The Little Prince


Author: Terence Rajivan Edward
Date: 2007
Note: not a small variation on a story I read


        Once there was a pretty little prince who lived all by himself in a tower. There was magic in the tower that allowed him to stay small no matter how long he lived. The magic there also provided him with delicious food and endless delights and spared the prince from having to do any work, like tidying up. But there was one thing that the magic in the tower could not do. It could not provide him with another person. Fortunately, one day a visitor knocked at the tower door.


        Without explaining why, she asked the prince, 'Is it possible for me to stay here with you in your tower?' And without asking why, the prince replied, 'You can stay here, but you are gigantic.' This was not true. The visitor was a woman of ordinary size. It was just that the prince had not seen other people for so long that he had forgotten how tiny he was in comparison to them. Nevertheless, as soon as the prince had said that she was gigantic, the woman felt it to be true.


        The prince asked the woman if she was hungry. She replied that she was. So he clicked his fingers and two plates of food magically appeared, a small one for him and a larger one for her. The food was so delicious that the woman would have loved to eat more. But since she now thought of herself as gigantic, she decided it was better not to ask for any more.


        After the meal, the prince decided to show the woman the many different rooms in his tower. They started at the bottom and moved upwards. At each level the rooms were more dazzling than at the level below. But they were also smaller. Before the pair had reached the top, the rooms had become so small that the woman was too big to fit into them. But she was keen to go higher and see the most dazzling rooms of them all.


'I do not see how you can,' said the prince, 'unless you can just lift your head from your body and let me roll it into the highest rooms.' To the woman, the tower seemed like a place where anything was possible. So she thought she would try to lift her head from her body. Amazingly, it came off neatly. 'Now will you show me the highest rooms?' asked the woman. The prince agreed.


However, the woman's head was bigger than the prince himself and it was hard work for him to roll it through the little rooms and then up a narrow winding staircase. Before he had reached the uppermost rooms, the prince wanted to stop. He had never put effort into anything before and was becoming exhausted. But the head of the woman pressed him to go on. 'You said you would show me the tower and I am sure you will keep your word,' she said in a firm voice. So the tired little prince kept rolling the woman's head, until he came to the door of a tiny room at the top of the tower.


'This is the room where the magic comes from. I have to come here every night so that I do not become gigantic like you,' said the prince. Hearing this, the woman was keen to enter the room. Maybe being there would make her smaller, she thought to herself. The prince opened the door to the room, then went behind the woman's head to push it in. But the doorway did not seem big enough. 'I do not think you will fit in here,' said the prince, with a note of relief in his voice. 'Just push,' the woman instructed in response. She told him to push a few more times and he exerted all of his strength to get her head into the magic room. But then there was no space for him to enter as well. Even worse, the prince could see no way to get the woman's head back out.


The prince went back down to his bedroom, which was in one of the lower levels. He asked the headless body of the woman to follow him there, which it did. He then tucked it in his bed, wished it goodnight and fell asleep beside it. He hoped that, after a good night's sleep, he would be able to figure out how to get the woman's head out of the room.


But when he woke in the morning he found that he had grown considerably. Having not gone into the magic room last night, he was well on his way to becoming what he called 'gigantic'. He was already too big to access some of the very high rooms in the tower. And yet the woman's head was still stuck in the magic room.


After a few more days, the prince was even taller than the woman herself. And when he clicked his fingers food did not magically appear. The prince was hungry and worried. He wished he had someone who could help him with the tasks that lay ahead of him. Then he heard a noise that sounded as if it was something rolling down the stairs. He ran to the stairway and stopped the woman's head from rolling any further.


'How did you get out?' he asked her. 'Some of the magic must have finally affected me and made my head smaller,' the woman conjectured. The prince could not notice any difference though. 'How did you start moving?' he asked. Of course, she was kicked out of the magic room by magic, but that is not what she said. 'Please put me on top of my body, instead of asking all these questions,' she requested. So the prince did.


The woman examined herself in the mirror. While she did so, the prince complained, 'I cannot even go to my magic room any more!' 'Well, I think it is time we looked for a house for ourselves,' the woman said in response. The prince looked around. For the first time in his life, he could see dust gathering. The magic tower was behaving like a servant who has just quit their job. 'I suppose you are right,' he said.


The prince and the woman left the tower that very day. They got married and found an ordinary-sized non-magical house for themselves. Soon they forgot all about the tower and even that the prince was a prince. They worked, slept, argued, made up, got ill, got better, exercised, went to dancing lessons, had dinner parties, read novels, went on holidays and more. But all that belongs to another kind of story.