Mashup tale

It has been said that there are really only something like seven story lines, with a few variations, like boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl to better-looking boy, boy dresses up as a girl and kind of likes it, and so on.

Virtually every possible plotline has been catalogued and numbered in a book called "The Types of International Folk Tales," so on a whim I slammed together tales #1+2+675+705+762+851+1414+1457+1620+1804 and wrote my own kind of folk tale mash-up. Tonight at bedtime, tell your kids a story they have definitely never heard:

Once upon a time, a clever fox played dead in the road, so that a man with a wagonload of fish would stop to pick him up, thinking to sell his beautiful pelt. But the fox stole the fish and fled.

Ever the trickster, the fox came across a bear in the forest and persuaded him that he could catch fish using his tail, so the bear stuck his tail through a hole in the ice where it froze fast.

That is why bears do not have tails to speak of, or to fish with.

Not far from the very same river sat a lazy boy. He had been born from a fish, as it turns out. The boy sat with his best friend, a dwarf, who didn't mind if people called him a dwarf, frankly, because he owned a golden billy goat.

The goat had once put a beat-down on an ogre and butted him off a high bridge, so he was golden, not in the sense that he was shiny and valuable, but just in that he had it made.

At the shriek of an owl, which was odd because it was only noon, a spider crept out from under a rock nearby, and the boy took this as a good luck sign, and who wouldn't? So the boy and the dwarf and the goat went to town.

Here the lazy boy (who was not really lazy, just introspective, but once you get a rep in Juvy, it sticks) encountered a princess who was trying to solve a riddle. The answer, unbeknownst to her, was "why the cat has a short nose," but the riddle, strangely enough, involved a woodcock, which was really a red herring.

The boy soon lost interest in the task anyway, because suddenly down the road came a woman with 365 children, one of whom was carrying a worm in a stone. The boy used this opportune distraction to steal the golden goat, but lost him in a wager a week later, competing with the devil at mowing grass.

Seriously.

Meanwhile, across town, Lucky Hans, who had gotten his name due to some now-forgotten escapade with a lisping maiden, pulled his shoes from the furnace (don't ask), lit out for the street, and immediately fell into conversation with a one-eyed man and a hunchback.

The hunchback had an eel filled with sand over his shoulder, a conversation-starter if ever there was one. Soon the men were fast friends, and headed together for the church, because they had heard a rumor that the parson was going to sell his daughter. The parson refused, on principle, to sell to an eel-toting hunchback, and anyway somebody else bid higher.

Then there came a thick fog, and a giant turnip. Or maybe it was a huge loaf of bread. Well, you can just imagine what happened...347+629+153.

And they lived happily, if peg-legged, ever after.