The Three Billy Donkeys Daft: a NORWEGIAN Fairytale Once Upon a South Carolina Road Trip
Once upon a time, there were three billy donkey siblings. They all shared the same name: Daft. The Dafts came in three sizes: plucky long-shot, centrist-standard, and populist juggernaut-alternative.
Grazing at their leisure, the billy donkeys lived in ambiguous harmony. Until one day, a buzzard named Monsanto buzzed and buzzed about until the grass, upon which their founding fathers pillaged and plundered and their twentieth-cent ancestors gentrified, had become too toxic for even them to consume.
The three siblings had heard of terms such as ‘displacement’ and ‘climate refugee’ — likely from pizzly bears, that rare ursid hybrid when polar bears and grizzlies do indeed breed. The three billy donkeys were also about to embark upon the perils of forced migration.
O’er yon was another meadow of promising prospects. Lush as inviting. An emerald carpet like green velvet lining a South Carolinian church pew.
The buzzards, apparently, had yet to rally.
And so? Into that horizon of hope, the first billy donkey, being ever plucky, set out — to merely survive. And lo! His flee from cooperate-environmental decimation was interrupted. A babbling brook began to roar. The road to the meadow of delegate abundance found the smallest billy donkey upon a rickety bridge. Clip, clop…clip, clop. His hooves announced him, echoing each weary step far into the field of representatively-diverse asylum.
The bridge had been occupied by a troll. During his reign of terror, the troll had fantasized about retrofitting the stolen bridge with a wall upon either ledge. His wall was the antithesis of a romantic covered bridge in nostalgic barnyard red. In the void that served as the mind of this troll, his imaginary wall was, “The most beautifulest wall you’ve ever seen. Never before…such a wall’s been great as this…no where in the world. The biggest. And the best of the best. Like none. The very, very winningest…of all…all walls.”
Unlike the bridge, the wall remained a troll’s delusion.
The troll could fright upon sight. His skin was that of emergency-alert-code orange, his necktie was as long as the lies coating his tongue and his hands were as tiny as his conscience. Many instinctively looked away. Grand Ol’ P. elephants, however, who starred - bargaining Faustianly - into the abyss, were turned into a sort of stone where their tusks were mummified. Alas, zombies incapable of speech against him.
Daft, the plucky long-shot, tried to hide his trembling before the troll.
“You there. I need a map to the polka dots. Present me with it or you’re fired,” the troll snarled.
“Fired?” Still stiffening his shivering, “But I don’t work for you.”
“You won’t see a blade of grass, loser. You could…” The troll paused, looking over both shoulders, “…go thru some things. Unless…you do me this favor…with the polka dots.”
“I don’t know much about them. When I was mayor, I fired their first polka dot police chief and fire chief. Under my tenure, marijuana arrests, amongst polka dots, soared. But that was my strategy to target their gangs. A few of their leaders agreed to read my Douglas Plan yet stipulated that a nod towards my policy proposals equated no endorsement. I ignored that request and publicly framed their Douglas approval as candidate endorsement anyway. I know so few that my campaign used a stock photo from not America, but the Polka Dot Diaspora, to suggest I’m more inclusive. But there’s another billy donkey behind me. She’s my sister and has damned the polka dots — maybe even more than me.”
“He better have.”
“She.”
“She…um…bad news. ‘She’ better have. Cross then,” the troll burped.
The first Billy Donkey Daft was free.
Sure enough, in good time, along came the centrist-standard donkey. And as promised, more seasoned. Clonk, clunk…clonk, clunk. The troll raised his voice to try and mask his fart. “You think you can just keep going? Across my bridge?” “What do you know of the polka dots?”
“I know two names well. Tyesha Edwards, an 11-year-old murder victim whose tragedy I donned as a saddle upon which my ‘tough-on-crime’ bona fides might ride. And then there’s teen, Myon Burrell, whom I allowed to take the fall for Edwards in a woefully inept prosecution. When his mother died in a car accident, I repeatedly denied the under-age Burrell permission to attend her services. The polka dots are handing me no key. But one who may have it? He’s right behind me.”
“If he can’t do more for me? I’ll…”
Daft’s eyes roll, “You’ll what? Lemme guess: I could, uh, ‘go thru some things’?”
“You’re a nasty piece of work. Be gone.”
The second Billy Donkey Daft was free.
As promised, the third billy donkey approached. As described, he appeared more substantial with the bonus of volunteering incredulous credentials before his hooves could be detected: “I don’t just know ’em. I’m practically an honorary polka dot. I’m their Daft and they’re my firewall.”
“D’ya say ‘wall’? Get ’em to pay for it?”
“Polka dot loyalty is my reward for…”
“For what?” wheezed the troll. “Take that low-IQ…Anita Hill? His nasal inflection becoming more prominent, “That ’94 crime bill? Making Delaware a credit card company’s wet dream? Weren’t those some of the gingerbready crumbs leading to the foreclosed doors of 2008 subprimes? The segregationist footsie before that?”
“Barack Obama would not have chosen…”
“Yeah, yeah,” snorted the troll, “Well, I do the opposite of anything he did. C’mon, that’s my shtick. You, Daft, and that kid can pass. That Hunter of yours? Tell him not to hem n’ haw. Get it? Hem? Haw? ‘Hee Haw’, right? ‘Hee Haw’…cause…you’re…”
“Uh…donkeys…yeah.”
“Cause in my pasture, you’re no ‘hunter’ unless you shoot on sight. Don’t even think about it; don’t think at all.”
“Look, the fact of the matter is: you hijacked this bridge. But that’s it. Beyond that, the whole pasture…”
“Will be mine. It’s green; it’s land.”
“Not a dung-hole territory.”
“Get outta here, Sleepy…scoot. Go take a nap.”
The third Billy Donkey Daft? Yep, free.
The troll slumped under his wall-less bridge, slouched over his phone, and his puny, code-orange fingers began to incoherently tweet. Briefly, he confused his punchy typing with the soft hooves of another billy donkey. TIP$, tap…TIP$, tap. Smaller in physical stature than the last three billy donkeys yet with what appeared to be a gargantuan pouch — seen more commonly on kangaroos or wine-cave dwellers.
“Humph,” the troll sniveled, “Only supposed to be three of you Dafts.”
“We’re quasi-estranged. They act like I don’t do my fair share.”
“Sounds divisive. Rifts are my ‘raft’…copycat. Haven’t seen you, kitty, since New York. So…what about the polka dots?”
“My Stop-and-Frisk policy is in the past. Yet certain civil rights violations can still follow a loose logic: Smoke? Maybe fire. ‘Broken window’? Eh…And redlining? It actually held a hidden wisdom.”
The latest billy donkey and petulant troll were startled by a mighty clomp, jarring stomp, and ear-splitting neighing that shook the bridge with such a force that the populist juggernaut-alternative slipped into the stream. He recovered enough to barely float himself upon the primary shore. The pouch, apparently, could inflate.
Before the troll was a creature of yore, a hybrid akin to the prizzly bear. Parentage? Billy Donkey +Internet Troll = Satyr/Pan/your garden-variety faun(with all Greek n’ Roman mythic implications).
“You’re…you’re…” The pure-bred troll soiled his bespoke Brioni trousers. “Heard of you, yeah. But no one’s actually seen you. Not before me. You’re…one of those…oh…Bernie Bros.”
The neighing of the creature reached a pitch — somewhere betwixt feverish and chilling, “Look away, MAGA bib, lest you dare to MAGsplain us.”
“I’ve seen your work on the dark web; you really should be on my team. All I wanna know now is what you know about the polka dots.”
“We don’t see pattern. You’re Harlequin patch-checkerboard? Hell, herringbone! Whatever! We’re pattern-blind, see. Like your wall, we just keep telling ourselves that. We’re post-pattern and besides, anything repeated enough? Well, at least on the net, it’s bound to circle the drain of truth. And as far as the ‘misogyny’ charge? Who’s she anyway? We searched Reddit and doubt Miss AhJenny is even real. What we do know? Us half-billy donkeys dig bitches. As far as you?”
“What about [sniff] me?”
“You’re an insult to trolls. Have ya any idea how hard that is to be? You’re some con of a gate keeper, let alone a bridge.”
And upon hearing those words spoken directly into face of the troll, he dropped to the green earth, curling into an unnervingly tight fetal position.
Yawning, the Bernie Bro unfurls the troll’s vainglorious necktie, wrapping it around n’ round n’ round him like a ball of yarn. He pauses long. Inexplicably, a wind of empathy sweeps up both in a mystical intimacy of shared toxic masculine privilege. The new lines of the ‘yarn’ ball mimic the age-old creases of Bro’s palm. Satyr Bern sighs, cradling the Brioni ‘yarn’ ball before hurling it(him) downstream, directly over a Monsanto-contaminated waterfall, into the River Styx. There, a Sphynx pussyfeline rescues it(him).
The Sphynx bounces the ball back n’ forth in her paws. For all eternity.
Henceforth, the Billy Donkeys Daft - plucky long-shot, centrist-standard, and populist juggernaut-alternative - all got over. How they crissed and how they ‘crossed’ the troll’s bridge, exploiting and appropriating the fraught as dire narrative of passage. With nary a polka-dotted clue — peaceful as piteous, they graze.
And they grazed obliviously ever after.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff is a NORWEGIAN fairytale, first collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, in their Norske Folkeeventyr - initial publication estimated in mid-1840s.
KM Fikes is an intersectional absurdist playwright & poet & experimental novelist. With this blog. (Perhaps, redundant?)