“Little Poucet” is one of the less familiar fairy tales. Steve Rasnic Tem stays close to the original, adding a touch of eroticism by concentrating on the more sexual aspects of the story. The oiriginal comes to us from Perrault, and was the last of the tales Perrault included in Histoires du contes du temps passé in 1697, under the name “Le petit Poucet.”
Little Poucet was born small as his father’s middle finger, smaller than a mouse, smaller by far than his six brothers who had all come out normal sized. Although he would eventually grow a bit larger than this, inside he would always feel that same size. His parents ignored him, expecting him to die, because he was so small, and because he was mute.
Because he was mute he had never found much use in words. Words were walls and boxes enormous adults built: the caves and castles and impassable mountains that made lies and broken promises out of each new day. Words could not be trusted. The adults in his life used words with an emphatic pounding of fist against table and a broad, fleshy palm across the face as they told you who you were, what was to become of you, and what you must believe. Little Poucet vowed that when he eventually used words, as he knew he would someday, they would be practical words. They would mean something.
But in the beginning Little Poucet relied on dream, and memory, and for as long as he might remain a child, he knew these would be very much the same.
Little Poucet’s most important dream was the lush memory of his mother’s bedroom, where he would spend every minute of his life until departing on the journeys which would make him so famous later on. He supposed it was his father’s bedroom as well, although this faceless mountain of flesh (except for the whale’s eye of him which would stare at Little Poucet even in sleep) visited the bedroom rarely. When his father did visit, the children were kept asleep with warm, oily drinks before bedtime. This was so that the mountain that was his mother and the mountain that was his father could crash into each other with a great moaning and quaking of the bed, without the children disturbing them. But Little Poucet never drank the drink. Little Poucet never slept, waiting up all night to hear the words his parents used with each other.
He had no experience of other bedrooms so he could not know whether the world of his mother’s bed was grand: for someone of his small size it was pre-eminent. He had come into the world into the pale soft folds and dark-haired shadows of this bedroom, as had all his six brothers, and if his parents had so decided he would have left the world by way of this same room. He remembered lying on his mother’s immense white breast, her billowy flesh extending in all directions across the bed and toward the dark walls of night beyond.
Always a small lamp glowed in this room, but it served only to intensify the darkness of those distant walls until Little Poucet was compelled to give them the name Terror. The lamp spotlighted his mother’s oily flesh, the pink nipple, the heavy wet smell of her as she breathed in and out like waves pushing the raft of him to another side of his contained world.
His mother was always the central event of this world, her size at times making her indistinguishable from the bed, her creams and perfumes and powders and foods ranked on the tables beside her head and the forest spread of her thick black hair, her sighs and moans and gaseous eruptions providing a background music to his day, her silvery flickering black box a gate to one side of the darkness beyond the world of the bed, a gate full of noise and words and dancing dreams, which Little Poucet would not gaze at for long for fear he’d be struck blind as well as mute.
And beyond this the cracked rectangle of yellow-brown shade that covered the window, made to glow half the day with loud noises from other giants and hard smells close to, but not as pleasant as, the smells his mother created.
So central in fact to this world was his mother that on those rare occasions she gathered her heaving flesh and left to get something from the Kitchen or to Go Potty, Little Poucet would huddle to himself with his eyes closed, desperate to find in his dreams some comforting memory of her.
When time came for Little Poucet to Go Potty it was small and insignificant (later he would understand this to be from the rarity of food), and collected into a can his mother kept in the nighttime beyond the bed. Sometimes he would see her smelling the can before she put it away, smiling and nodding so that her great black tresses fell all over flesh and bed, covering his own scarce flesh like a web that caught and thrilled him.
Sometimes she’d pull him up to her huge blue eyes (the whites slightly yellow, the entire eye long and fish-shaped) and watch his nose. A smell sour enough or sharp enough would make his nose wiggle, and she would know to put more powder on, or more perfume, or she would rub herself with a wet cloth, moving him like a divining rod over every bit and crack of her. What he did not think she understood was that his nose wiggled out of pleasure, because as much as he enjoyed the perfumes and powders which hung in a cloud over the great bed, it was the slightly corrupt fragrances underneath which really thrilled him.
Sometimes she would pull from behind her tables a large book smelling of insects and dirty linen and she would read to Little Poucet alone written-down dreams of giants and trolls and nightmare castles and missing princesses and ravenous wolves and even solitary elves such as himself who lived out their lives in lands no bigger than this, his mother’s bed.
Besides his mother and the smells and the murmuring gate and his own small presence and the occasional mounds of his six larger brothers (although usually they slept on the Rug in the dark outside the bed), there were always the pillows, of various sizes—each one bigger than he, and ranging from four to eight in number. The pillows were marvelous because although not as soft as her skin they always smelled of his mother and remained accessible to him when his mother was out of the room or quaking with the powerful presence of his father. Sometimes they surrounded him like her own breasts and legs, and sometimes he mounted them where they carried him off to dream. In his head he made up songs about the pillows, about their softness and firmness, about their sizes and shapes, about how they sometimes resembled his sleeping brothers, and about his occasional fear that they might be used by his mother to smother him.
Then into this world of his mother’s bed his father might loom, a towering cliff as dark as the walls. He was more a voice than anything else, and sometimes a pair of huge rough hands. His father always picked up Little Poucet and moved him to some distant valley of pillow when the giant came and entered her bed, there to roll and rumble and laugh, and to backhand Little Poucet off into unkempt shadows if the baby ventured too close to the adults’ play. But they were never very careful about what they had to say to each other, thinking Little Poucet’s mind to be small as well, and no threat to the slap and tickle that went on each night.
Sometimes his father smelled of distant rooms and other giants, however, and at those times Little Poucet’s presence was welcome in the family bed, as was that of his brothers, and they all played naked in the family caverns and on the mountain ranges the adult bodies made and remade throughout the evening, their motion so constant, fluid, and restless that Little Poucet could not tell where his own self ended and these ancient forms of creation began.
As grand as these reunions were, Little Poucet most loved the secret times when he was shoved to a corner of the bed and wrapped in pillows. His father the giant uncovered the thing Little Poucet understood to be Brother Eight, who seemed every bit Little Poucet’s size when he stretched his muscle, who had dark hair gathered about his feet leaving his glistening head bald, and who had been born with no face at all, which explained why his father kept him hidden.
During these frightening, exciting secret times, his father would plunge Brother Eight back into the dark original folds of his mother as if desperate to allow the distant ancient seas of her to effect a change, and at last to provide Brother Eight with a face. These attempts never worked the necessary magic, however, and so Little Poucet vowed never to tell the other six brothers of the secret of Brother Eight. Instead Little Poucet contented himself to lie beside the still, soft form of the only brother who was even more an embarassment than he himself. Sometimes his mother’s hand came down during these times to stroke Little Poucet, in a way to suggest that she might be confusing Little Poucet with the almost identical Brother Eight. In his dreams they were two damp, slim little pixies, secretly smarter than their brothers, and by far the favorites of their monstrous parents.
“Can’t feed them no more. Nothing left, Sadie.”
Little Poucet almost missed the significance of his father’s statement in his wonder at the sound of his mother’s name, which he was sure he had never heard before. But having heard something once, of course Little Poucet never lost it, and going back over his father’s words he felt a growing alarm.
“Enough food for me and you. As little as they eat, still too much.”
His father spoke softly, deeply, as he did when he was trying to make Brother Eight a face. His mother’s face had grown soft and blurry, as if her flesh were melting.
“Hush now. You’ll wake the others,” his father said, looking at him with that great whale eye the way he might look at Brother Eight, something without sense and with only one purpose, and in Little Poucet’s case, a purpose his father obviously valued very little.
“Tonight, couple hours after dark. You dress ’em, I’ll take ’em out into the city. Stop your blubberin’ now. Here, I’ll give you somethin’ for the pain of it.” Adult words, all of them.
And the rolling and heaving of the bed put Little Poucet back to sleep.
He woke sometime later from dreams of a giant troll beneath the bridge of his bed. The whale eye was closed, and his mother smelled of night. Carefully Little Poucet crawled over the dark coverlet of her hair and reached for the bag of black cookies with the dazzling white fillings, brighter than the bed sheets, that were his mother’s favorites. He hid the bag beneath one of the pillows, thinking of whose clothes might hide them best tonight when his mother dressed him and his brothers for their journey outside the world. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, searching his head for the words he might use for the first time to persuade his brothers of the value of his plan.
When he opened his eyes again it seemed as if he had indeed slept, and were still in the midst of a dream. Six of his brothers (Brother Eight, as expected, was off with his father somewhere) stood groggily upon the expanse of bed, his mother slipping over their heads rags she referred to as Their Clothes. Little Poucet had never seen these clothes before. As his brothers gradually woke up they smiled and winked at each other, as if on the verge of a great adventure.
“Pierre, Maurice, Charles …” She counted and recounted, stroking their sweaty heads. Then when she turned, Little Poucet slipped the bag of cookies into the back of Pierre’s trousers, which were much too big for him anyway.
Pierre turned in surprise as Little Poucet whispered behind him, “Be still until I relate my plan to the others,” keeping his mouth shut in obvious shock at his mute brother’s use of words.
Their father came in then, Brother Eight hid behind heavy coat and pants (He’s to stay behind because he’s mother’s favorite, Little Poucet thought). “Come along,” his father boomed. “It’s time you boys helped your father earn his living.” And so Little Poucet was forced to leave the world of his mother’s bed for the first time in his life.
Little Poucet was surprised to find that the world of the City was not unfamiliar. It was the world of the dark night walls in his dreams. The City was all buildings (this Little Poucet knew from the flickering gate) and what were buildings but walls that went on forever, filled with night and the stink of garbage and sour flesh and sheets? His father pushed the seven of them in front of him, prodding them along with a thick stick as if they were dirty, ill-fed geese. Now and then he would stop to retrieve a wallet from some drunk or addict sleeping it off in an alley, or he would gaze at the unbarred windows of stores and warehouses with a look of intense concentration on his great face, as if he were considering matters of stress, strength, approach. It was only then that Little Poucet understood how it was their father made his living.
Every few yards, hiding them with care and a small, swift prayer, Little Poucet scattered the dark cookies with their creamy fillings. He was careful not to let the others see him, for he knew they were so hungry now they would have gobbled them up instantly. It was hard enough for Little Poucet to handle them without risking a surreptitious lick.
Once they were deep into the tallest walls of the cool, smelly city, Little Poucet realized he had not felt his father’s sharp prod or heard his heavy footsteps for some time. He turned around and looked behind him. His father was nowhere to be seen.
“So, the old man’s taken off and left us little fools here all by ourselves,” Little Poucet said.
His brothers turned and looked at him in amazement. “He talks!” Maurice exclaimed.
Jean Paul stepped forward and examined Little Poucet’s mouth. “Maybe it was someone else,” he said. “A ventriloquist.” Little Poucet bit down sharply on his brother’s finger. Jean Paul did not cry out, but examined his bloody finger in the streetlight’s dim gray. “He bites as well,” he said.
“I will try to control my hunger,” Little Poucet said, but found himself gazing at his brother’s finger as if it were his mother’s huge and wonderful tit. He forced himself to look away. “I’ve left a trail. We must hurry and find the bits of it before someone eats it.”
They found each and every one of the cookies, passing them back and forth between them for nibbles, Pierre licking the fillings and Little Poucet taking the smallest bite for himself each time.
By dawn they had arrived back at the dark and greasy brick wall beyond which lay the apartment of their mother and father. Upstairs and outside the door they could barely hear their mother’s sobbing above the chatter of the flickering gate. “With that score you made on the way home we might have kept them!” she cried.
“We can always make more where those came from,” the father shouted, and again the great bed began to rock and their mother’s cries to subside.
Little Poucet had neglected to plan what they all should do when they arrived back at their parents’ apartment, and before he could make a suggestion his brothers had beaten down the door and poured into the grand bedroom shouting, “Here we are! Here we are!”
Little Poucet ran in behind his brothers, and was not surprised to see that Brother Eight had taken his place in their mother’s bed and now nestled his quivering form at his mother’s pale breasts. The giant father stared at Little Poucet then left the bed. His mother opened her arms then and he and his brothers stripped off their traveling clothes and disappeared into her embrace.
Only two nights had passed before Little Poucet’s father had exhausted his recent earnings and there was no food again. During those two nights their father and Brother Eight were gone from the apartment, returning fatter on the third. As his mother and father crashed together that night with even greater clamor than before, Little Poucet again overheard their conversation:
“No food no room no peace no food no good good good …” his father chanted in a low growl. After his parents were asleep Little Poucet again slipped up to his mother’s bed table and stole more of the black cookies with the dazzling white centers.
On the next night their mother dressed them again, kissing each of them goodbye with tears on her fat cheeks as their father took them out exploring. Little Poucet planted a bag of cookies each on Jean Paul and Maurice, but this time letting those two—the oldest of his brothers—in on the details of his plan.
This night their father took them even deeper into the dark valley that was at the city’s center, where there was no air for the stench, and no lights at all other than the shining whites of their small eyes. Half the time they couldn’t see their father at all—so dull and oily was his outfit, his skin—so it came as no surprise at all to suddenly find him gone.
They stared at each other: at the whites of their eyes, at the bright fillings of the two remaining cookies Little Poucet held in his hands. “Don’t worry, my brothers. I’ve been making a trail as I did last time.”
But then Pierre opened his mouth to laugh, and his tongue and teeth were dazzingly white with the thick, gooey fillings from the cookies Little Poucet had planted all along the way.
“Hmmmm …” Pierre sighed.
Little Poucet shook his head. “You’ve killed us, my brother.”
Little Poucet led his brothers on a snaky trip through the cold night of stone and damp asphalt, but nothing was familiar. Everywhere the walls towered above them, stinking of garbage and the press of generations of sweating, dying bodies, so dark they blended and became indistinguishable from the night sky around and above. Now and then they would stumble over some form or other, sleeping or dead on the greasy pavement. Hands with long, slick fingers clutched at their ankles and trousers, slipped inside their cuffs to creep toward their thighs and groins. Maurice tittered and Little Poucet told him to hush. Some of the bodies in the dark leaked fluids and they gave these a wide berth.
When the others complained of hunger Little Poucet warned them not to stray from the path he was reimagining for them, so they kissed Pierre’s sticky teeth and lips with their open mouths and tongues, sharing in the last bits of the sweet white goo, filling their bellies with the dazzling light that permitted them to continue through such darkness.
Muffled cries and howls floated just as slowly down from the dim windows high above, fixed there like distant, complaining stars. When they shuffled past the darker mouths of night, they could hear teeth rubbing, tongues lapping at the gritty stones.
At some point in the night it rained, but the night air had grown so thick they barely felt the drops.
“Where are you taking us?” Pierre whined.
“Home,” Little Poucet replied, less and less sure of himself. “Wait here.” He climbed a scarred and deadened lamp post and twisted his body round and round its head searching for distant signs of life. Once upon a time he would have been able to fit his entire body on the head of such a lamp. He was surprised at how much larger he had grown. And how much his skin now smelled of adult garbage.
Down a distant corridor walled by two different shades of black, he saw a distant glimmer of light low to the horizon like a ground-floor window. Thinking of warm kitchens and broad beds and small boxes flickering he slid down and led his brothers off in that direction. They complained that they could see nothing in that direction, but they had become used to following him so they did.
Often he lost all sense of direction and led them down into holes and wet places where invisible, spongy flesh rubbed against them. But eventually they came to the glowing window set beside a rough gray door in the back recesses of an alley stacked high with soggy cardboard cases of rotting meat.
Little Poucet reached as high as he could and pounded his fist against the door. After a few minutes a frail, worried-looking woman with stringy yellow hair answered.
“What do you children want at this time of night?” she demanded. “If it’s stealing you’re thinking about I warn you my husband is not a forgiving man.”
“Food, ma’am,” Pierre spoke up. “We’re so hungry!”
She jittered her eyes from one face to the next, finally resting on Little Poucet’s diminutive form. “Looks like someone has already eaten the best part of this one.” She paused, considering. “Very well. Come in then and I’ll toss you an old fruit or two before sending you back to your parents, if you should have any.”
Inside the dusty building Little Poucet tugged on her skirt. “We’re lost, ma’am. Perhaps you could call the authorities?”
“Authorities?”
“The police? Social services?”
The withered little woman began laughing. “The police? Oh, my husband would dearly love that!” Then she laughed some more and Little Poucet could see that when she laughed she looked even thinner, her skinny arms flapping and beating her narrow torso, the loose material of her dress lifting away from her tight skin and pressing against it again, so that he found himself thinking of his mother, because this woman was the complete reverse of his enormous mother and in that was a kind of a negative twin, a sister to her.
“Perhaps just a bit of food, then,” Little Poucet said softly, and the woman started laughing even louder than before. Little Poucet was embarrassed, and gazed down at his feet.
Just then the scrawny woman’s head shot up, her neck stretching like a startled chicken’s. “You hear? It’s him, my man come home! You hear? Oh, you poor children—he’ll be murdering you for sure! Here … here …” She stretched out her arms and legs and gathered the seven brothers to her, and despite her resemblence to a gigantic praying mantis then, Little Poucet allowed himself to be gathered with the others. “Here, here … let Auntie hide you. Auntie won’t let bad old Otto get to you!”
With desperate pattings and shooings of her long-fingered hands she rushed them to the back of the building, pushing them past greasy piles of old clothing, dusty collections of children’s shoes, children’s toys, through passageways littered with dirt and what appeared to be yellowed animal bones, dried chicken skin, and a scattering of tiny teeth—Little Poucet figured dog, cat, badger. Pierre was snivelling, but there was no time to comfort him as she practically lifted them up to the first landing of the back stairs whispering hoarsely: “First room on the left. Get under the bed there. But don’t wake my daughters if you know what’s good for you! Get under the bed there. I can’t think of a better place to hide you.”
Little Poucet waited until his brothers were all safely tucked away under the bed before joining them there. As he rolled under the bed he looked at the bed on the opposite side of the room, and one great bloodshot eye peering over.
His brothers huddled together silently, staring at him. He could hear the sound of a bearlike voice downstairs, much like his father’s. He heard a slap, then crying. His eyes now adjusted to the dim light under the bed, he looked around him and his brothers: several small skulls, a rib cage that might have housed the tiniest of birds, leg bones and arm bones, a tiny skeletal hand with a small child’s ring on one of the fingers. Tiny teeth marks on all the bones, aimlessly crisscrossing the tops of the skulls, like the tracks of some small animal, like a tattoo. Downstairs more bellowing, and a breaking of furniture.
“But I can smell them, dammit!” And suddenly Little Poucet heard the thunder move to the stairs. Another eye joined the first atop the bed across the way, equally bloodshot, then the long dirty blond hair, the high cheeks, the sharp nose and thin lips and teeth filed to points like knitting needles. The chin stained dark.
The thunder was right outside the door now. Little Poucet could hear the lightning strike, the torrents of rain as Auntie wailed for the seven brothers to run, but Little Poucet knew of nowhere to run. Six more identical heads joined the first on the other bed. The heads leaned over the edge and smiled down at him, their long tongues slipping over their chins. They leaned forward some more and he could see that they had no clothes on. They rubbed their tiny breasts (in two or three only one had begun its development) and made a sound like swarming moths.
Otto burst through the door, and at first Little Poucet thought indeed that it was their father who had followed them here. He had the size (like a wall, a dark and heavy wall) and the voice, and the way of wrinkling his nose as if he were always smelling a bad smell. And the large, broken teeth.
Otto strode over to the bed and lifted it to uncover the seven frightened brothers. “Such pretty boys …” he cooed. He turned to his wife. “Get them ready for bed! I’ll want them rested in the morning. No challenge otherwise.” Otto looked back down at Little Poucet. “Sweet little thing,” he said, and patted Little Poucet’s head, stroked his shoulders, felt for muscles in his arms and legs. Then Otto gently spread his great hand until it covered the whole of Little Poucet’s chest. He leaned over him, his breath sour with beer. “I can feel your heart beating,” he whispered. “I can almost taste it, too. Wait until the morning.” He massaged the boy’s rear, circled the boy’s groin with a huge, blunt forefinger. “You’ll see.”
After Otto left (Little Poucet could hear him drinking and singing downstairs), Auntie gave them a quick dinner of cold noodles and helped the seven brothers strip off their clothes. She shook her head at each naked little boy. “Oh, you’re all much too soft and tender. He likes them soft and tender.” She handed each of them a ragged, dark-stained nightshirt, then turned to leave. Her daughters began to giggle. “Hush up now!” she told them. “There’ll be time enough tomorrow for what you’re wanting. Go to sleep now!” And she left the room.
The seven little girls looked over at the seven naked little boys and whispered excitedly to each other. Then they all laughed one last time and pulled the covers over their heads.
Pierre started pulling on his nightshirt. “Stop that!” Little Poucet cried. “Can’t you see the stains, the torn places? It’s like butcher’s wrap!” He looked back over at the other bed, the seven sisters starting to snore and snarl under their covers. He pulled his brothers close to him. They snickered at his cold touch on their bare skin. “Hush up now … once he’s got enough drink in him to bring out the beast he’ll be back up here quickly, I think. I have an idea. Do you remember how our father trained us not to wet the bed?”
The other six nodded solemnly, their eyes pale and tight in their tiny faces.
First he gathered seven left-over noodles from the cracked plastic bowls Auntie had provided them (Pierre’s bowl, of course, had been wiped clean). A bit of thick, flour-based sauce had settled into the bottom of each one. He dipped each noodle until it was heavy in the sauce, then with great stealth crept over to the girls’ bed, pulled back the covers, and gently stuck a noodle to the sex of each one. They snarled and snapped in their sleep, but did not move off their backs. Soon, he knew, the sauce would become a paste, the paste would dry, and their disguise would be perfected. His brothers’ hair was just long enough that in the dark Otto might not suspect.
After a quiet search of the room Little Poucet found enough string to take care of all seven of them. Each brother tied one end of the string to the tip of his penis, passed the remaining string back between his legs, and gave the other end to Little Poucet (who also held the end of his own string). Little Poucet became the puppeteer: all he had to do to turn him and his seven brothers into instant females was to pull on the string and thereby tuck each of their penises back under their asses. With their soft bodies and bad teeth, and by pressing their arms close to their sides to accentuate their breasts, they became wonderful, matchless little girls. Lying there together on the bed Little Poucet really found them quite irresistible.
To no one’s surprise Otto did come up later that night, stumbling drunk, and went straight to the boys’ bed. Little Poucet jerked hard on the string causing Jean Paul and Maurice to gasp, but they drew their gasps out quickly into yawns.
Otto reached under the covers and felt for their groins. “What’s this? My daughters? I could have made a terrible mistake.” He paused for a time, smiling, gazing off into space. Finally stirring himself he said, “But no time for this,” stood up suddenly, and walked to the other bed.
He reached under the covers there and laughed. “Tiny they are, but unmistakable! Here’s one seems a little stale.” He pulled out a sharp knife and rapidly cut off the heads of his seven daughters and dropped them into a large bucket by the bed. He then proceeded to flay the bodies, making miniature vests and tiny leggings. He pulled out one of the heads and removed the skin of the face, turning it into a small mask. “This’ll be a good mask for the dog to wear when he watches TV with me,” he said, holding it up to the light coming through the window. He stared at it a time, then dropping it as if it were something truly disgusting he cried out, “Imogene!” and spun around to the other bed.
But the seven brothers were already out the door and on the staircase, their strings trailing along behind them. Otto leapt up and ran after them, bellowing. He stepped on one, then another of the trailing strings. Pierre and Maurice screamed and tumbled down the stairs. Otto lost his balance and followed hard upon them. Auntie suddenly appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and, startled by the naked, bleeding children tumbling down her staircase, she went up after them, only to watch helplessly as they wheeled past her, and her husband Otto, Otto the Butcher, Otto the Cannibal, crashed into her.
The seven brothers gathered what they could find in the litter and rot of the house: mostly jewelry and clothing from Otto’s past victims, and all manner of cutting instruments and devices of torture. They dressed in the cleanest rags they could find, and when daylight finally came, Little Poucet led them home with all their loot.
Their parents were of course overjoyed to see them, especially with all the items they had taken from Otto and Auntie’s house. They were puzzled by the fact that both Pierre and Maurice had become girls while away on the journey, but this fact was of very little importance to them. “After all,” their father would say, “children are children.”
But the world of his mother’s bed was never the same for Little Poucet again. He stayed awake nights. He listened for voices in the distant, dark walls. And sometimes when his parents were unusually noisy, when their cursings and crashings and complaints about how many mouths they had to feed became almost too much to bear, he would reach into his pillow and take comfort in the knife and the hook, the club and the razor, and dream of their readiness.