Once upon a time the whole Bugle family was so weak from hunger that Chief Lord Fairy-Wings Bungleperchaunstiltskin descended from cloud-land and advised the family as follows, “Take your eldest son (well, they only had one son) and have him marry the devil, a.k.a. Queen Noiku Hegemony.” Though normally fearless, possibly from stupidity, this time Cootie turned deathly pale. His fear was understandable. The whole world knew that the Queen’s teeth made whirring sounds, her heels crushed nations and millions of people had gone insane in her golden palace. So, while Cootie was usually happy to do a heroic deed, but this time he turned quite scarlet, and burgundy too, as he emitted this scream, “AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!”
His father wished to encourage the boy, who now lay in convulsions in the dust. “Son, don’t you think you’re over-reacting? You have considerable powers, spells, magic and that sort of stuff. And if you need us, just send a messenger. C’mon, be a man!”
Cootie crawled to his mother and hugged her ankles. He had to be pried loose by his family and dragged by ten horses to Queen Noiku. She looked upon our somewhat bruised hero with the inhuman, predatory eyes of a crocodile. Cootie trembled in her shadow.
“Well, he looks acceptable,” the Queen admitted. “But what relationship skills does he have?” she asked with fiercely piercing eyes.
John removed his hat and confessed, “Sorry, your highness, our boy has never been in a romantic relationship, but he will learn everything naturally enough.”
Cootie’s sister couldn’t stand begging, and boldly cried, “Look at our ribs and have mercy on us, you greedy, toothless, knobby-kneed lollipop!”
The Queen laughed and slapped her knees, which she rarely did. “Darling, how sweet of you to bring back memories of all my past marriages. My husbands used to blame me for everything, even their toothaches, and I loved thinking life is so simple. Now, what on Earth do you think that simpleton of a brother can possibly do for me?”
“He could make you feel young again,” answered John, lost in dreamland.
“Me? Young? But I’m a thousand years old!” she snapped and laughed.
“Beside him, your Elevatedness, you’d see you’re not half as ugly as he,” explained Alexis. “Plus, Cootie will trim your toenails every evening.”
Cootie glanced at the Queen’s brittle, talon-like nails sticking out of her pink royal pumps. Horrified and sickened, he turned green and vomited. While his mother tried to console the boy John, visibly embarrassed, approached the Queen and whispered, “Please, we would be so thankful if you took him off our hands. He’s not good for anything except for making us think that we are blahblahblah.”
Hearing this description, Queen Noiku quickly accepted Cootie as her personal mood counsellor and doctor. The guards took him to a lovely room in a tower, padlocked the door, gave him the golden key and said, “But don’t even dream of using it until you turn the devil into an angel.”
“The devil? You mean my sister? Wait! HEY!” he hollered after the guards, but they had already dashed away to the ballroom.
At the window, peered over the sill and wondered how long he’d need to grow hair long enough to get him down to the ground, 100 feet below. He calculated in the dust on the floor: 100 feet divided by four inches a year equals – what? 400 years!!! Despondent over his calculations, he wept himself to sleep, only to wake up a minute later, when Queen Noiku entered his cell with a torch and poked him awake.
“COOTIE! Wake up and do your magic. Your father promised that you would persuade me to believe that I am not the dumbest person in the world. Now, I await your spell,” she said, lowering her hoary head.
Cootie, half asleep, staggered to the mirror on the wall, and there he recited this magical question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the dumbest person of all?”
“You are the greatest dimwit by far, for talking to a mirror and for obeying Chief Lord Fairy-Wings Bungleperchaunstiltskin!”
Queen Noiku laughed, thanked the hero, left the cell and – forgetting her promise – commanded the door firmly padlocked again.
“HEY, DIDN’T MY FATHER ASK FOR SOMETHING IN RETURN?” Shouted Cootie.
“No he didn’t!” she snapped. “Your dad said he was just glad to be rid of you,” and she cackled and laughed. Then, squinting as if staring into a blazing sun, she added, “Anyhow, I would never set someone dumber than myself free on my defenceless citizens. I do have a social conscience, young man! Have no doubt about that!”
Cootie thought she might be right, but didn’t count on it. That evening he prayed to his god, Chief Lord Fairy-Wings Bungleperchaunstiltskin for help, and the god came in the night through the back door, which was never locked and never guarded and actually in plain sight. Bungleperchaunstiltskin , however, took precautions not to get caught, and was disguised as a sheep.
“Maa! Hello Cootie. Maaa! What can I do for you tonight? Broke your magic wand again? Maaah!”
“Nice outfit! Hey, can you help me out of this prison?”
“You’ll have to bribe the Queen with true love. Believe it or not, true love is the only thing powerful people ever really want. Isn’t that funny? Well, do you think you can be her true sweetie? Can you, oh great and bravest knight?”
Cootie closed his eyes to think about the enormous challenge of giving true love to Queen Noiku. He considered all the thoughts, words and actions of true love, and a great stress shook his soul, and he broke into a sweat and screamed, “AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII! OKAY! I’ll do it!”
So Cootie and Queen Noiku were married, and after the ceremony he insulted the Queen just as his sister had done, even more vigorously, but to his shock and amazement, she slapped him, spanked him, and kicked him all around the palace grounds.
“Let that teach you how to treat a wife!” she told him.
Then, taking her utterly off guard, the young hero kissed the Queen on the lips and sucked her nose so hard that he momentarily took her breath away. However, as aroused as she was, she did not take him to the royal mattress, instead she sent him back up the tower, and later sent the guards to padlock the door again. The following day, after a good night’s sleep, she told him through the iron grillwork, “I know you enjoyed my kicking as much as our kissing, and you enjoyed our kiss as much as I, or even more, I dare say. Still, there was no love in that lustful kissing, young man! I am not so easily fooled. If you truly love me, you’ll have to prove it with a sacrifice! Ten more years in this prison for love; are you ready for that?”
“Don’t make me laugh! I could do 520 years in ten prisons for you! Whatever pleases you, my dear wife, you shall have, for I am far dumber than you.”
“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?” the Queen mocked him before going to the royal barbecue.
In his cell, Cootie prayed once more to his god. “These women sure are hard to please. She keeps asking for more. How can I kill her desire?”
Chief Lord Fairy-Wings Bungleperchaunstiltskin heard the boy’s troubles and rushed to his aid. He arrived in the form of a circus lion and whispered into the boy’s ear, “To please the Queen, promise to wage spectacular wars for her. Kill all her enemies, and kill everyone she fears and hates, so that love alone will fill her heart.”
Naturally, Cootie, being a hard-core fool, took the advice of his old schoolmaster again. When the Queen returned to say hello to him, as she did once every day, he said, “Queen Noiku, tell me whom you fear and hate the most, and I will risk my only life in battle against them!”
She threw herself at him, kissed him hotly, and said, “Brave knight! Swear it shall be so and I will take you to them directly!”
Well, our desperate numbskull swore repeatedly, and when he saw what the Queen feared and hated most of all, he swore again. For her enemies were no ordinary soldiers or fairytale monsters, no, they were the world’s 20 billion cows, pigs and chickens, who together devoured the Earth. Cootie observed their vast armies scattered on fields and crowded in barracks, and he was confused. Somehow, seeing their innocent eyes, he could not imagine a single one capable of evil.
“Uhhm, Queen Noiku, with all due respect, what harm can they do?”
She slapped him hard. “I’LL TELL YOU! These cute creatures have created some of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet, plus they are eating the food of the poor, killing small farmers, causing heart attacks, causing obesity to ruin human lives, creating deserts by denuding the land, and they even drive up global temperatures with their poisonous butt fumes! Can you imagine any greater evil than that?”
Cootie’s brain was spinning too much to answer. Queen Noiku withdrew a huge, three-foot long steak-knife from her deep pocket and handed it to the boy-hero.
“COOTIE BUGLE, TAKE THIS GREAT SWORD AND SLAUGHTER THE ENEMY!”
With one trembling arm he took the mighty, diamond-sharpened weapon, gulped, stood in a daze, and finally mumbled, “My Queen, though I love you more than life, this task may take some time.”
“Work swiftly, never veering from your goal, and you’ll be done before midnight. But should you fail, I will turn you into a goose!” she said and hissed, sending the young man running into a forest of cows. The beasts gazed upon the armed intruder.
“MMMOOOOOOOO!” they said.
“MMMOOOOOOOO!” Cootie answered back, his heart pounding, the great knife lowered to the grass.
Somehow, Cootie and the cows understand each other, though not half as much as Cootie understood the chickens, whom he loved even more than the adorable pigs he found at another factory farm. In fact, Cootie loved the chickens so much that he grew quite attached to them, and completely forgot that he wasn’t one of them, though by that time he was actually a goose. Nevertheless, the chickens didn’t discriminate much, and a whole week passed before the Queen, with the help of the boy’s family, found him trying to hatch chicken eggs. Queen Noiku could not control her emotions. Clutching his downy buttocks she cried,
“Cootie, Cootie, I counted on you! You’ve betrayed me, me, and for what? For a life with these… these hens?” and she fled in tears, leaving his parents standing, slack-jawed, hungrier than ever, and his sister shaking her head.
“Nice going, brother,” she commented, oozing sarcasm.
“YAHOOOO! IT’S TRUE, COMPARED TO YOU, I’M A GENIUS! HA-HA-HA-HA! YAHOOOOO!”
It was Queen Noiku. Thanks to Cootie, she’d been driven totally crazy with happiness by the precious illusion of her intelligence and innocence. She danced away, whooping with delight through the field before disappearing into her golden palace, where she later gave birth to a little lamb.
“Well, what are we going to do with our goose?” John asked his wife, Rose.
“Eat him, of course,” she said, and, since they were in fairytaleland, that’s what they did. With one swift blow Alexis knocked the bird unconscious. Before dawn it was plucked, cooked and consumed. No part of it went to waste, not even the brain, which tasted funny, like a great nut.
