Ugly Stick
Installment #2 in my several-part series, Shit I Wrote a While Ago. This one is from 1997.
Ugly Stick
A very long time ago, in the center of a valley between two high mountains, there stood an old oak tree. After some time of being there, a little cottage was built up next to it. In the cottage lived in old woman, but the tree never saw her. One night, in a storm, one of the tree’s branches scratched against a window of the woman’s cottage. All night it scratched, and it was so annoying that the old woman didn’t get a wink of sleep. Come morning she was so enraged that she burst out of her little house and cried in a crackly old voice, “Tree! Your scratching kept me up all night! Now I shall punish the cursed branch that scratched at my window!” And so the little old woman, actually being a witch named Zeldiezoo, raised her bony hands into the air and cackled, “Habbilty, scrabbilty, oogilty, ick! Turn that branch into an ugly stick!” And, with a clap of thunder and a flash of lightening for effect, the poor branch fell off the tree and landed on the ground, where it shriveled up into a gnarled old stick. Picking up the stick, Zeldiezoo stated, “Whoever touches (as in, picks up, trips over, or is beaten with) this stick shall become unbearably ugly.” After a short pause, she added, “I bet you’re wondering why I didn’t turn unbearably ugly, huh? I’m already too ugly. It would be impossible for me to become any more ugly.” And she strode off into her little house, leaving the stick on the ground.
A few weeks later there was another terrible storm that hit the valley. The witch’s house was smothered in the winds, and the tree was knocked down and would later be used to build a bridge across a body of water somewhere, but the stick, being less fortunate, was blown all the way out of the valley to a small fishing village nearby. It wasn’t storming in the village, and a group of young boys was leaving a house just as the stick blew up into the town square.
“Look!” one of the boys pointed out. “That stick will make a fine fishing pole!” He snatched it up, not knowing that it was an ugly stick. The second he touched it he grew immensely ugly, with wrinkly, grayish skin and sunken eyes and a bald head. Huge warts broke out all over his body, and some of his teeth fell out. The other boys were so frightened by his appearance that, without thinking, they took him and hauled him into the bay, where he sank like a stone. When the fish saw him they all died of fright. For days the fishermen went out to fish, but to no avail. All the fish were dead and rotting at the bottom of the bay, much like that unfortunate little boy. You may be thinking that this is the worst that it can get, but you are wrong. You see, the other boys, the ones who would have accompained the grossly ugly one on his fishing trip, had he not turned so ugly, got an ax and chopped up the stick. Then, using a garden trowel, they scooped up the pieces and buried them way out in the woods. Even less lucky than the boy turning into a troll and all the fish dying, the little pieces acted as seeds rather than dead pieces of stick, and they sprouted, merged together, and grew into an ugly tree. It grew very large in a week’s time, reaching the sky, and it showered little saplings all around it that would one day grow into trees too.
Two years later, the saplings hadn’t sprouted yet, more fish swam in, and the village had pretty much forgotten about the ugly little boy and the brief fish famine.
Two girls were out in a meadow one day, flying their kite. All was going well, and hey were singing the catchy tune from Mary Poppins, “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” when suddenly a gust of wind came and blew their kite up into a tree. The ugly tree, in fact.
“I’m not going up there to get it,” one argued, knowing that it was an ugly tree and that she’d never become a model if she did.
“We have to get it somehow,” the other argued, being as it was her kite, and brand new, too.
As luck might have it, a boy named Nave (as you’ll notice is Evan backward) came strolling along with his herd of sheep. “Hello there!” he called to them.
“Oh, hello, Nave,” the girls said delightedly. Nave and his family were new to the village and they didn’t know of the ugly tree.
“We were wondering,” one of the two began, flirtatiously twirling a lock of her curly hair around her pinkie finger, “if you’d get our kite. It seems to have blown up into that tree.” She innocently turned her big blue eyes up to the tree where the kite lay.
Her flirty ways evidently worked, because Nave agreed, “Sure!” without a second thought to it. The kite wasn’t up very high, so he began his ascent of the tree.
Then one of the girls screamed. He became very ugly, just as the other boy had, only he looked somewhat different. The girls fled, and ran to the village, where they called one of their big brothers, the village brute, whom everyone called Slash. He came immediately [ed note: TWSS], and was so disgusted by the boy that he threw him full-force into the tree, causing him to actually smash through the tree and stop inside its huge, hollow trunk. Slash quickly nailed up part of the hole, leaving only enough space for Nave to breathe through. The whole village then took a vote on it, and they decided that he should have to change his name from Nave to Evan. There wasn’t really a reason for it, but to this day the name Evan means “ugly boy who lives in a tree and gets uglier by the day,” because, of course, he did.
God, there are so many glaring inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies in this story that I don’t even know where to begin. In the first place, a living tree would not blow over in a storm. Nor would such a violent storm be able to take place “not far” from a coastal area where it was completely calm (and apparently also mid-morning). As an 11-year-old, I ought to have known that dead things do not sink in water (at least not until they’ve floated for a good long while); I also should have realized that if the stick itself has magical growing powers wherein it goes from “seed” to “reaching the sky [???!!!!]” in one week, then its saplings would have at least sprouted after two years’ time. Unfortunately I also elected to play into the whole “old, ugly woman is the only kind of woman who has power” addage, as well as the “young, pretty girls are merciless whores who will sacrifice well-meaning neighbor boys to get a kite back” addage. Also I wrote this story because I hated a kid in my English class named Evan. Considering that, I should give this story an F, plus it’s cliched and poorly-written. Oh welll. C+
