“Hey, Coach Jackson!” Huey nervously communicated to Fletcher as he glanced around the tall trees and thick fog.
Fletcher maintained a cautious eye on the path ahead of us, but he still responded to Huey, “What?”
Huey relayed to him, “I changed my mind! I wanna play volleyball now!”
After rubbing his temples in a frustrated fashion, Fletcher articulated, “It’s too late for that now! But I want you to remember this experience when we get back, and-!”
“Their memory of this experience will get completely wiped out when we go back to the Earthly Realm,” I informed Fletcher.
“Lucky them!” Aleck muttered as he untangled himself from a pointy branch. “I wish the monsters would hurry up and bother us already! Sam only agreed to watch my students ‘cause I told him I’d be back in a minute!”
Phoebe remarked, “No one is watching my kids! I said I was going to the bathroom real fast… which I still need to do!” She clutched her stomach, and then she notified us, “I’ll be right back!”
Ginger critiqued her decision to run into the thicket, “You can’t go potty in the woods! There are bugs there!”
“And possibly monsters!” Kamali added.
“Oh, come on! What are the odds she’d run into a monster at this precise moment?” Jasper pushed back against that notion.
From the spot Phoebe chose to occupy, we heard a male’s voice cry out in anguish! Phoebe reemerged, and after hoisting up her pantaloons, she announced, “I found the next monster! Maybe if we run, we can-!”
A statuesque wolf in people’s clothing entered onto the scene walking on his hind legs and glowered at us. “You humans are disgusting! You think you can leave your droppings just anywhere, huh?” As the boys huddled together in fright, he threatened, “You’ll pay for your misdeeds!”
The adults prepared to fight the wolf, but the children whimpered at this terrifying development. Jimmy exclaimed, “Oh no! We’re gonna get eaten by the Big Bad Wolf!”
“Hey! Who are you calling big?” The wolf shielded his guy from our view as much as he could.
“Isn’t that your name?” George inquired.
Quite affronted, the wolf replied, “Wow! Who taught you your manners?”
Huey indicated to my friends and me standing behind him. “These guys did!”
The other five awkwardly waved at him, but this interaction struck me with interaction, so I hurried over to the boys and whispered, “Forget all the rules of politeness we gave you! Be as mean as possible to this wolf!”
“Are you giving us permission to bully someone, Mister Fenmore?” Jimmy incredulously asked.
“No, in this instance, I’m encouraging it!” I answered.
The wolf bristled at their rudeness. “Ooh! I’m going to thoroughly enjoy killing you!”
I urged the boys, “Do it! Now!”
“How are you gonna kill us?” George somewhat timidly spoke to the wolf. “Are you gonna breathe your nasty breath on us?”
“My breath doesn’t smell!” the wolf indignantly stated.
The boys began to pick up on the wolf’s vulnerability, so Huey more jocularly jeered, “Maybe that’s his nasty feet we smell! He’s not even wearing shoes!”
Getting rather depressed, the wolf spat, “It’s hard to get footwear for paws!”
“Guys, he’s probably too poor to afford any shoes!” Jimmy snickered. “I mean, who’s gonna hire this nasty creature? He can’t draw a salary!”
“You’re all just… cruel!” The wolf busted out into tears and ran back into the knotty trees as the entire class laughed at him.
Ellie amusedly noted, “Teenage callousness has its place!” As the boys celebrated their victory, Ellie advised them, “Let’s not give him a chance to rebuild his self-esteem! Get a move on!”
We soon came to a babbling brook with a stone bridge above it. Prior to anyone setting foot on the span, I held my arms out so no one could embark on it. “Hold on! If I remember my fairytales correctly, there’s a troll underneath that bridge!”
“Who said we were in a fairytale?” Ginger challenged me.
“I dunno!” I shrugged. “The Big Bad Wolf thing made me go the fairytale route I guess!”
Jasper opined, “Seeing how it’s our only route forward, it couldn’t hurt to see if there was some sort of trap there.”
Natalia declared, “I’ve got this!” She took off a shoe and hurled it onto the span. Within seconds, a creature with brown fur, pointy ears, fangs, and a portly belly sprang out and ravenously devoured her footwear! When it realized it had been tricked, it glared at us and retreated into its shelter. Natalia bemoaned, “Oh, great! Now, I gotta get another pair!”
“Wow! I’m not used to hearing a woman complain about having to go shopping to expand her wardrobe!” Aleck commented.
“I’m from Heaven- there aren’t exactly a lot of malls in a place that doesn’t use money!” Natalia huffed. After I emitted a noise of disappointment at the premise of a favorite hangout of mine not having any residency up there, she continued, “I gotta get another pair from the Big Guy!”
George puzzled, “The Big Guy? Do you mean…?”
Osra elucidated, “He goes by many names! God, Spirit, Lord, Zeus, Brahma, the sun, Yahweh, Jeff…”
Ginger questioned that, “Jeff?”
After sighing, Osra clarified, “It was a cult thing!”
“Maybe we can ask him nicely to let us pass,” Phoebe suggested.
“I don’t think we have time to ask Him for a favor right now!” Kendra put in.
Connor gently corrected her misimpression, “I think she meant the troll.”
Kamali scoffed at that notion, “Who’s gonna volunteer for that death trap?”
“Aren’t you guys dead?” Jimmy pressed him.
“Yeah, but our spirits can still perish!” Kamali shot back.
Eamon audaciously asserted, “This task requires someone that’s nimble and quick enough to flee should things go awry, and none of you possess that quality! And, while I do, I cannot possibly perform this feat because…” When he realized the fault in his logic, he dismally went forward. “Alright, I shall make this attempt!”
He gingerly approached the troll’s proximity at the foot of the bridge, and he politely addressed it, “Excuse me, dear chap! My companions and I would like a hasty use of your domain. It seems mutually beneficial to not quarrel with one another, so I propose a peace agreement between both parties. What say you?” The troll did not come out or even acknowledge that it heard Eamon, so Eamon begrudgingly accepted that he would have to broach the beast’s terrain. As he carefully approached the span, he kept striving to negotiate with the troll, “If there is some other toll we must pay, we-.”
Prior to him getting to finish that sentence, the troll scurried out from its site of refuge and charged at Eamon at full speed! Eamon sprang off the structure in time to stay safe, and he rejoined our group with a visibly shaken visage. Fletcher tersely posed to everyone, “Now what? Do we gotta kill the varmint?”
“What if we built our own bridge?” Ginger propositioned.
“That’ll take too long!” Aleck argued.
Ginger contended, “I don’t mean anything fancy! We could use a tree trunk or even some large rocks! I see some over by the bank there…” As she went to retrieve them, she tripped over an unknown commodity behind a bush! “Man, I wish they didn’t put me in a skirt for this!” The boys rushed over to catch a glimpse of this sight, but preceding their arrival, Ginger already stood back up. After they groaned from disappointment, Ginger announced, “This is what tripped me!”
She held up an archaic volleyball, and George perplexedly regarded Ellie, “Missus Wayan, didn’t you say they invented that sport in the eighteen-hundreds?”
“Oh sure, now you’re paying attention to the facts I present!” Ellie pouted.
“Property of the Three Little Pigs!” Osra read some writing off of the volleyball. “I guess that other beast really was the Big Bad Wolf!”
At that moment, a lightbulb went off in Fletcher’s head. “Hey! We can use this to clock that sucker! We can lure him out, and then- bam! We can move on!”
Natalia folded her arms defiantly. “I’m not using my other shoe! Someone else can sacrifice their footwear!”
“What if we use this long stick?” Kalmali picked up a slender and lengthy twig high enough so we could all see it.
“Oh, fine! Make me look foolish!” Natalia sulked.
Fletcher instructed, “Alright, you three reach that branch out as far as you can, and as soon as that troll comes out, serve the ball to him, Huey!”
Huey objected, “Why me? I know I said I wanted to play volleyball earlier, but… Why can’t he do it?” He indicated to George. “He’s the one who brought us here, and you said his form was so awesome!”
“He was only saying that to distract him from his weird eyes!” Jimmy disputed. “Besides, you’ll be a big hero, so you should cherish this honor!”
“Okay, you do it then if it’s such a big honor!” Huey tried to hand the ball to Jimmy.
Jimmy threw his hands up in refusal. “No way, man!”
The boys began to bicker, so Fletcher intervened, “Shut it! You wanna know why you, Huey? This nonsense! Quit it and let’s get this over with already!”
Kamali, Phoebe, and I guided the narrow piece of lumber to the bridge, and Huey nervously readied himself to complete the task. When our sprig finally reached far enough on the span, the troll shot out with its usual fervor. Huey launched his projectile, and…
“Wow! You missed the bridge completely!” Kendra noted.
“I told you not to let me do it!” Huey vehemently reacted. “I choke under pressure!”
Ginger asserted, “It’s all about angles! If you hit it from the right point, your trajectory will follow a motion that-!”
Cutting off her geometry lecture, I directed everyone, “Hey! Look at the ball!”
“I get it! My aim sucked!” Huey grumped.
“No! See how it’s sitting in the river…” I alluded to the spot it rested at, and everyone could discern it was only partially submerged.
Osra raved, “It’s been shallow all along! Ugh! Let’s go!”
We all heeded her decree and crossed the wet ravine. Ginger tossed the ball out of her pathway, and we heard the unmistakable sound of it landing on the Big Bad Wolf! We eagerly trudged through the brook to avoid dealing with that annoying foe once more!
“Are we there yet?” George moaned as we trekked through a shadowy sector of the woods.
“Yeah, but we kept going for the fun of it!” I sarcastically verbalized to him.
George’s eyes widened at that concept. “Are you serious?”
I irritably assured him, “No! You’ll know when we’ve found the Gilded Pheasant ‘cause we’ll have to fend off the dragon guarding it!”
Aleck probed, “How do you know it’ll be a dragon?”
“Because that’s the ultimate boss in fairytales,” I reasoned.
“Not necessarily,” Phoebe differed. “There could be a blood-thirsty giant or a witch with powerful spell-casting abilities! Gosh, I don’t know what to root for!”
Aleck opined, “We’ve dealt with giant creatures and jinxes before, and we know we can deal with them with whatever random crap is at our disposal. We were only able to defeat that dragon ‘cause I concocted a substance that combusted in its digestive system. We don’t have any of that at our disposal unless we happen to come across Merlin’s hut!”
Kendra protested his imagery, “Merlin didn’t live in a hut! He shared residence with us in Tintagel! A hut would’ve been nice for him- he was clumsy and destroyed several vases and small tables!”
Everybody except for the rest of my ancestors garnered so many questions about that revelation, but prior to any of us getting to delve into that subject, a puff of gray smoke blocked our route! We heard some guttural growling, and the entire collective understood what that implicated. Ginger tried to encourage us, “Maybe it’s a little dragon!”
We tiptoed around some hedges bordering a rocky crag. When we reached the edge, we warily peeked around the corner to behold what we were destined to duel. We all hoped for Ginger’s prediction to manifest, but in reality, we all expected a giant monster to greet our view. What we didn’t expect to espy was…
My Stories 