Alternate Endings
Have you read
those books where you get to pick options at different points of a story? If
you want the hero to take the injured man to the hospital, go to Page 35. Or if
you want the hero to pursue his assailants, go to Page 40. I ran into a variant
of that with my 5 year old daughter.
There’s this
filler on one of the kids’ channels where they tell the same short story each
time. It goes something like this: there are 3 goats who must cross a bridge to
get to the grass to graze. As the first one tried to cross the bridge, a troll
caught it and wanted to eat it. The frightened goat told the troll to leave him
and catch his bigger brother instead. The troll lets him go and catches the
second goat. It too escaped citing that the next goat is even bigger. When the
troll tries to catch the biggest goat, he head-butts the troll and escapes.
Upon which, my
daughter suggested this variant, “Couldn’t the 3rd goat just have
said catch the next one, he’s even bigger? And then of course, there would be
no next one.”
I guess she’s
knows her Machiavelli. Or, if you want a positive spin on it, perhaps she is
familiar with The Art of War:
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the
enemy without fighting.”
Another time, I
had just finished reading this story to my daughter where two monkeys took a
cake piece each from a shop. The shop owner chased them and was about to catch
up with them. So one of the monkeys dropped its cake and climbed up a tree to
escape. The other monkey picked up the fallen cake. With a cake now in each
hand, there was no way it could climb the tree, and so it got caught by the
angry shop owner. The moral of the story was that you can’t have your cake and
eat it too.
Immediately my
daughter spoke up. “Imagine”, she said (it’s one of her favorite phrases), that
she and a friend were the ones who had grabbed the cake pieces and they were
the ones who were being chased. Her friend would drop her cake and climb up the
tree. She would then pick both pieces and throw them to her friend at the top
of the tree. With her hands now free, she’d climb up the tree and escape. See,
she said triumphantly, it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too.
That she could up
with an alternate version instantly had me floored. Is she the next JK Rowling?
Or was this a one-off case, inspired only by the lure of the cake? I am guessing
it’s the latter.
But either way,
why does someone who likes to come up with her own stories still ask us to tell
her stories…
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