To wrap my head around this task of retelling King’s story about how evil came into the world, first I laid out the stripped-down basic story.Some ideas starting coming to my head, for how to put real things in my life into this story. Some were painful, that I considered telling anyway for the sake of reconciliation and forgiveness. Other ideas were silly, mocking a group of people for entertainment. I was trying to decide what kind of story to tell, similar to the dichotomies that King outlines as he defines our choice of stories to delight in and relish,  “why we tell our children that life is hard, when we could just as easily tell them that it is sweet” (26). He wonders if that tendency stems from our first negative starting story, rather than being in our nature. And the rest of King’s gymnastic discussion of the Christian creation story and its ramifications led me to think of more dark stories, my own beginning stories that I absorbed as a kid and that seem to have shaped my psychology forever. Those moments that I remember so clearly, the exact phrasing of something my mom or dad or someone else said, that are stuck exactly and permanently in my head, you know those? I can trace my most deep and stubborn beliefs, stories I tell myself all the time, to some of those memories.

But overall, I was told that life is sweet. And a lot of those beginning stories are not dark ones at all, they’re very happy stories. I never had a big devastating revelation that Santa doesn’t exist. I just gradually started believing what my mom continues to say: “I believe in the spirit of Santa”.

So, I started thinking of how to retell this story of how evil came into the world, in a light way. King describes how he told the two creation stories differently, one recreating oral storytelling, in a way that makes it sound exuberant and less authoritative. The other version, he told maintaining “rhetorical distance and decorum while organizing the story for a knowledgeable gathering” (22), a technique that makes it sound formal and truthful (23). The first was closer to my strategy. In the end, though, this story is about how evil came into the world, and I don’t really see a way to make that story entirely cheerful. Anyway, here it is. I have a great story to tell you!

And just because, bonus points for tackling the story of this classic!

Do you know how evil came into the world? It was not a broken mirror, or salt spilled on the table, or a ladder in the way, or a black cat. Not a black cat, but a pretty grey and white cat. This little cat was a lucky cat. When she was a kitten, she had four brothers, and she was the littlest one. Some nice people came and picked her because she was the only girl kitten, and also picked her softest and fluffiest brother. They both went together to live in a nice house with these nice people. They were small and quiet,  and they slept together all tangled up in a ball of fur, and they played together, and they both grew bigger. They were happy to chase the little bugs in the grass and pretend to chase the birds in the trees.

After a while, the pretty grey cat started getting angry at her fluffy brother. She didn’t like to play with him anymore, and she didn’t like to sleep with him, and she didn’t even like to see him. One day she decided to run away on an adventure, just for a little while, so that the nice people would know that they missed her a lot and loved her more than her fluffy brother. She went away on a trip and saw a lot of things and did a lot of hunting, but sometimes she was a little scared and she was getting hungry, so after a few days she went back home. She was so happy to see the nice people and drink the milk they gave her, but she was not happy to see her fluffy brother. The nice people told the pretty grey cat how pretty she was, how soft and smooth her fur was, how beautiful she looked sitting quietly in the sun with her eyes closed and her tail waving slowly. They didn’t know why she didn’t like her fluffy brother, but they thought that eventually, she would go back to normal. She was such a sweet pretty cat, after all, and she always made the nice people feel happy. So did her fluffy brother, but the pretty grey cat wanted to be the only one who made the nice people feel happy and the only one they petted and laughed at. She always meowed and purred happily at the nice people, but she only hissed and growled at her fluffy brother. She got more and more angry, especially when the nice people told her how pretty she was, because she knew she wasn’t the only one. Soon, she went on another trip, to one of the places she had visited before. In that place she told a story about her fluffy  brother that was a lie, and she knew it was bad. But she thought of how pretty she was, and how nice it would be to be the only pretty soft furry cat. When she went home, she was even happier than ever before to see the nice people.

Because of this story, a little while later, her fluffy brother disappeared, into that place she visited. The nice people thought he would come back home, but she knew that her fluffy brother would never come home. The pretty grey cat thought, for a minute, that she shouldn’t have told that story. She knew the nice people missed her fluffy brother, even though she did not. She was very happy to be the only cat, but for a minute she wondered if they would find out that she was bad and stop calling her pretty.

But of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative”. Peterborough: Anansi Press, 2003. Print.

Lambert, Dennis and Potter, Brian. “One Tin Soldier”. Lyrics. Bell Records, 1969.

Penner, Fred. “The Cat Came Back”. 1979.

Photograph taken by me in 2007.