Day One, Section 2. 7:27 pm. 686 words

Okay, made dinner. Here's what happened next.

Or so I heard. I wasn’t born when all this happened, but my grandmother was. She had nothing good to say about the Borealis family. Since her personal policy was “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all,” when I asked why no one liked them (I mean, seriously, how unsympathetic can you get with a beautiful princess and her entire family held hostage in a castle by a fire breathing dragon and the only person to break the spell could be a prince who killed the dragon and gave her love’s true kiss. Or was that true love’s kiss? Either way, you’d think they’d at least get some sympathy.) Where was I? Oh, yeah, when I asked why no one liked them but she could say anything mean herself, she merely handed me newspaper clippings from that time.

To say the Borealis family was litigious would be a gross misunder- something. What’s that word? Oh yeah, understatement.

To name a few:

• They sued all the king’s horses and all the king’s men for not being able to put Humpty together again.
• They sued Little Boy Blue for not keeping the cows out of their corn or the sheep out of their hay.
• They sued the little red hen for not sharing her bread.
• They sued the fairies for giving the princess, Aurora, such ridiculous gifts. They argued that a princess automatically was beautiful, witty and musical.
• They sued the spindle makers for not making their product spell proof.

“Why couldn’t you just say they liked to sue people?” I asked.

I remember she patted me on the head – which hurt since I had my usually limp brown locks in curlers- and said something that rhymed with truckers. But that can’t be right. Grandmother never swore either.

So when they were put to sleep, so to speak, the townspeople, villagers and country folk got together for a huge celebration that lasted about a month and vowed never to live under royalty again. I’m pretty sure everyone was drunk when they decided that they’d pick a leader by lottery and he or she would only be able to govern for about a year or until they got the hang of the job. After that, they’d pick someone else’s name out of a hat. But it worked pretty well overall, except for when Shamus put in his herd dog’s name as a joke and everyone decided that the dog might work just as well as anyone else and if someone asked him a question he could just bark once for yes and twice for no.

The day the dog got a bit uppity was the day he was booted out and

Time to clean the kitchen and hope for inspiration. I don't know where that dog came from. If I had a satirical bent I could have made the dog a donkey or an elephant. But no, I can't change it now, so years from now students will be tortured, wondering what I meant about the dog party.