Really good story

To switch things up this evening, Kid told me a bedtime story. I was falling asleep and was snuggling Ruffy, the well-loved stuffed terrier. If this were a story by The Bloggess, the terrier would be a real terrier, probably armed with a dictaphone or a tennis racket, but our love of taxidermy as interior decoration has dwindled recently. We're probably not getting enough Vitamin D. That seems to be behind almost every ailment you can think of these days, and I can think of a lot. For instance, the toe I broke a few months ago started inexplicably throbbing this afternoon, and I instantly realized that it was because cancer had gotten into the crack in the toe bone and that if I had only put my foot out the car window when we were driving to the mountains every weekend it would have gotten the right amount of sun and its Vitamin D level would be just fine and now I wouldn't be dying of toe bone crack cancer. And I couldn't even go out to charge it back up again because it has been snowing sideways here for two days.

So the story I was being told--and I was told in "story voice," with that look of measured authority, that this was a true story--was about the Prince of the Golden Entrance. His boat was solid gold, with silver masts and sails made of flower petals. He was not just a prince, but also a magician, the most powerful in his land, and also the man with the best heart. He was the goodest person anyone had ever known. But there was a song that pulled at his heart and he thought that the singer must be one of the mermaids he'd heard so much about, who lived on a misty pillar of granite that emerged from the sea at the edge of the world.

My son is so sensitive and poetic, I smiled happily to myself.

I must have drifted off there for a moment on that blissful thought.

I awoke because my little poet was up on his knees in his bed yelling BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! and CHOP CHOP CHOP CHOP!

What on earth?!?!?

It turns out that an attack helicopter carrying a thermal detonator was overhead. The mermaids had on their gas masks and were lobbing grenades. The prince sustained a major head wound and drownded.

The end.