Storytelling for Week 13: Naked and Afraid

Winter had hit our forest home in full force so my buddy, Choo Choo, and I had nowhere to stay.  You see, we are fairies and as everyone knows fairies live outside in the buff.  Normally, we live outside through the winter season because it is usually not cold in our neck of the woods.  We tried our best to find somewhere warm but to no avail.  Since we both had no clothes, we also decided it would not be a good idea to snuggle up for warmth.  We tried to find shelter at Mr. Squirrel's house, but his house was completely filled with nuts and he had no room for us.  We also tried Mr. Bear's house but he snored too loud while he was hibernating so we couldn't stay there.  After asking all of our woodland friends for help but getting none, we decided to head to the humans' town to find shelter. 

However, we had just as much luck among the townsfolk as we did among the forest creatures.  The big people’s dogs would scare us off or we couldn’t get into their houses since they were sealed up tight.  Finally as night hit its coldest point, we found an old, rundown cobbler’s home so we decided to camp out in there.  It was shabby compared to the other houses but we didn’t care, it was somewhere that was out of the cold.  We hid and slept during the day so we wouldn’t run into the humans that lived there, an old man and his wife.

One night as we woke up from our daytime sleep, we saw a small bit of leather set out for the cobbler to a pair of shoes.  At first we were going to steal the leather and make some clothes for ourselves, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough leather for two sets of clothes.  With so much free time on our hands, we decided to go ahead and just finish the old man’s shoes for him.

The next night, two sets of leather were laid out but we still didn’t have enough to steal, so we finished the shoes again.  The night after that, four sets of leather were laid out and we had enough, but deciding that the cobbler and his wife were almost as bad off as us, we decided not to steal their materials.

For weeks this continued on, Choo Choo and I would make shoes from the ever increasing amount of leather, and they would always have it cut out.  We decided it was time for us to move on so that night we made ready to snag some leather and hit the road, but luck would have it that we saw the old people watching us from behind a terrible hiding place so we couldn’t make our move.  We finished up the shoes and called it a night.  

The next night, the old people were at it again, watching us from their hiding spot but then we realized there was no leather for us to work with, but instead tiny suits all made of leather.  Now that we had our clothes, we made off back to our woodland home, warm and chaffed in our leather.

Jimmy Fallon as the Leatherman, WebSource

Author’s Note:  For this storytelling, I used The Elves from the Brothers Grimm unit.  I decided to tell the story from the perspective of the elves.  I was also watching old Jimmy Fallon highlights on SNL when I came across The Leatherman, so I used that as a base for my elf characters.  I also made the elves have a motive for making the shoes instead of them just showing up and finishing them.

Bibliography:  The Grimm Brothers' Children's and Household Tales by D.L. Ashliman (1998-2013). Web Source