The old queen doesn’t believe the soaking wet ragamuffin who has appeared at her door is a princess, but she knows how to find out.
After a week or so of bitterly cold temperatures, the weather finally warmed up enough for me to enjoy walking my dogs again. The three of us were walking down my road at a good pace, enjoying listening to some cows mooing and horses neighing in a pasture somewhere close by. There were no worries about any traffic coming up my road: I no longer have a neighbor and the mail had already run.
It happened when I turned around at the end of one of the laps: something poked me in the heel. Whatever it was had at least one very sharp side, and it was inside my shoe. I’d had my tennis shoes on for a while already, so I was puzzled as to what it could be. It felt like a pebble, but I had no clue how a pebble could have wormed its way into my shoe and beneath my heel. My best guess was that the sharp little culprit was a piece of cat litter. I have nine cats, and cat litter ends up in the strangest places, so why not in my shoe? Whatever it was, it was very annoying. Its sharp end poked into the bottom of my heel for about the last half-mile I walked.
That uncomfortable situation made me think of the story about the princess and the pea. The prince had searched far and wide for a true princess to marry, yet somehow, he couldn’t find one. During a thunderstorm, a rain-drenched young lady knocked at the door of the castle. Although she appeared to be a ragamuffin, the young lady said she was a princess. The queen didn’t believe her, but she know how to find out. She invited the young lady to stay the night there and placed a pea beneath the twenty mattresses that the young lady was to sleep on that night. And on top of all those mattresses, she spread twenty featherbeds of eiderdown. That must have been one tall bed. When the young lady awoke the next morning, the queen asked her how she had slept. “Oh, horribly!” she said. “I hardly closed my eyes all night. Goodness knows what there was in the bed! I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It is horrible!”
This told the queen that she was a real princess.
What about your characters? Do any of them have a-princess-and-the-pea moment?
But what I call a princess-and-the-pea moment isn’t what that story is about. “The Princess and the Pea” shows that people aren’t always what they appear to be. Even though the young lady appeared to be more of a ragamuffin than a princess, she was a real princess. What about the characters in your book? Do they try to hide their true identity?
Is one or more of your characters a bad or evil person who tries to appear to be good? Or does a good character unwittingly appear to be bad despite all attempts not to?
Maybe a wealthy person wants to appear to be poor. Or a poor person could pretend to be rich.
This story shows that you need to have all your facts before jumping to any conclusions. It is a perfect illustration of why you shouldn’t judge a person by their appearance. Of course, the young lady might have been a true princess, but that doesn’t say much about her actions, her temperament, or how she treated others.
By the way, the object in my shoe did turn out to be a pebble. I don’t know how it ended up in my shoe, but it didn’t turn my heel black-and-blue. It just annoyed me. And there weren’t twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds of eiderdown between my heel and the pebble, only a sock and an ankle sleeve.
The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen
Writing Prompt:
Have you ever had any princess-and-the-pea moments? Keep track of all these moments in a notebook and use them in your stories.
