Fractured Fairytales - The Pied Piper: Rat Exterminator

Frankie Gammyfoot never expected his life to turn out like this.

It all started when he was walking along the road headed for the village of Hamelin, Germany. Rumor had it that the people suffered from a rat infestation. This was good news for Frankie. He had just graduated from the Academia Granados Music/Vermin Control School in Barcelona. So getting rid of Hamelin’s problem would give him the credentials and word-of-mouth to really make his business prosper.

He found the villagers to be disgusting people. Trash littered the streets. Their houses were a mess. It was no wonder they had rat problems. Frankie walked into the mayor’s office and offered his services - at a discounted rate, of course. The mayor jumped all over the deal.

Well, Frankie Gammyfoot started tootling on his pipe. Every rat fighting the dogs and killing the cats followed him out of town and drowned in the Weser River. Yet when he returned to the mayor’s office to collect payment, the crooked politician began his double-talk about how the coffers were empty and he didn’t want to raise taxes on the villagers.

Of course, Frankie was rightly pissed over this. He left town with thoughts of revenge. During the following week, while all the adults attended church, he crept into the village. He played his pipe trying to coax the children to follow him so he could ransom them back to their parents.

The children looked at the man like he was crazy. They laughed and threw stones and snubbed their noses. Then they went back to playing their X-Boxes and Playstations.

Frustrated, but not giving up, Frankie left the village. He dyed his hair black, permed it, bought a large felt top hat, and took up guitar lessons. The next Sunday, Frankie Gammyfoot walked into the village, hooked up the amp, and played “Stairway to Heaven” on his rocking guitar.

This got the children’s attention.

Totally addicted to the Guitar Hero and Rock Star video games, the children eagerly followed Frankie away from the village hoping this was part of a publicity stunt for a national guitar-playing competition. All the children followed him except a lame child who couldn’t keep up with the group, a deaf child who grew bored following them, and a blind child losing his way along the trail (also those Sudoku geeks who were more interested in playing their stupid number games). Frankie led them into the Koppenberg Mountains and into a cave to hide out. Then he returned to the village with his ransom demands.

He found the villagers celebrating.

They were happy that the little video game addicted brats had left. The children never did their chores including taking out the trash, which led to the rat infestation. Now the parents could sell the video games and take Bahama vacations. Everyone begged Frankie Gammyfoot to keep the children.

Worried from the parents’ reactions, Frankie hotfooted it back to the cave. There he found the children had turned into a ritualistic, barbaric society. Deprived of their video games, their minds slowly cracked as they donned on loincloths and smeared mud across their cheeks in war paint. Meanwhile, they whispered in fear about a terrible beast coming to eat them as they placed a pig’s head on a spear at the cave entrance to feed the imaginary creature.

When seeing Frankie Gammyfoot in his large funny hat and the trail of cigarette smoke blowing from his mouth, the children hallucinated he was a fire-breathing beast. They grabbed their sharpened sticks and cried out, “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” They chased Frankie toward the edge of the cliff where he fell to his death.

The children hollered their victory cries fully into the bloodlust of the kill when they heard the celebration from the village. Hungry from the lack of food, they snuck down and descended onto the unwary villagers, ransacking and looting their own parents that the children no longer recognized. The few survivors screamed in terror, believing savage pygmy people had attacked them.

The moral of the story is . . . I write really whacked-up tales when remembering I don’t have a proper post ready for this blog. Now, if you will excuse me, I have the hankering to play video games. But I’ll do this right after reading the last chapter of “Lord of the Flies” and cleaning out the rat traps.

The End!