QWC #3: Peck of Pickled Peppers

[Redlass]

We may have to come up with a different name than "quickie" 'cause I'm not so sure this next one can be done quickly. I just received the following tale in e-mail and it gave me idea for a writing challenge:

Prodigal Progeny
Re-wording a Bible story, fondly:

Feeling foolish and frisky, a feather-brained fellow forced his fond father to fork over the family finances. He flew far to foreign fields and frittered his fortune, feasting fabulously with faithless friends. Finally facing famine and fleeced by his fellows in folly, he found himself a feed-flinger in a filthy farmyard. Fairly famished he fain would have filled his frame with the foraged foods of the fodder fragments left by the filthy farmyard creatures.

“Fooey,” he said, “My father’s flunkie fare far fancier,” the frazzled fugitive found feverishly, frankly facing facts. Frustrated by failure and filled with foreboding, he forthwith fled to his family. Falling at his father’s feet, he floundered forlornly, “Father, I have flunked and fruitlessly forfeited family favor.”

But the faithful father, forestalling further flinching, frantically flagged the flunkies. “Fetch forth the finest fatling and fix a feast.” But the fugitive’s fault-finding brother frowned on the fickle forgiveness of the former folderol. His fury flashed.

But fussing was futile, for the far-sighted father figured such filial fidelity is fine, but what forbids fervent festivity? The fugitive is found! “Unfurl the flags, with fanfares flaring! Let the fun and frolic freely flow! Former failure is forgotten, folly is forsaken!”

Forgiveness forms the foundation for future fortitude.

So here's the challenge:

Pick another well-known story (be it a fable, parable, fairy tale, whatever) and pick one letter. retell the story while abusing alliteration.

Daresay, I decline. I don't delight in demonstrating dictionary-driven drivel.

Here's a lame twist on the challenge. Take an existing story or fable and take a different perspective on it:

"Unlike Father, Unlike Son"

You may have heard the tale of Rip Van Winkle, my lad, but have you ever heard the tale of his son?

Not too long ago, Old Van Winkle fell victim to Henry Hudson's spirit and played away 20 years of his life at ninepins, sawing wood at the foot of a tree by the edge of the mountains. He came back to find that his family, his town, and his whole life had moved on without him, but he didn't suffer the worst of it.

Van Winkle's son, Rip W., he suffered the most. Without his father around to raise him proper, providing for his brothers, sister, and mother fell heavy on his young shoulders. Some can shoulder such a burden, but poor Rip W. couldn't, and he cracked under the strain and never made an honest man's wage since.

When faced with his father, after twenty years of hardship, pain, and the occasional time spent behind the old bailey's lock and key, at first he felt joy. But the joy soon turned to anger, and then to spite. After burning the homestead down with all within, he headed up to the mountains to exact revenge on Henry Hudson himself.

"I want no beer and I want no rolls at the ninepins, you bastards," he spat, drawing his rapier. "You've stolen these past twenty years from me and my father and I want them back."

Hudson and his gang laughed. "We stole nothing of the sort," said he. "How were we to know that each of your father's forty winks would be six months at a wink?"

Rip W. was incensed. "You've shed your lifesblood on the ground before, and you'll stain the soil with the blood of your death."

The swordfight was bloody and fierce and lasted for days, weeks. Rip W. slashed and hacked and jabbed at the spirits, dispatching one after another whilst suffering grievous wounds of his own. When it was down to he and Hudson himself, the old scamp called for a rest.

"There is no rest for the wicked," shouted Rip W., but he was too tired to raise his own sword to finish his enemy.

"Rest," said Hudson, and Rip W. rested... and...

And sure enough, Rip W. found himself asleep against the tree that his father had slept twenty years away against. And as his father slept through twenty years, so did he.

Except that he slept twenty years thence, not hence, and he found himself awakening in his own past time. What he had once thought of as twenty years of painful memories, he now saw the root of the weeds of bitterness in his heart.

"If I could just pluck them out," said Rip W.

Walking into the town of his past, he saw it as it was, twenty years before. He saw faces familiar, all viewing him as an oddly familiar-looking stranger instead of a well-familiar vandal and delinquent. He waved happily, and they waved back, slowly at first.

He felt a hand on his changepurse... there had been no pickpockets in the days of his youth, had there? He reached for his sword, turned, and thrust it into his own heart of twenty years before.

As he felt his blood flow out through the wound, he staggered and ran from the town. Occasionally, he heard shouts and screams as he tripped and stumbled along the path, of "Murderer!" and "Brute!" Somehow, he managed his way back up the mountains of Hudson and his crew, and he reached the tree beneath which he had slept his way back into the past.

And below which, he now saw, his father slept on the side opposite of his own twenty years of slumber.

It's been twenty years since now, or has it only been a week, I guess it is how you look at it. I don't know what to believe anymore, remembering how it was before the father's sleep, and then before the son's sleep after that. All I know is that this town doesn't quite seem the same for it, cursed for the weakness of a father and a son, and it's best that you speak no more of this tale I have told you to those that would ask.

When you hear thunder, boy, don't head up into the mountains.

[satan]

Like file13, i must decline . . . i don't know about others, but personally, i prefer the KJV version, and i'm not all that fond of KJV either . . . i hope this alliterative retelling will be filed under "ideas that seemed good on conception" with the Spice Girls . . .

O file13, have you heard of Gregory Macguire's The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West?

[Redlass]

All right, all right! So this one was a loser. What can I say--I have a warped sense of humor. It struck my funny bone. (Not that I think either of you are going to thow stones at my warped humor )

I'm impressed, though, Larry with what you were able to do despite finding the original challenge lacking. I make a deep bow in your direction.