Week 5 Storytelling: Motley

We were three baseball players, but none of us had a bat. So we went to the guitar store and bought three ukuleles, but only one had all its strings.

We came across a leafless tree with three birds in it who didn't have any wings. One of us grabbed the big one with his hook but we decided to walk to China for authentic Chinese food. We climbed a couple of hills and I fell down a really deep valley one time right into a river on stones.

We came to a village with no houses and all the people were zombies. The last living people took us to their house without a floor so we could eat. We asked for some stuff to cook with and they gave us spoons without handles and a pot with no sides. So we baked the bird we caught in the oven and I went to set the table with no top with the plates with no bottoms.

When we were done, we had to let everyone know. I said I was full, the pitcher said he was finished, and the catcher said he didn't want anymore. The pitcher had eaten all the feathers, the catcher all the gravy, and that made me mad so I left to go to a corn field.

I took my blade and cut down some ears of corn. Then a guy with a wagon went through the corn field and I asked him where my blade went. He told me he had been looking for his ten daughters he lost 20 years ago. "How am I supposed to find your blade?" he asked.

So I left again because I was mad and I found the tree with the birds in it again. Someone had killed another one, though, and left it in a box. When I went to look at it, I saw one hundred marauders on motorcycles coming for me so I ran for my life.

I ran to the other side of town and stopped in a church yard to catch my breath. But the motorcycle guys came bursting through the gate and chased me around. I was running as fast as I could but my legs wouldn't move fast at all. So I started climbing a wall to get on the roof, but one of the guys came after me with a metal pipe. My hand slipped trying to grab the roof and I screamed while I fell back to the ground, but before I could reach it-- I woke up.

Big bed, little kid (Wikimedia Commons)

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Author's Note: The source of this story is a tale called Kunterbunt from Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos (1913). The title is actually a German word meaning motley, which is why I chose this word for the title of my retelling. Yes, this is a very weird story and it doesn't make any sense until the end, hopefully. This was all just a dream. It's hard to summarize the original plot because it is very nonsensical. Basically, there are three brothers that go on a very strange adventure. They buy broken bows, kill an already dead duck in a stream without water,  and cook and eat with plates full of holes or without bottoms. Then the narrator leaves because one brother ate all the meat and the other all the bones, meets some guy looking for 12 lost camels for 40 years, sees a dead body in a basket, runs from 40 thieves, tries to hide but fails, and eventually falls while trying to climb to safety and wakes up, realizing it was all a dream. I wanted to retell this story because it was different from any other story I had read for this class and I thought it would be a challenge. How do you tell a story that's not supposed to make any sense? I tried to make things my own by changing characters and objects but without straying too far from the general idea of the original plot. I hope that the story makes sense once you get to the last sentence, like the original story where the realization that it was all a dream just made everything click.