TheBanyanTree: Handcell and Gridel: A Fairy Tale

[Mike Pingleton]

Handcell and Gridel lived next to the last remnant of forest remaining in the 
North American Biome.  They lived in a small pre-fab cottage with their 
father and their stepmother, and it was very crowded and dreary place to 
live.

Some things never change; a proportion of all stepmothers are wicked, and none 
more so than Handcell and Gridel's stepmother.  "I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER!" she 
would screech at the two children.  "You are your father's kids by a 
Previous!"  When Handcell and Gridel were small, they often wondered what 
kind of creature a Previous was.  At any rate, the wicked stepmother would 
only feed them enough to stay alive, and only gave them the tattered clothing 
that Goodwill Industries threw away. She made the children do all of the 
cooking and cleaning, belittling and insulting them while she sat on the sofa 
and ordered merchandise from the Cottage Industry Network.  Handcell and 
Gridel knew what the 'step' in stepmother meant.

Why, you might ask, didn't Handcell and Gridel's father Do Something?  The 
real answer was less than appealing.  He worked three jobs to make the 
minimum payments on his wife's credit cards, and so was never around to see 
how his children were treated.  He was also the biggest wuss in the North 
American Biome.

Now internet rumours had the wicked stepmother hauling the children into the 
woods to lose them, but what really happened was Handcell and Gridel got 
tired of her daily ration of crap and decided to run away.  In a chat room 
before school, Handcell had heard of a fabulous Mall on the other side of the 
woods.  "The Forest Remnant Mall even has a McDonald's Factory Outlet!" he 
told Gridel.

That night, while Father toiled away washing dishes at the Cracker Barrel, and 
the wicked stepmother was snoring through Suzanne Somers' ButtMaster II, 
Handcell and Gridel slipped away into the dark forest.  Since the family GPS 
was under lock and key (Popiel Pocket Placer, three easy payments of $49.95), 
instead Handcell brought along a plastic grocery bag full of plastic grocery 
bags, and every so often he would tie one around a tree while Gridel held 
their wind-up flashlight (Krank n' Shine, $19.95 on QVC).  "This way we won't 
get lost," he told Gridel, who, keeping her mouth shut, thought it was also a 
good way for the WS to track them if she ever levered her ass off the sofa.

Late in the night and 7.3 kilometers away, the two brave cherubs finally 
collapsed and fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning the sky was overcast and a Level Orange pollution alert was in 
effect.  The children awoke and Handcell gave a cry of dismay - nearly every 
tree and bush had one or more plastic shopping bags caught in them!  "We're 
lost!  We're lost!" wailed Gridel.  They wandered around aimlessly for 
several hours, becoming quite hungry and losing hope of ever finding a way 
out of the forest.

"Did you hear that?" asked Handcell, stopping and cocking his ear.  "That 
sounds like a Diet Pepsi commercial!"  The children slowly made their way in 
the direction of the faint sound, and coming into a large clearing found the 
Television House.  

They thought of the dwelling as the Television House becasue the outside was 
covered with 42 inch Sony Flat Screen HDTVs (Best Buy, $7665).  The windows 
were televisions.  The door was made of a flat screen television turned 
sideways, and a huge satellite dish graced the roof.

To make a long fairy tale short, the Television House was owned by an Evil 
Witch.  Not a Witch in the Gardnerian sense, or even an American Folk Witch, 
but an Evil Witch who used the Television House to lure children, whom she 
would shanghai off to Shanghai, where they would be put to work making shoes 
for Tommy Hilfiger.  However, Handcell and Gridel proved to be more than a 
match for the Evil Witch, having seen every Bruce Lee movie ever made, along 
with daily reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger.  With Gridel's 'Falling Willow' 
move, combined with Handcell's flying drop kick, they managed to propel the 
EW right thru the open doors of her Tandoori Magick Clay Oven ($389.95, in 12 
easy payments).

Handcell and Gridel stayed on in the Television House, making a slight profit 
leveraging comic books on E-Bay, living happily ever after, that is, until 
the IRS caught up with them.

But that, as they say, is another story...