So she took a shovel from her daddy's garage where all the garden tools were kept and she found a place in the yard that wasn't too conspicuous or too inconspicuous and where none of her mother's precious pretty flowers were growing and that wouldn't damage her daddy's all-important lawn and she started digging away. She dug all afternoon and into the night and all through the next morning, too. She kept right on digging for days and days and days. She probably slept at some point; common sense tells us that she must have eaten something; but when she slept or what she ate we can't say. Mostly she just dug
and dug
and dug and dug
and dug.
The question is asked: "Where did she put all the dirt that she dug as she dug? Surely there came a point when she could no longer just throw it out of the hole above her or it wouldn't have been a very deep hole.
Well, fortunately for her (and us), these aren't the kinds of questions you have to answer in fairytales. Instead, you just dig. You don't worry about where the dug dirt goes.
The sun went up.
The sun went down.
Stars twinkled above her.
And then they twinkled out.
She dug through her whole childhood. She dug through her teen years. Then she dug through her twenties and thirties. She kept right on digging until she lost track of how long she'd been digging altogether. That's the thing about digging. There is never any end to it. There is never a bottom to a hole. Wherever you stop is the bottom. And where she finally stopped it was pretty far down. When she looked up, she could blot out the whole sun with the tip of her forefinger.
"This must be deep enough," she thought and waited.
And waited and waited and waited and waited. She refused to call up from the bottom of her hole because that would defeat the whole purpose. What she wanted was to be found at the bottom of the hole. But no one was finding her.
Then she realized she'd made a very fundamental mistake. She'd brought the shovel with her. There it stood, stuck in the dirt where she left it when she stopped digging, two feet away. How was anyone going to dig her out of the hole if the shovel was down here with her? Even worse, what if someone saw the hole and thought it was just a hole and decided to fill it back in without looking first to see who might be at the bottom of it? Suddenly it occurred to her that what she might have actually dug by accident was her own grave!
Darnit! This hadn't been a very good idea at all, she began to think, with a frown. Somehow she'd gotten her fairytales all bollixed up. What she should have done was build a tower from which she could let her long hair down, not a tunnel underground. A tower gets you noticed by princes. A tunnel gets you cold and damp and crawled on by worms. No, this hadn't been a good idea at all.
Now at this point in a fairytale something unexpected and miraculous happens and everything turns out for the best. But not so much in this fairytale. By now the little girl wasn't little anymore and no longer a girl but a mature woman with long white hair and brittle yellow nails and a cracked voice that could hardly carry halfway up the incredibly deep hole she'd dug for herself even if she had been inclined to call for help at this late date which she wasn't.
In fact, she'd grown used to the dank and the chill and the worms and the moles and the roots and the tiny dime-sized view of the world above that she could see through the other end of her hole the way you'd look at another planet miles and miles and miles away as if through the eyepiece of a telescope. So she stayed there and no one ever did notice her and eventually that was just fine with her because on the plus side no one ever bothered her either and she came to forget why she ever wanted to be noticed in the first place.
And that is pretty much the happiest way a story like this can ever end.
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