Pequeño

by Madeleine Kando

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there were three little children whose names were: Jane, Eva and Peter. They all lived together in a big house with their mother and father. They were very busy getting bigger, because that’s what they wanted most of all: to get BIG.

One day, Jane fell out of bed and broke her tooth. Poor Jane. She wasn’t too upset though, she could still chew her food quite well with all her other teeth. But just to make sure, her dad called the tooth fairy and said: ‘Tooth fairy, could you come over tonight and grant Jane a wish, so Jane won’t be sad about her lost tooth?’ So, the tooth fairy asked what Jane wished for the most and he told her: she wished she were BIG.

The next day, when the children woke up, they were a little surprised. Everything was so BIG! The chairs were big, their beds were really big and even their slippers were so big that they looked like boats instead of slippers.

Peter (who was smaller but very smart) said to his sisters: ‘Don’t worry. This means that we are still asleep, and we are just dreaming. Let’s wait until we really wake up.’ So they all laid down, closed their eyes again and waited until they REALLY would wake up. Eva, who became a bit impatient, peeked through her half closed eyes. But nothing had changed. So she said: ‘I don’t think we are dreaming, guys. We better find out what’s happened.’

Eva managed to climb out of her enormous bed. And right there, on the enormous floor was an enormous piece of paper with enormous letters on it: ‘Yoor weesh as bin granted. And it was signed: ‘Sinceramente, la hada’ (which means ‘fairy’ in Spanish).

Oh, no! The tooth fairy, who had just arrived on a boat, only spoke Spanish! She had feverishly looked up all the words in the Webster English/Spanish dictionary, and had misunderstood.

Instead of making Jane, Eva and Peter BIG, she had made everything else big! Jane said: ‘We will write on the note, ask her to make things ‘smaller’ (they knew the word from their Spanish class in school).

Luckily there was a bucket of fresh paint on the enormous floor. Peter, Jane and Eva dipped their little feet in the enormous paint bucket and started to walk the letters like this:

They managed to climb back into their huge beds by grabbing onto the sheets and closed their little eyes and waited. Sure enough, they heard a swooshing sound and when they opened their eyes everything was normal sized again.

Jane, who was actually the smartest of the three, told her dad that they wanted to send the tooth fairy a gift certificate which would entitle her to take some English as a Second Language classes. That is how the tooth fairy learnt English and never made mistakes like that ever again. leave comment here