Fairy Tale For a Boy Lost and Found Again
Once upon a time, in a far off land where the sun always shines, there lived a beautiful Princess. Wherever she walked, flowers bloomed and bands burst into song. One day, a young peasant boy swam from the island where he lived, over the sea to the sunny Kingdom where the Princess lived. He was looking for the truth (for he was still foolish enough to think that there was such a thing) and he was trying to find out what kind of a man he wanted to be.
He met the Princess under the bright sun and for months they shared themselves with one another.
But one day, the peasant boy had to leave the sunny kingdom and swim back to the cold, dark island. Before he left though, he and the Princess agreed that they’d meet again some day on his little island.
When the boy got home though, he found the island was colder and darker than he remembered it. It seemed to him cloudy and dark, compared with the bright light of the Princess and the place where she lived. He could scarcely find a way to live on the little island.
And worse! A wicked witch cast her eye over the boy and cast a terrible spell on him. She turned him into a horrid little toad, covered in porcupine spines so that he would prick and hurt all of those who were close to him. The boy had no choice, covered as he was in spikes, but to leave the city he lived in and find the deepest hole he could, where he could stay and try to break the spell.
So in his hole he sat, safe where he couldn’t prickle anyone but too sad to see that absence might hurt more than prickles and that other people, once informed of his predicament, might help him break the spell.
So he sat at the bottom of the hole and thought. He tried to find a golden thread to tie his time in the sun to his present. He tried to remember what love was, once upon a time. Unable to find answers (and asking entirely the wrong questions) the little toad boy sat at the bottom of the hole, stinking and ribbitting. Then, eventually, he fell into a deep, deep sleep. It’s hard to say how long he was asleep for he was at the bottom of the deepest hole he could find but he slept and slept and dreamt and dreamt.
And then one bright morning, the boy awoke to a skylark singing in his ear. He woke with deep, velvet sleep crusting and crumbling in the corners of his big, black eyes. His mind was, for the first time in months, completely awake. He stopped thinking so much of himself and thought instead of others. He remembered what love and compassion were and couldn’t believe he had ever forgotten. He clambered out of his hole and started the long walk back to the city on the island. On the way, the spines started to fall from his skin and his spine began to straighten. Soon, he was a biped again. Back on two legs, with each step his skin turned back from green to human. By the time he returned to the city the warts had fallen from his skin and the scales had fallen from his eyes.
And this was not a moment too soon for the Princess had crossed the sea and her life’s journey had brought her to his little island. The boy, now more like a man, knew that he had hurt the Princess. He didn’t know how to make it up to her, or even if he could. He decided that all he could do was plant a garden in the hall of his chest and the corridors of his arms. He nursed it and watched it bloom with lilies and petunias, with cherry blossoms and avocado trees and he offered the garden to the Princess.
The Princess wasn’t sure that she liked the garden. She wasn’t even sure that the person offering it was the same as the peasant boy she had loved. So the boy resolved that all he could do was continue tending his garden in the hope that the Princess would see some beauty in it.