Week 2, Storytelling: Love and Marriage...

One day Rama and Siva were sitting around their condo, drinking coffee, talking, and basically enjoying their morning. Rama went outside to get the morning newspaper as usual and as he stood up he saw this BEAUTIFUL woman walking by with her dog. His mouth literally dropped open and he stood there until he could not see her anymore. After shaking his head to regain his bearings, he turned around and went back inside. He told Siva, who had already started reading the paper, about the woman he had saw, but she just muttered a response, not really hearing him, already engrossed in the article. Rama spent the whole day in a daze daydreaming about the beautiful woman.

The next day, Rama went outside again to get the paper and the same beautiful woman was walking her dog again. He had thought all night about what he would say to her if he saw her again. He waved hello and she waved back. He then introduced himself as did she. Her name was Suparnakha. She said she had been walking by his house everyday waiting for him to notice her. Now that he had, she intended to have him. She was getting really close when Siva walked up into the doorway to see what was going on. When she realized what was happening she started shooing the woman away and telling her to leave. Rama turned on her and said he would not allow her to get in the way of his and Suparnakha's love and that he would be asking for a divorce. Siva was obviously not happy about the quick turn of events, but turned and walked back inside, not knowing what to do. Rama and Suparnakha walked off together as Siva watched from the window.

She could not believe he was doing this to her. She would make him PAY! Oh, yes, she would get him where it hurt. His dad was a big wig politician and had plenty of money for her to go after. She went and visited a lawyer who gladly took her case and won. Now Siva had the condo, enough alimony to keep her comfortable and nothing else to do. After the divorce was final, Siva began to become depressed. She bought a kitten to see if that would ease her loneliness. The kitten soon grew to a cat and no longer needed Siva's constant attention, so she bought another kitten. The dependence of that one soon waned and so her collection of cats began.

Now, if you want to see Siva, you can walk by the condo that she used to share with Rama and see children outside looking in and laughing at her. She is there on the couch every day watching soap operas and eating bonbon's surrounded by all of her cats.

Rama Spurs Suparnakha by Warwick Goble. Date unknown. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Author's Note: I based this story on the meeting of Soorpanaka, the demon sister of Ravana, and Rama, the protagonist of the story. In the original, Rama rejects Soorpanaka in her human form (Suparnakha) and decides to go back inside with his wife, Siva. In this story I wondered what would have happened to Siva if Rama had went with Soorpanaka. I kind of saw her as a Peg Bundy from "Married With Children".

Bibliography: "The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic" by R.K. Narayan, 1973.

Week 1: Storytelling

MULTIPLICATION is vexation,

Division is as bad;

The Rule of Three doth puzzle me,

And Practice drives me mad.

-The Nursery Rhyme Book, by Unknown

There once was a witch that lived with her young daughter in an old victorian house at the end of a lane in a small town. The house had good bones despite the fact that it was built over 100 years ago, but the witch couldn’t handle the upkeep by herself anymore so it looked worn down with overgrown shrubs and peeling paint. Her husband had died when their daughter was just a toddler and she had been just making it by doing small favors for the people in town. She would help the men and women with small ailments and sickness but would also help with nosy neighbors and other disagreements between people in town but she would never do anything negative, no matter how much money someone offered to pay her, because of the Witches Rede. The Witches Rede is “The Rule of Three” which means that you do not harm anyone and that whatever you do with witchcraft will come back to you three fold.

The witch’s daughter had finally reached the age where her mother was ready to begin teaching her the craft. Her mother tried to teach her about the plants and herbs that would help her in her spell work such as how to reproduce the plants she would need with seeds and how to separate the plants. But the girl was an impatient child and became easily annoyed by her mother’s slow and precise teachings. Her mother held teaching lessons every day, but the girl never wanted to practice on her own. Most of all though, the girl didn’t want to follow the Witches Rede. She thought it was silly and outdated.

(Cooking Witches: Wikimedia Commons)

The witch’s daughter had finally reached the point where she could do spell work on her own and decided to make her first a spell to stop the girls from teasing her at school. She set out to make a spell that just made them leave her alone, but after some thinking she really wanted to make them pay. After gathering everything she needed, she began working a spell to make them all sick. The next week at school the girls started getting sick one by one. The witch’s daughter was quite proud of herself and had two peaceful weeks of school without the girls there to bother her. But on the day that all the girls came back to school, she starting falling ill herself. The witch tried different spells and healing ointments but her daughter only kept getting worse. She took her to many doctors, but they said they could not find anything wrong with her. After two weeks, the witch’s daughter died.

Author's Note: This story is based on the nursery rhyme "Multiplication is Vexation" which is retold at the beginning of the story. You can find the rhyme in The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang (1897). As I was scrolling through the book, I noticed the phrase ‘rule of three’ and immediately thought about the Witches Rede. I then started to figure out a way to work in the rest of the nursery rhyme by playing with the non-mathematical definitions of the words ‘multiplication’ and ‘division’.

Bibliography: The Nursery Rhyme Book by Andrew Lang and L. Leslie Brooke. Dover Publications, 2008.