Lucy Vickery

Competition No. 2663: Grimm revision

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

issue 11 September 2010

In Competition No. 2663 you were invited to submit a politically correct version of a well-known fairy tale.
The inspiration for this challenge was  Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, who recasts favourite yarns to take account of modern political sensibilities. In  Garner’s PC world, witches are ‘kindness impaired’ and Cinderella wears a robe ‘woven from silk stolen from unsuspecting silkworms’. Bill Greenwell pockets the extra fiver this week. His fellow winners, printed below, get £30 apiece. Honourable mentions go to G.M. Davis, Robert Schechter, Gillian Ewing and Marion Shore.

An omnivorous, optically-challenged wiccan appropriates two pre-pubescent and differently-gendered siblings whose adoptive mother and natural father, themselves victims of a recession, have allegedly relinquished their custodial responsibilities. The siblings, exercising their right to roam, have nonetheless invaded the personal space of the wiccan, and defied national advisory consumption guidelines relating to body-mass index by eating her dwelling-house, which is biodegradable but high in fat content.

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