I first met my future wife after accepting a challenge to wrestle this odd fellow named Hercules. He wanted to skin me and wear me like a coat! However, I am digressing. After the match, she approached me and introduced herself. She was obviously impressed at my ability to beat a demigod, so we began dating. After a few months of dating, I knew that she was the one, so I decided to propose. I asked her and her parents to meet me at a local restaurant so that I may ask for her hand. I knew that this would be extremely difficult since her parents didn't (and still don't) like me. When I got to the restaurant, I was met by her parents, both with disapproving scowls imprinted into their faces. Despite their hatred for me, I tried my best to clean up and impress them. Over the months while my wife and I were dating, her parents insisted on me filing down my teeth and claws. Since I loved her so much, I decided to do it to the point where my claws are nearly nonexistent and my mouth looks like that of a 2 month-old's.
After taking our seats at our table, I cleared my throat and mustered all of my might to ask them for their blessings. I decided to just come out and ask them before even getting our appetizers. I'm assuming I didn't get their blessings considering the fact that, after asking, her dad lunged towards me with a nearby steak knife while her mom started spraying me with mace as if it were a new cologne. Had I had my teeth, I probably would have mauled them both, but since all I had were my filed down teeth and bare paws, I mostly gummed on them until my future-wife was able to pull them both off. At the end of the dinner, I was maced and scratched up. Regardless, I still proposed and we decided to elope, sending pictures of our honeymoon to her parents as payback. A few years later, we had a couple of kids (imagine centaurs with manes) and are on visiting terms. Even so, they still try to kill me every visit. Every year, for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and her parents birthdays, we have to get dressed-up and visit. Where most Christmas dinners ends with the family arguing with each other, ours usually ends up with me maced and her parents covered in my saliva since I've lost all my teeth.
The moral of the story - at least how I, a lion stuck with in-laws who try to kill me all the time, interpret it - is to never get married.
Author's Notes: I thought I'd put a spin on Aesop's fable about the lion who tried to marry a woman. I'm not a fan of either endings (where either the lion is betrayed and laughed off or where it is killed) so I decided to make my story a bit more lighthearted. One aspect that I wanted to keep from both iterations of the story was the fact that the marriage between a lion and a young woman was totally normal.
(The Lion in Love:
Bibliography: Aesop's Fables by Joseph Jacobs; The Lion in Love.
I really enjoyed this story. The first thing that caught my attention was the title; I knew it had to be funny. Later, at the dinner, the line about mostly just gumming the in laws after being maced brought a definite chuckle. As I was reading, I did wonder a little bit more about the lion's wife. Since you changed the story to reflect a more normal, consensual marriage, it made me wonder what a woman who chose to marry a lion, against her parents' wishes, would be like. Also, since you approached the lion/human marriage as something not particularly unusual or controversial, what reasoning did the parents' give for being against it, and how was that reflected in the personality of the wife? If I were to make a recommendation, I think it would be that I'd like to see one of those family holidays in a little more detail. Perhaps, what the mom might be yelling as she maced her lion son-in-law, and what the wife was yelling back at her parents as she tried to break up the fight. You could even throw in one of the children jumping in and biting grampa, because he thinks that they're all playing a game.
ReplyDeleteI thought this story was really funny! I liked that you kept the normalcy of the lion/human relationship because fables have enough weirdness going on. I also liked that you brought in some Greek myth as background for how they met, it was a good way to blend the two genres. Telling this story from the Lion's point of view in order to give the story a new ending and a new meaning was really creative.
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