A Fairly Accurate Fairy Tale Selection by JT Hilltop

Intro:

We can’t wait until our babies can talk until they can talk. That’s because once they start communicating the first thing they learn is how to ask questions. Not a question here and there but a barrage of never ending questions. “What’s sex Mom, what’s the finger mean Dad.” They wanna know everything about everything and the questions don’t stop, “Mommy, where do babies come from? Daddy, why were you moving furniture around last night?” Its just in the very fabric of our being to be inquisitive because even those unable to speak are curious. Inquiring mimes want to know.

Back when I was just a mere tadpole burning questions festered in my head as well. I drove my Mom and Dad crazy with an overwhelming curiosity. “Why do I have to eat spinach? Why do I have to put the seat up after I pee?” And so forth. Unfortunately the answers I usually got to real questions was go ask your mother or go ask your father but still I trusted that the two of them had the answers. Then one day I had an epiphany of sorts. If they give me the answers then who gives them the answers? Who the heck is explaining everything to them? Grandpa talks nonsense and Grandma just repeats herself so it can’t be them. Where the heck are Mom and Dad getting all the answers they give me? So I did what any curious young word detective would do, I launched my own investigation

. It seems they got their answers from some house like building they called church. Apparently this church place is only open on Sundays and in order to get in everyone had to be dressed up real nice. So I guessed that everyone who went to church got the answers to life if they got all dressed up. It’s some dude who wears a robe with a funny necktie thing they saw only once a week on Sunday that has the answers. He seems to be everyone’s father. The father stands up in front of everyone and talks, sometimes even scolds everyone. Then after yelling at them in an apparent attempt to make the parents feel better he makes us sing songs and repeat phrases like “amen” “and with you“ and the like. They pass around some baskets and people apparently either write their questions down in an envelope or they have to pay money to get answers. Mom even gave me a quarter to put in the basket so I assumed I had to save up enough money to get my answers from this father dude. After he finishes all his jabbering and singing he waits by the door to talk to everyone on the way out. I guessed he then gave them the answers to everything. But I had my doubts. I mean like why does this dude who dresses so damn strange seem to know everything? But this is the guy who gave my parents all the answers to all the questions of the world. This is the dude who told Mom where I came from, and told Dad how to make babies. But how does he know so much? I needed to find out. Another investigation.

I watched closer to see how it all works. First we all go into this huge room. A gigantic room actually, and this all knowing dude stands up on a kind of stage he calls the alter all lit up with candles. He stands at a podium and lectures everyone in the room, all of whom are sitting on these hard wooden bench like things. I don’t believe the designer gave any thought whatsoever about how peoples asses would feel just 5 minutes after sitting. I could see all of the kids and half of the Dads squirming around trying to find a position that doesn’t leave bruises on the cheek. That must be what they mean when they say turn the other cheek. Anyway this funny looking dude stands up there and tells stories about a long long time ago, tells us to open our song books and makes us sing songs. Then he gets mad and tells the adults how to live, which for us kids is the best part because its Mom and Dad getting some of the shit they give us constantly. But still, its boring as hell, which apparently is a word I can’t say even though its in that book the dude reads from. Is that where he gets all his info?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As it turns out he does know everything because it tells him in that special black book. it’s the Big Black Book of Everything he calls “The Bible” and it is considered by just about everyone to be the end all and be all of answers. Some people call it the holy bible. Funny word, if I heard a story with lots of holes in it I would think it’s a lie. Yet people put their hand on this book and swear to things and everyone else accepts that as absolute truth. It made me wonder what could make one book so damn powerful. If this book has the answers to everything and I read it myself I’ll know everything too. So I took a copy, which didn’t seem like a bad thing to me until Dad screamed when I got home and he saw it. Now I know what stealing is and that its wrong to steal. For one thing stealing results in an ass whooping, so you see, that book taught me something right from the start. I was learning already

I finally did read this Bible when I got older though, and what I did read absolutely amazed me. This book, this holy bible is filled with some very strange stories, even stranger than green eggs and ham. It was quite hard to read because even though the words were English words many of them made no sense. Like what is a begat? And why are so many people doing it? So I read it over and over until I could finally understand it. It was loaded with all kinds of rock throwing, sword fighting, and stories about whales and endless rains, and fights with whole buildings falling down and blood. Holy (there’s that funny word again) shite there’s a lot of blood. I wondered who wrote this Bible and why so I asked the Sunday dude with the funny collar how and when it was written. I have to tell you I was quite shocked when I found out. This shit was written thousands of years ago, and it is a kind of history book written by god. The story of Everything by God. Well he didn’t actually write it himself but it was his book, or as the father dude said his “word.” I think he had some holy ghost writers pen it for him but the first five books were written by this like four thousand year old bearded guy named “Mosey”. Not only did he write it, but he had a starring role in the second through fifth chapters. The rest was written by some out of work history teachers called scribes. That is until this Spanish guy named Jesus comes along, then all the different religions have different history books. But my interest was in the beginning, the first five books that seem to tell the story of everything. In the beginning when man created god in his own image. Or do I have that backwards? Maybe this Mosey dude was dyslexic. Somebody needs to spin these fantastic fables out.

So now that I’m fully grown and have an understanding of how all this church and Bible stuff work I decided I would spin this story with my own biblical proportions. I started thinking back to the time when my Mom and Dad would read me stories. All these wild fairy tales of ladies with hair so strong and long that a man could climb up her hair and save her, or a little girl that ventured into the house of a family of bears. Bears who ate porridge and slept in beds. There was a cross dressing wolf dressed as a grandma, houses made of candy, and even three little pigs who each made their houses from different things, one straw, one wood, and one was apparently a freemason who built his with bricks. All the stories were quite harmless really, and very entertaining to a young child. And I had no clue at the time, but these stories had more than just entertainment values they taught me something. They taught me about what my parents called morals. The moral of this story is don’t steal, or the moral of that story is to be considerate of others and be good, be home by midnight or whatever. The point is the purpose of those stories was to teach me what’s right and what’s wrong in a way my young mind could comprehend. As I got older of course I realized that pigs can’t talk let alone build brick houses, and bears live in caves and shit in the woods, and they don’t even like porridge. I learned things from these stories even though they were completely made up. It was just a way to get me to understand right from wrong in a way I could understand at the time. But now that I’m grown up they still expect me to believe in a garden with the first two people ever and some evil talking snake., a man building an ocean liner called an ark and grabbing two of each animal, insects, birds, all of them, and gave them their own rooms. Some kind of floating creature hotel filled with honeymoon suites. It floated around with them for forty days and forty nights while it rained continuously. Somehow they all ate, but not each other. The lions played with the lambs and the crickets and the birds and none of them gave into the temptation for forty days. It got me thinking about these bible stories. What if the funny collar dude was making up stories like The Brothers Grimm did? What if it is just stories written by his mom and dad to help teach him right from wrong? I mean it makes sense, right? Just like Rapunzle, or Rumplestiltskin, or Goldilocks. Maybe these stories of Adam, and Eve, and Noah, and Cain and Able were just fairytales to teach him morals.. What if they are really made up stories written to explain to the children of thousands of years ago how to behave and how to treat each other? And of course how everything came to be?

It brought me to an internal understanding. This bible, this holy book, is nothing more than the history of humans as told by the people who first learned to write. Most of these biblical tales are merely a recounting of stories that were told around campfires or homes around an area of land we call the fertile crescent. Now I need to rewrite these first five stories in the bible in way we can all relate to in more modern times. I need to write my own big black book, JT’s Story Of Everything. Bring it on!

TBC