"AN ABORTED FAIRY TALE"
by Joel Becker

In a distant valley, very far away, a small farm house sits on a slight decline. In that crooked house lives, Mama, Papa, Grandpapa, and Timmy. Looking at the farm from afar, seeing all the spotted cows and the large red barn, any man of normal intelligence would think, a dairy farm of those dimensions would require at least twenty hired hands. But, they would be wrong. They would be horribly wrong.

Due to imaginary illnesses and indifference, Mama, Papa, and Grandpapa don't lift a finger to assist with the daily milking or feeding. No, these wicked characters wake in the late afternoon, shuffle into the dinning room and sit down at the decomposing table. Crowded, elbow to elbow, they each pull out a deck of cards and begin playing solitaire. Timmy, a small boy of eight years, showing all the symptoms of malnutrition, is forced to perform all the farming duties.

Outside, in the fields, hundreds of cows graze. There is also, one dog. No one ever bothered to name all the cows. Mainly, because, there were too many cows, and Timmy was too busy to amble through the grazing fields, greeting the dairy cows with personalized salutations.
But, the dog was named Ralph.

One day, many years ago, Timmy was milking the cows when Ralph, a puppy then, stumbled into the barn. Timmy, not possessing any intellect and having very poor eyesight, thought Ralph was an extremely small dairy cow. He sat for hours, scratching his, prematurely balding, head trying to produce milk from Ralph's singular tit. Ralph, enjoying the attention, kicked his hind leg, wagged his tail, and licked Timmy's boney fingers. After that, Timmy and Ralph never left each other's side. Over the years, Timmy and Ralph even began to act a like. Timmy, never being much of an orator, dropped all words from his vocabulary; he communicated using a three bark system that only Ralph was able to decipher. And Ralph also took on Timmy's traits. Eventually it became difficult to tell them apart. But one thing did stay constant throughout; Timmy never stopped trying to milk Ralph.

But, Ralph had a horrible secret. He acquired a taste for human blood, through the most unconventional, and innocent, way imaginable. One day he did not lust for human blood, and then the next day, that's all he desired. It happened just like that. And one hot summer day, after Timmy was finished milking him, Ralph took what he wanted. Ralph killed Timmy, with one jugular slicing bite. For days Ralph nibbled the meat off Timmy's limp body until there was only a small yellow skeleton left. And then Ralph began to chew on Timmy's soggy bones, crunching them between his large white teeth.

Mama, Papa, and Grandpapa continued to play solitaire. Wicked to the core, they only questioned Timmy's wellbeing when their stomach's began to growl. And even then they did not speak. No, they started pounding their closed fists against the dinning room table. And when the dinning room table crumbled into a thousand pieces, they shuffled back to their soiled cots and waited for death.

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JM Becker lives in Maryland. He dreams of big city lights and easy women.

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PREVIOUS WORK

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TWO ODES by Stephen Ausherman

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"THE MISSING GIRL" by Jason Shaffner

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