UTTERLY ITTY-BITTY
The Wee Folk of the Navel
A fairy tale
Once upon a time, there was a family of three wee folk who lived inside a human navel. The young boy was very wee, and so was called Wee-Wee. The mother was Midsized-Wee. The father was relatively enormous. He was known as Great-Wee.
Their grandmother lived with them too, but her size was not so obvious because she stayed in bed all day. Naturally, like all creatures living in the cavernous navel, Grandma was extremely minuscule.
Happy years passed for the wee folk until one day the boy decided to go for a long walk in the dark woods of the Belly Button. Mother thought this was a bad idea, but Grandma had another plan.
“Go walk,” she told Wee-Wee, “Along the path you may encounter a terrible wolf. If you do, tell him I am here in bed, and very frail. Then resume your trek.”
Wee-Wee did as she requested as Grandma was the wisest of their umbilicus clan.
And so
Wee-wee was walking along in the shadowy forest when a menacing wolf appeared on the path, just as Grandma said he would.
“Hark! Who goes there?” cried the wolf, even though the boy stood directly in front of him. The boy hid a smile of relief. He suspected the wolf was either blind or daft, or old-fashioned.
“It is a wee boy,” replied the wee-est one, “I am out for a stroll, but my grandmother wants you to know she is in bed and very frail.”
The wolf lifted his crouched head and eyed the boy.
“Are you Belle’s grandson?”
“It is I.”
With that, the wolf darted past the lad toward the family home and the boy continued on.
Meanwhile
Back at the house, Wee-Wee’s parents were upstairs enjoying a rare conjugal romp in their bed. Downstairs, a distracted girl no bigger than an atom with golden locks and a red cape entered the home by mistake.
“Oh dear!” she exclaimed, “Where am I?”
Was this not her math tutor’s house?? Nobody was about, and this was peculiar. Her math tutor had 3³ children who made a mess of the kitchen at all hours.
This kitchen here was beautifully appointed, and there were three bowls of steaming porridge on the table before her. She immediately felt the hunger in her belly and thought it not too intrusive if she had just a small taste of the hot cereal.
The girl began to spoon the cooked mush into her tiny mouth. It was so tasty she forgot to stop at one spoonful. Soon the first bowl was empty. She gasped. Yet she moved to the second bowl and devoured it. She gasped again. By the third bowl, the stomach of the tiny girl bulged so large she now resembled a microscopic whale.
Suddenly
The front door flew open and there stood the terrifying wolf. The stuffed girl cried with fear. The wolf growled because he loathed whales. He brushed past her, went straight to the grandmother’s room, and burst the bedroom door open.
“Belle!” he cried, “Is it you?!”
The grandmother lay waiting for this, as she had for many long years in a sleepy sadness.
“Tis, my love. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been in the deep forest of the great umbilicus searching and searching. You were nowhere to be found.” With that, the wolf hung his head and shed an unbelievably minute tear.
The old grandmother extended her bony finger to motion for the wolf to come hither. “Get over here, you,” she said.
He crawled into her bed, and hence they began to make a wee version of human-wolf love. Instantly, the wolf turned into a preposterously handsome older prince, worth hundreds of millions of dollars from a massive real estate portfolio and compounding interest.
Perhaps
You could have said at that moment these wee folk of the navel were at their happiest in a long while, and it was a great blessing.
Unfortunately, the porridge had gluten in it. The red-caped girl, who had a gluten allergy, began to violently vomit across the kitchen table and onto the fancy chairs. This caused her to wail in grevious discomfort and her belly to shrink to its normal wee size. The four love-making wee-folk heard the commotion and became alarmed.
The mother and father, still romping in the room above the grandmother’s, tried to quickly finish so they could address the issue. As always with their bedroom exploits, the couple suddenly crashed through the floor onto Grandmother Belle and the prince below. While the home was indeed quite fashionable, it was constructed of desiccated staphylococci cells — not so sturdy. The couple rarely made love in their bedroom because of this, as it required a complete reconstruction of the home afterward.
Just then
Wee-Wee returned from his walk with a fairy princess on his arm. They called for the family so they could announce their engagement. When they noticed the wailing red-caped girl, the fairy princess realized it was the mean girl from Math class.
“YOU ARE VILE!” the princess screamed, and she flung the bacteria she’d picked in the garden at the gluten-intolerant girl. The bacteria consumed the red-caped one until she was no more than the size of an oat.
This shocked Wee-Wee who realized he’d made an awful mistake asking the overly expressive fairy for her hand in marriage. He turned and ran out the door into the woods, never to be heard from again.
If this wasn’t tragic enough, underneath the rubble of the bedrooms, the prince — and lone survivor — became hungry and crawled out from the wreckage. He ventured to the kitchen and ate the first edible thing in sight, gulping the homicidal fairy princess in one slurp. The taste of savory flesh turned him back into a wolf and he was cursed to wander the woods forevermore.
Such is the sad story of the Wee Folk of the Navel, but not of the bacteria. Slowly the house in the woods was absorbed by the umbilicus microbiome, and in due time the bacterial community thrived happily ever after — both in the wee world and the great.
The End
The wee folk of the navel didn’t exist before Andrew Rodwin’s kale prompt beef. Now they exist into eternity, thank goodness.
And there is no way they would exist without the preposterously talented editing of T. Kent Jones. If you laughed, please thank him.
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