Humpty Dumpty seems to me to be a rhyme that probably had historic meaning at one time but has now become a description of things that attained importance but when they crash can't be fixed. That leaves it to many interpretations. Yours is a good one that has impressive imagination attached. Never hear that one!
Depending on what you read, the origins of Humpty Dumpty are said to refer either to a now forgotten, portly statesman or a cannon. Notably, never an egg as picture in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.
Excellent! I love that ending. And this is exactly what I was talking about. You are a master of throwing the reader right into the story in the very best of ways. If that bothers some readers they need to go back to school and learn this is the essence of cleverly good writing--in all formats, actually, but definitely in the short story format.
Thanks Ann! I think many of my early drafts, of this story and others, start much further back before I clip the narrative and figure out the start of the story. That is to say, I need an on-ramp, if only for me. Also, in the original draft Charleen did, in fact, go and get help: “And though the virtuous Charleen brought all she could muster in aid the Prince only lay there, as close as they had ever been. King and horse knelt solemnly at his feet, now a splintered shell of his once ovular self, and remarked the height of his fall.”
I guessed we were talking about Humpty with this line. " His head had shattered into a thousand scattered pieces." and that no spell or magic could put him to right. It cracked me up that you had him eating chicken. Ha ha ha.
Huzzah! Of course you would be the one to figure it out, Sharron. The chicken was a last minute addition that I couldn’t resist—it just seemed so, um, full circle. Thanks for reading!
Humpty Dumpty seems to me to be a rhyme that probably had historic meaning at one time but has now become a description of things that attained importance but when they crash can't be fixed. That leaves it to many interpretations. Yours is a good one that has impressive imagination attached. Never hear that one!
Depending on what you read, the origins of Humpty Dumpty are said to refer either to a now forgotten, portly statesman or a cannon. Notably, never an egg as picture in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.
Excellent! I love that ending. And this is exactly what I was talking about. You are a master of throwing the reader right into the story in the very best of ways. If that bothers some readers they need to go back to school and learn this is the essence of cleverly good writing--in all formats, actually, but definitely in the short story format.
Thanks Ann! I think many of my early drafts, of this story and others, start much further back before I clip the narrative and figure out the start of the story. That is to say, I need an on-ramp, if only for me. Also, in the original draft Charleen did, in fact, go and get help: “And though the virtuous Charleen brought all she could muster in aid the Prince only lay there, as close as they had ever been. King and horse knelt solemnly at his feet, now a splintered shell of his once ovular self, and remarked the height of his fall.”
Cherchez la femme, Mr Curtis! Cherchez la femme!
I guessed we were talking about Humpty with this line. " His head had shattered into a thousand scattered pieces." and that no spell or magic could put him to right. It cracked me up that you had him eating chicken. Ha ha ha.
Huzzah! Of course you would be the one to figure it out, Sharron. The chicken was a last minute addition that I couldn’t resist—it just seemed so, um, full circle. Thanks for reading!
That “chicken lodged in the throat”. is evidence of the writer’s tweaked mind…. which is not a bad thing, if you ask me.
and half-eaten at that... such an unsatifying way to die.
Could you please add an epitaph for this broken man? Here lies....
I could, but it might just be a quatrain next to a cairn. ;-)