The Girl Who Trod On A Loaf

There is a meme circulating that says “Fight For Your Fairytale” with regards to women getting a Prince and castle.

No thank you.

If you’ve read any of Grimms’ fairy tales, you know that most of them are fucking terrifying.

Ditto Hans Andersen.

Have you read “The Girl Who Trod On A Loaf”?

No? Well allow me to give you a children’s nightmare story about being cruel to animals. Or maybe it’s about wasting food.

It’s about a poor little girl named Inger who also happens to be a psychopath. Her greatest delight is pulling wings off flies and sticking beetles on pins just out of reach of leaves so they’d thrash about trying to get free.

As she got older she got super hot so even though she was arrogant and cruel she was never punished. Because of her hotness her destitute parents sent her to live with a rich family.

One day the rich people convinced Inger that she should really go see her parents as it had been years. They even gave her a loaf of bread to take to them.

But this hot bitch had on some fancy shoes and on the way to her parents house she threw the bread in the mud to walk on to keep her shoes clean.

And you think that would be the moral, but oh no. You’d be wrong.

When she stepped on the bread the mud turned to quicksand and swallowed her whole.

But wait… It’s not over!

She meets the Marsh Wife and the Elf King. And a great-grandmother who takes her to Bogey-land which is like hell mixed with Fear Factor.

“Great, fat, sprawling spiders spun webs of a thousand years round and round their feet; and these webs were like footscrews and held them as in a vise, or as though bound with copper chain. … It would take far too long to enumerate the various tortures here.”

Inger becomes a human statue. Her clothes are covered in slime, snakes are in her hair and toads in all the folds of her dress. She is starving but can’t eat. She can’t move anything but her eyes which start having flies crawl all over them, flies without wings. Because she pulled them off as a child. So, karma.

But we’re just getting started!

While she’s down there scalding drops start hitting her face. The tears of her parents. She listens to her own funeral as people say they wish she was never born. Songs are written about her vanity and she becomes a warning to children everywhere.

But does she feel remorse? NOPE! In fact she blames her parents for not doing a better job, and thinks that she’s the victim and everyone else should be punished for their sins. And then she criticizes the other people in Bogey-land because how can she be expected to improve around such disgusting people.

Years pass. She witnesses the death of her mother and the rich family. She even witnesses the death of an old woman who as a little girl was told about Inger but was the only person to ever feel sorry for her.

Which is when the story takes a hard right into hallucinogenic-ville. She finally sees the error of her ways and wants to be better. But instead of going back to earth Inger is turned into a bird who lives in constant fear with no voice. Bird-Inger has to scavenge enough crumbs to make up a whole loaf and feed them to other birds. And upon completing that task she flies directly into the sun.

In retrospect this may have been where my fear of spiders started.