The Golden Slippers

With only three days to go before Thanksgiving, the spirit of the season hadn't caught up with Donna yet. Cars were packed into the parking lot of the local supermarket, and it was even worse inside the store. Shopping carts and last-minute shoppers jammed the aisles and packed the checkout lanes so that the shortest one still would take at least twenty minutes.

In front of Donna were two small children, a boy about five years old and his little sister. The boy wore a ragged coat. Enormously large, tattered tennis shoes jutted far out in front of his much-too-short jeans. He clutched several crumpled dollar bills in his grimy hands.

The girl's clothing resembled her brother's. Her head was a matted mass of curly hair. Reminders of an evening meal showed on her small face. She carried a beautiful pair of shiny, gold house slippers from Aisle 6.

When the children finally reached the checkout register, the girl carefully placed the shoes on the counter. She treated them as though they were a treasure. The clerk rang up the bill. "That will be $16.09," he said.

Tinny Christmas music blared from Donna's cell phone, the sign of an impending call. "Myron! It's so good to hear from you!" she said loudly, oblivious to the annoyed stares of shoppers around her. "No, I'm just out finishing the shopping for Thursday. I got the candied yams for Mother, but I couldn't find the stuffing you said your daughter likes. Are you sure Stove Top even makes jellybean flavor?"

The boy laid his crumpled dollars atop the stand while he searched his pockets. He finally came up with $7.12. "I guess we will have to put them back," he said. "We will come back some other time, maybe tomorrow."

With that statement, a soft sob broke from the little girl. "But we need to buy them now," she wept.

"What do you mean, Myron?" Donna shrieked into her phone. "It's Monday evening, and I've been standing here for an hour at the supermarket with a twenty-pound turkey in my hands! How can Edith and Merkel even think about going to his father's?!

"Look, you give them a call and tell them we are not going to let them ruin Thanksgiving for everyone and visit his father just because the old man is 83 and all alone. He made it this far, he can make it one more year!"

The little boy cast an odd glance at Donna before turning back to his sister. "We'll go home and work on it," he said gently. "Don't cry. We'll come back."

Now other customers were shuffling nervously from one foot to the other, and a few were departing for longer but seemingly cheerier checkout lanes. One or two looked desperate enough to abandon their carts and make a break for another supermarket.

"I am not being unreasonable!" Donna shouted. "If you were with Dominion Wireless you could make that call for free! I get two thousand WheneverIDarnWellWant minutes each month, plus free weekends and even health benefits."

With a start, Donna realized that no one was moving. Her eyes swiveled onto a sniveling pair of waifs standing in front of her who suddenly began to quake. She turned her attention onto the cashier.

"Will you get them out of here?" she demanded.

"We were just going," muttered the boy. He fumbled past Donna with his sister, then surreptitiously added the golden slippers to her pile of groceries before ducking around to the exit with his sister.

Ten minutes later, Donna emerged pushing a cart loaded with groceries, still talking on her cell phone with her brother Myron. There, poking out of a bag, were the golden slippers. While the little girl pretended to be hurt and fell against Donna's legs to distract her, the older brother pulled the slippers out of the cart.

"MY PHONE!" Donna shouted. She scrambled across the sidewalk and grabbed the phone. "Myron, hold on a minute." She stood up and looked at the two children critically. "Oh, it's you. What hideous slippers you bought."

"We thought Jesus would like them," the little girl said.

"Oh swell, Myron. It's a couple of religious freaks," Donna said into the phone before putting it back down again. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.

The boy answered. "Our mommy has thyroid cancer and is going to heaven soon. Daddy said she might be with Jesus before Thanksgiving."

The girl spoke. "My Sunday school teacher said the streets in heaven are shiny gold, just like these shoes. Won't mommy be beautiful walking on those streets to match these shoes?"

Donna rolled her eyes, and got back onto her phone to tell Myron how Child Welfare needed to do a better job keeping children off the streets. The little girl tearfully watched her scurry into the distance, until her brother showed her the twenty-pound turkey he had been able to snag too.

Somehow, they knew, it would be a happy Thanksgiving after all.

Moral: If we can't "hear you now," we must be deaf -- so just hang the freaking phone up already.

The Pit of Shame
Curious to see what the original is based on? We don't have the original story on our web site, but you can find "The Golden Slippers" all sorts of places on the Internet.

Mouse trap

A mouse (whose name was Clay), overhearing the farmer and his wife talking about something they had bought to "take care of the mouse" looked through a crack in the wall in hopes of seeing some kind of food. To her dismay, from the small plastic wrapper emerged not cheese but a shiny deadly mousetrap.

Devastated, the mouse retreated to the farmyard (which was called Trump Acres) and took up a loud lament, "A mousetrap's in the house! A mousetrap's in the house!" and soon enough the entire mouse population of the farm was alternately crying "Doom!" and beating their undersides with tiny clenched paws.

The chicken (whose name was Alla), scratching in the dirt for corn, clucked in annoyance at the commotion. "Little mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you," the hen said seriously before walking away. "But it is of no consequence to me, and I cannot be bothered by it. Just suck it up, princess."

The pig (whose name was Adam), still half-buried in the trough, was more sympathetic. "When I win the next farmyard election," he snorted before re-submerging headfirst in the pork barrel, "I promise to take immediate action to reduce the number of mousetraps in the house by thirty percent within three years. In the meantime, I can do nothing but pray… but be assured I will. Remember that I do respect you as a person."

 

The cow (whose name was Felisha), which had been chewing absently on the farmer's five-leafed bumper crop, only looked off dreamily into the sunset as the mouse repeated its terrible news. "That's a bummer," she said before walking away. "Say, did you know that I'm planning to develop the land in my stall? I'm going to call it Cowtopia."

The mouse sat and absorbed these various cruelties until the sun began to sink, then gathered herself and stiffly returned to the stall to feed her young for what may be the last time, and to think.

That very night, a loud snap echoed throughout the house, and the farmer's wife (whose name was Melania)hurried to the trap, knife in hand, to add yet another tail to her growing collection. In the darkness, she did not realize that the trap had caught not a mouse but a terrible snake, one filled with deadly venom, lured there by Clay and now caught by the tail.

The farmer (whose name was Donald) rushed his wife to the hospital, where she was treated with potent anti-venom, but infection set in, followed by terrible fever.

Chicken soup, the farmer thought after returning home, under the studied gaze of the mouse lingering unnoticed on the pantry shelf just above him. Chicken soup is just what you need when you have a fever.

Not long after, the chicken's neck lay pinned across a block of wood by the farmer's mighty left hand. The right hand placed the hatchet gently on the chicken's neck, then lifted it up to deliver a mighty swing. The last thing the chicken saw with its tear-filled eyes was the mouse looking down from the farmer's shoulder, a look of grim satisfaction on her pointy little snout.

When the fever did not break, the pig soon found itself hanging upside-down from a tree in preparation to feed all the friends and neighbors who had come to tend the farmer's wife in her illness. As its life drained away, the pig noticed the mouse distributing leaflets and campaign signs. and realized that this time he had lost the election.

Sadly, the farmer's wife soon died. So many people attended her funeral that the farmer needed to slaughter his cow in order to feed them all.

"But what will become of Cowtopia now?" the cow told the smug little mouse, as she walked into her final stall. "By the way, I really hate you."

 

At the wake, several mourners remarked on the interesting kibbles the farmer had thought to add to the rice dish, and many of the children enjoyed playing with and petting the "gerbil" that they assumed had escaped from its cage. Several even showed the rodent to their mothers and fathers, who oohed and aahed over the nice pet and patted it on the head before wiping tears from their eyes, and one even kissed it.

But as his visitors finally filtered home, the farmer felt a cold shadow drape over him, and he shivered as he perceived the dark and mirthless eyes of the mouse upon him.

Not long after, a mysterious illness swept across the countryside, killing millions. The farmer, one of those unfortunates who did not die, spent the rest of his days locked in a sanitarium, haunted forever by visions of a large mouse with preternatural intelligence staring heartlessly at him with eyes that spoke of the void.

And so, wise reader, the next time you hear of someone facing a problem and think it doesn't concern you, remember that when one of us is threatened, all of us are at risk. We must keep our eyes upon one another and stay involved, or suffer the consequences.

Moral: The life you save could be your own.


The Pit of Shame
Curious to see what the original is based on? We don't have the original story on our web site, but you can find "Mouse Trap" all sorts of places on the Internet.

The Rescue

The Rescue

In the dark of a November morning in Markle City, a thunderstorm capsized a milk truck on the Number 17 Route. Stranded and in trouble, the buxom milkmaid Holly and her assistant sent out a call for help over the truck's CB radio.

The call came in and the city aldermen went at once into a closed-door meeting, where they worked long into the night to discuss ways to blame the mishap on the mayor, who represented another political party and was coming up for re-election. The next afternoon, they called a press conference that no one came to (except for a reporter from the Washington Post, who thought someone had mentioned free beer) and asked for a volunteer to risk life and limb to save the buxom milkmaid Holly.

All eyes swiveled on the hapless reporter.

Cursed by his misfortune at being the only attendee, the newly commissioned Rescuer of the Hapless (yet Buxom) Milkmaid Holly and her precious cargo jumped into his car and in a tizzy lurched around the town square, knocking down one newsstand after another that sold The New York Times.

After the reporter had driven off in the general direction of the Number 17 Route, the people of Markle City began their long, anxious wait — for the stores to open. Christmas was only forty-five days away, and the stores had not opened yet that morning for them to finish their Christmas shopping. What was worse, the lack of fresh milk had driven the local coffee shop cappuccino clientele into a caffeine-junkie rage that threatened to leave the lower part of the city in flames.

An hour later, the reporter from the Washington Post returned, screeching his car into the scattered remains of the newsstand that had once sold The Miami Herald, sending grocery fliers and tattered copies of Cosmopolitan flying.

The cheering people ran to greet the reporter and the buxom milkmaid Holly, who emerged from the fogged-up car, breathing rather heavily. Falling exhausted on the ground, the reporter announced that there hadn't been any room in the back seat for them to bring both the buxom milkmaid Holly AND her assistant, who had made the ultimate sacrifice by being left behind.

"We never would have made it past first base otherwise," the reporter explained, a little off-balance. "I mean, trying to hit one out of the park – wait, no, a line drive into left field… no no no, I mean, well, um, I would have struck out," he finished, thumping himself doltishly on the forehead when he realized he would never get a Pulitzer for this slew of commentary.

Not much into baseball after the recent "blink and you missed it" World Series, the city aldermen held another emergency meeting in order to determine how the mayor once again had been at fault. But as they spoke in guarded whispers and charted out their strategies on the white board, 36-year-old Smirkov Grinn took another look at the flushed and radiant buxom milkmaid Holly, smiled determinedly, and stepped forward.

His mother grabbed his arm, pleading, "Please don't go! Your father died in a freak milking accident ten years ago and your younger brother Jocko has been lost ever since you took him to Wal-Mart this past June. Smirkov, you cannot go, you are all I have left!"

With a steely glint in his eye, Smirkov replied, "Ma, I have to go. What if everyone in this town said, 'I can't go, let someone else do it?' I cannot help but do my duty. When the call for service comes, we all must take our turn and let the chips fall where they may."

Extracting himself from her iron grip, Smirkov leapt into the station wagon before she could refasten herself, simultaneously rolled up the windows and locked the doors in an amazing display of dexterity that could have only resulted from countless years of practice, and breathed a sigh of heavy relief. As his mother threw herself in front of the car to stop him, he threw the car into reverse and prepared for the rescue by driving to a neighboring town where he knew there was a coffee shop with a full stock of steamed milk.

An hour passed, and then another, and another, leaving the town aldermen wondering how to blame this new predicament on the mayor, as they were not nearly as creative as they were politically ambitious.

Finally a single headlight pierced the fog, and the old station wagon sputtered to a stop. Smirkov's head was sticking out the driver's window because he had never bothered to refill the washer fluid and the windshield was now creased with road salt.

Cupping his hands, the chief alderman asked, "Hoy, there, did you find the buxom milkmaid Holly's assistant?"

"Yeah." Smirkov grumbled with the growl of a man who has been sorely disillusioned. "Yeah, tell my mum I found the bum. It was Jocko."

Their mother was so overjoyed that she blubbered uncontrollably while the brass section of the marching band played one song, the woodwinds played a second, and slide whistles commandeered the third.

Jocko looked overwhelmed and uncomfortable. Smirkov wore a gigantic smile on his face — but whether it was the grin of someone truly as pleased as punch at finding his brother or of a frustrated postal worker with a handgun in his mail bag, no one knew for certain.

"Guess you're happy now, Ma, right?" Smirkov said at last, trying to make the best of things.

The stare their mother gave Smirkov was withering. "As if that even matters to you! Running off like that, risking your life on a fool's errand, without a thought for how it would affect your poor old mother! Didn't it occur to you that I'd be sick with worry at the thought of losing my second son as well?"

"Uh …well…"

"No, I don't suppose you did!" she said harshly. "Ever since you were born, the only one you've ever cared about has been yourself!

"And YOU!"

She rounded now on Jocko, who had survived his harrowing ordeal alongside the road by drinking skim milk and eating the foam padding in his seat.

"The nerve you have! Where have you been for the last five months?! Don't you know that I love the two of you so much that I would rip my legs off and feed them to crocodiles if I merely thought it would make you happy, and you can't even bother to call me or send me a lousy card on my birthday!"

And then Ma bobbled away.

"Well," Jocko said at last, as their sobbing mother receded in the distance. "Glad to see I didn't miss a thing."

Moral: If you dump your mother to rescue another, and it's your brother... don't bother.

The Pit of Shame
Copyright laws prevent us from sharing the original inspirational story that serves as the basis for today's mailing. Fortunately, lots of people on the Internet have posted stories like "Rescue at Sea" illegally for just such an emergency.