat rack. Sensing that his family was not following him, he said:


“We are going for a WALK! This family never does anything together.”


Both Mama and Baby Bear rose reluctantly from the table and followed Papa Bear out of the door.


“You know, if we were real bears,” began Mama to Papa, “it would just be me and Baby living here and you’d be out on your own somewhere.”


“When are you going to stop calling me ‘baby’?!” cried Baby Bear. “I’m eighteen now.”


“All of you shutup!” yelled Papa Bear.


And so as they argued they wandered into the deep, dark forest.





***


Not long after they left, a shadow slid silently along the wall at the back of their house. It moved cautiously to the front, to the very door by which the bears had just left. And just like the day before, the door stood wide open. Not smart.


In went the shadow followed by an almost vampyric girl. Her black dress complimented her black hair and eyes, making her already pale skin even more so. The chains about her waste clinked softly as she stepped carefully through the door in her Frankenstein-type black boots. She held a black sack in one hand. Once inside she took a sniff of the air. Her face screwed up in disgust as she walked to the table. She looked into Papa Bear’s bowl.


“I don’t care how the story goes, I am not tasting that shit,” she said mumbled aloud to herself. She went along the table and quickly dipped her finger into each bowl.


“Ow, too hot. Yikes, too cold. Ah, just right.”


She espied the three chairs sitting silently by the hearth. She went to Papa Bear’s chair first.


“How the hell did Goldilocks get up there?” she asked as she studied the height.


She went to Mama Bear’s chair.


“This was built for a pigmy,” she said in disdain.


Then she went to Baby Bear’s chair and stood on it.


“Juuuuuuuusssst right.”


She pushed the chair over to the pantry, opened it, and pulled out the cookie jar. After every cookie was consumed and her stomach purged, she climbed the stairs to the bedroom, twisting her ankles a few times on the way up because of the god-awful boots that she was wearing. She finally made it to the beds. The little girl took a shiny new penny from her pocket and bounced it off of Papa Bear’s bed. The penny jumped straight up and lodged itself into the ceiling.


“Too hard.”


Now Mama Bear’s bed. The little girl bent down to the black sack that she dragged at her side and untied it. Inside was a beautiful cat with amber eyes and long, snowy white fur, which had actually been chocolate-colored up until the moment of its demise. Its face was distorted in sheer terror and its tail was three times its normal size. The girl lifted the cat out by the tail to hold it up in front of her. The cat, now three days dead, stuck out straight.


“Nice kitty,” she crooned with a wicked smile. She dropped it onto Mama Bear’s bed. The mattress, since it was too soft, immediately swallowed the rigid feline. The girl breathed a sigh of relief. She had found a place to hide another of Goldilocks’ “missing” pets.


The girl pivoted on one foot until she faced Baby Bear’s bed. From what her sister had told her the day before, this one was just right. She climbed upon the mattress and began to jump on it, here and there, all over the bed. Yes, this one was just right.


But then…


The three bears were ambling back to the house, still in a heated argument over the temperature of the porridge and the consumption of meat. They stepped across the threshold to find that their house had once again been visited. Baby Bear’s chair sat by the pantry with the cookie jar next to it, void of cookies but full of cookie scented vomit. Papa Bear began to turn red in the face under his fur. He went to the table to look at the bowls of porridge. All three were still intact except for one strange feature: an impression of a single print driven deep into each one.


“Someone stuck their finger into my porridge!” Papa Bear fumed.


Mama Bear looked into her bowl. “Someone stuck their fin…” she began.


“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Papa said, cutting her off.


Baby Bear studied his for a moment. “I’m not eating that now,” he said as he pointed at it. “I don’t know where that hand has been.”


Just then there was a loud thump up the stairs. All three jerked their heads in the direction of the sound. They scrambled up the steps in haste. To their great and everlasting surprise, there was another human child in the bedroom, sitting primly in the middle of Baby Bear’s bed with a magazine in her lap. Papa Bear put his hands on his hips. The little girl looked up at them.


“Yo,” was her only word as she gave a nod of her head toward them. She returned her attention to the magazine.


“Who are you?!” Papa Bear shouted.


“Mouldysocks,” the girl answered. “You were pretty mean to my twin sister yesterday.” She turned the page of the magazine. “What kind of garbage is this?” she asked as she held it up to them. The centerfold revealed a princess lying naked atop a pile of mattresses with a pea sitting in her belly button.


“Baby Bear!” Mama yelled in shock.


“It belongs to Dad!” he yelled back as pointed an accusing finger at his father.


Mama Bear turned her look of shock to her husband. He gave his wife a glance and a nervous smile then turned to his son. He reached forward and grasped his arm firmly in one paw.


“We’ll talk about this later,” he said to the young bear through gritted teeth.


“What are you doing in our house?” Mama Bear asked Mouldysocks.


Mouldysocks tossed the magazine aside and took a nail file from the nightstand. “Your door was open,” she answered as she rasped her black nails down to the quick.


Mama Bear gave Papa a quick slap. “I told you we should have locked the door!”


“This is a nice place you rugs got here,” Mouldysocks said. “Think I’ll stay awhile.” She flopped herself down on her side and closed her eyes.


“You can’t stay here!” Baby Bear spouted. “That’s my bed.”


“I saw a couch downstairs,” Mouldysocks answered, her eyes still closed. “You’ll fit on it.”


Suddenly Papa Bear let out a ferocious roar.


“That supposed scare me?” the child asked in response.


“Yes it is,” he replied angrily.


Mouldysocks opened her eyes and turned her head toward the three of them. “You bears eat porridge. Who the hell ever heard of a vegetarian bear? That kind of tells me that the three of you are nothing but milquetoasts. ” And with that she closed her eyes again.


Later that night, a heavenly aroma drifted through the kitchen. Mama Bear threw out all of the porridge in the house. Papa and Baby sat at the table cutting jokes after an especially wonderful dinner. Who would have thought that a child named Mouldysocks would have barbecued so nicely?





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