Very Short Story - Practical Considerations

 Now over the years, I've written quite a few little stories, mostly as part of a writing challenge on various online writing groups, now sadly mostly gone. However I thought it might be fun to share a few of these little pieces, written mostly in the spirit of pure daftness and finding as odd an interpretation of any given prompt as I possibly could. I'm also very fond of writing in a pure dialogue form for this sort of thing, as per the below. I believe the prompt may have been "apple". Copyright is mine, obviously. Do enjoy. :)

Practical Considerations

“Oh blimey. So now what do we do?”

“Well… and this is just the first thing to spring into my head, mind… I reckon we should carve her a beautiful glass coffin and carry her to a perfect sunlight glade in the centre of the forest where we should build a nice plinth on which to rest her and then wait for a handsome prince to come along and kiss her back to life.”

 “Why wait for a prince? I mean, if the kiss of life’s all she needs, I could…”

 “No, you couldn’t. Aside from the fact now beautiful forlorn, exiled princess deserves to wake up to you leering over her, she’d choke on your beard.”

 “Hang on a sec, though. Glass coffin? Plinth in a sunlit glade? This stuff’s going to take time, right?

  “Well, a bit of time, yeah.”

 “Well, while we’re faffing around with all that fancy stuff, isn’t she going to…go off?”

 “Go off?”

  “Yeah! And with a glass coffin, I mean… that’s not going to be a pretty graveside to visit after a couple of months, is it?”

  “Ewww… He’s got a point, you know.”

 “All right, fine! Then what do you suggest we do with her?”

 “Well, we’re miners aren’t we? All these pickaxes we’ve got, shouldn’t take us long to dig a grave, should it?”

  “Hey, why even dig a new one? We’ve plenty of holes up at the mines! Couldn’t we just dump her in one of those?”

  “Hey lads? Whose apple is this?”

  “Dump her? Dump her? You ungrateful pack of sods, this is Snow White we’re talking about! The fairest of them all! The kind-hearted princess who we took in and got to do all our cooking and our laundry for no charge at all! We can’t just dump her in a hole!” 

  “Only there’s this bite out of it see, so I know it’s someone’s…”

  “Yeah but it’ll be so much effort, all that plinth and stuff! Having her around, you know, I’d got used to someone else doing all the cleaning up!”

  “It still looks ever so tasty. So if no one else wants it…?”

  “Cleaning up? You call a dignified burial for a head fairytale heroine cleaning up?”

  “Well, she’s lying on our carpet, isn’t she?”

  “I’m just going to have a quick bite…”

  “Hang on, what’re you chewing?”

  “Apple!”

  “What apple?”

  “This…”

  THUD.

  “Ah.”

  “Was that…?”

  “Yep.”

  “The apple?”

 “Yep.”

“Why didn’t someone throw it away?”

“Well, we don’t do the cleaning, do we? She does.”

“Did.”

“So this plinth thing?”

  “Yep?”

  “How long do you reckon it’ll take with only six of us?”


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