Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales by Gregory Maguire, Chris L. Demarest Read Free Book Online

the help of a toilet scrubber the size of a floor lamp.

    So What begged to be allowed to come along, but the giraffes always said, “What if your gorilla stepmother comes to the circus one day and sees you there? That would be the end of you.
    No, my boy, stay home and polish the silver. And weed the vegetables. And clean the windows.
    And vacuum. And so on.”

    Though he still talked big, So What found he was glad he hadn’t been killed by a hunter and his heart served up as an hors d’oeuvre. He really rather liked being alive. From a mail-order catalog, So What bought a pair of stilts so he could hang up the giraffes’ circus clothes when they came home and flopped into bed, one after the other, like a whole stand of pine trees being felled by a chain saw.

    Back at the castle, the king could hear better now that no one was around to stomp on his ear trumpets. He began to listen to what his new wife was saying, and he realized that he had made a mistake choosing her for a wife. But she had developed such a powerful arm with that lamp-throwing business that he was afraid to cross her. So he stayed in his throne room most of the day, reading the paper.

    The gorilla queen bought a full-length mirror at a garage sale. Every morning after breakfast she went to her boudoir and gazed at herself. She practiced making muscles. One day, making “I’m the champion!” victory signs at herself, she said,

    “Mirror mirror on the wall,

    Who’s the strongest of them all?”

    To her surprise, the mirror spoke back to her. It said,

    “Gorilla Queen, Gorilla Queen,

    You’re the strongest I’ve ever seen.”

    “Well, fancy that, a chatty mirror,” said the gorilla. “And one that tells the truth, too.
    Thank you, mirror.” Then she kissed the mirror, but she was really kissing herself.

    One day, however, the gorilla said,

    “Mirror mirror on the wall,

    Who’s the strongest of them all?”

    This time the mirror answered,

    “Gorilla Queen, you preen and strut.

    You’re not the strongest, though. So what?”

    “So What!” seethed the gorilla. “Do you mean that little twerp is still alive?”

    “Unless you talk in simple rhyme,

    You’re simply wasting both our time,”

    said the mirror.

    The gorilla queen clenched her teeth and tried again:

    “Where does he live? Is he near? Is he far?

    Tell me, you stupid flat-faced mirror!”

    The mirror thought for a bit. Far and mirror aren’t really rhymes, and the scansion was dicey. But at the expression of the gorilla, the mirror decided to let it pass. It replied,

    “In a house with seven lady giraffes,

    He is the houseboy. How’s that for laughs!”

    The gorilla queen lost no time in firing the hunter who had given her the chicken liver.
    He found another job as the ringmaster at the same circus the giraffes worked for.

    The gorilla queen looked up the giraffes’ address in the phone book. Then she sat down and thought how she could kill So What. She wanted to be the strongest of them all. Down into her exercise dungeon she went and did a hundred push-ups for inspiration.

    Finally she had an idea. She could poison him! If he was so strong, he must be a mighty eater.

    She raced to the market and bought a bunch of bananas, and then she barreled into the library and looked up how to poison them.

    It was but the work of an afternoon to coat the banana with a very special yellow poison that looked just like the skin of a banana. The fact that it smelled like a slice of toxic salami was a bit worrying. But the gorilla queen disguised herself as a Merry Maid of the Forest and sprayed on eight ounces of Jungle Spirit, a new cologne she’d read about in Baboons’ Home Journal . She went bounding like a triathlete through the forest, carrying a basket of bananas with her.

    When she found the tall house in the forest, she pounded on the door until So What came to see what the racket was. He was still a little chimp. He didn’t look so very strong. But