The Prince and The Pea: A Short Tale for Picky Girls
Once upon a time there was a plain medium-sized princess. She was happy in all the ways but one. She had everything she could ever want but she could not find a true prince. There was nothing she wanted more than to find this magical man (and build her own castle and learn to bake croissants and have adventures and travel to Peru).
“What are you looking for my daughter?” said the Queen.
“The man train is leaving you behind and you’re getting old,” said the king,
“But you must understand,” said the princess, “I’m looking for a true prince!”
The king and queen looked at each other. A true prince!
“And how will you know this true prince?” the queen asked, already dreading the answer.
The king said nothing. He did not understand the concept.
“I will set up a tower of mattresses for him to lay on,” said the princess. “And underneath the bottom-most mattress, I will hide a pea. If he can feel it, then he will feel my heart underneath all the walls I put up over the years because I did not want to be disappointed or hurt by all the gallivanting princes out there. Also, it will probably mean that he’s a light sleeper and will likely not snore.”
So the king and queen— while they did not agree with this and found it terribly silly — set up this tower of mattresses in the guest room. And they waited by the door, hoping to hear a knock.
The knock came on a stormy night and the princess was annoyed that the prince arrived wet and disheveled. Why hadn’t he come on a day when it was nice and sunny and everyone was in a good mood?
“Hello! I’m a true prince,” he said. They believed him and let him inside.
They put up the prince in the guest room. The prince looked up at the tower of mattresses and said “Oh, I see! This is a test! She wants to see how well I can climb to the top. I’m a strong man!”
The princess came out of her hiding place and cried, “No! No! No! You’re getting it all wrong! You have to — Oh! Ooooh!”
The prince was climbing the tower of mattresses and his muscles rippled and his tattoos gleamed on his bulging biceps. She drooled. When he got to the top, he bade her goodnight and fell immediately asleep because he was too tired to question any of this weirdness.
In the morning the prince showed up at breakfast rubbing his back.
“How did you sleep?” the princess asked, eagerly. She had lain awake all night imagining their wedding. Or maybe like…their first trip together somewhere…or even just a first date.
“Ooof! Those mattresses were as hard as boards,” the prince said.
“And?” the princess pressed.
“And your plumbing is not too quiet, I must say! The castle was grumbling all night!”
“And?”
“There were bats outside my window.”
“Anything else?”
“I’m hungry…”
The princess growled. “Dude! Follow the script! Did you feel anything underneath the mattresses?”
“Huh! Now that you mention it yes, I did. There was a small round knobbly thing…”
“YES!” the princess shouted. “I FOUND HIM! I FOUND HIM! HE’S MINE!”
“Wait — what?”
The prince seemed flabbergasted. What had he just walked into?
“It was actually just one of my ear pods,” he continued. “It was in my pocket. Felt like a pea sticking into my hip!”
The princess roared and kicked him out of the palace. She kicked all of the princes out. She put up a sign at the gate that said “No princes allowed. No princes of ANY kind.”
And so the princess spent many days pacing her garden, weeping, covering her hurting heart, wondering why there was no true prince out there for her. She wondered if she put the pea too far down the tower of mattresses and if perhaps she ought to have moved it up a little. She wondered if she should leave the palace to go hunting for the prince somewhere else in the world. AGAIN. But she was too tired. She just wanted him to show up, to find her on his own.
As she was ruminating over all of this by the pond, a frog pounced out of the water. It was an ugly frog with bulging eyes and sore-looking flesh.
“Kiss me!” the frog croaked.
“Sorry! Wrong story! Move along!” the princess grumbled.
“Kiss me!” the frog said again.
“Nope. You’re too ugly. And you’re not a prince. And like I said, you’re in the wrong story.”
“Follow the script! Kiss me!”
The princess put her hand on her hip and glared at this audacious creature. How dare he demand a kiss when she had just said “no”!
“So you’re saying,” she argued, “that princes get to go out there hunting for a bee-yoo-tiful princess — and they generally get their wish — but I have to kiss a frog first? That’s unfair. It’s misogyny.”
The frog shrugged — if a frog could shrug — and jumped back in the pond.
The princess found that time helped her to forget about the prince she was looking for. Time took her on adventures and lured her into caverns and showed her the sacred waters were an ancient priestess once wept. Time took her to tea salons and in and out of bookstores and onto the couches of the dear friends that she made on the way.
The princess did go to peru. And she built a humble little castle of her own. She could not make a good croissant, however. An excuse to go to Paris, she told herself. Or the bakery next door.
One day, when she was older and no longer pretty — not pretty enough for a commercial magazine at least — but pretty enough for the sun and the air and the trees, she found a prince.
He was what she wanted, a true prince, who didn’t need to sleep on top of a tower of mattresses to prove that he was true. He was what she wanted but not quite what she imagined and that was the loveliest surprise of all.
One day when the two of them where swinging on a hammock, the prince made a confession.
“Remember years ago when you wouldn’t kiss me?”
“No…wait! That was you?”
“It sure was. You wouldn’t follow the script. And I’m glad you didn’t.”
It turned out that, back when he was a lowly frog, he was kissed by another princess. He turned into a prince and they were married for a while. It was happily-almost-ever-after for the two of them until things began to go terribly crooked and they realized they were completely wrong for each other.
The princess scratched his chin. She was glad that happily ever after never happened for him. Until now. Back then, he wasn’t ready for the princess that she was. And she wasn’t ready for the prince he would turn out to be.
