When I was a little kid I loved to read and I had a lot of books. I especially liked this set of books with posable puppets that acted out the stories in weirdly specific and graphic detail, they really fueled my imagination. Most of these books involved magic and food and they were generally trying to teach some sort of lesson, to this day I have not forgotten them (the books and the lessons).
One was about a little girl and her family, someone gave the little girl a free magic pot that when she commanded it, it would fill up with porridge. The catch being (there is always a catch with free stuff!) that she also had to tell it to stop. So, of course, she ended up not telling it to stop and her whole village flooded with porridge and the people who lived there had to eat their way back into their homes.
When I originally read that story I had no idea what porridge was. I grew up with oatmeal and everyone I knew also called it oatmeal. In the oddly graphic puppet picture, it appeared as a wall of shiny grayish yellow glue, which bared no resemblance to anything I had ever eaten. I have no idea why, but I imagined that the food wall in the story tasted like buttermilk with sugar in it.
Another story was about a gingerbread boy all decorated in colorful candies and frosting who magically came to life and ran around teasing everyone with his deliciousness. He outran everyone except a fox. I remember the gingerbread boy perched on the fox’s mouth, sort of doing the splits with one foot on each lip. There was no graphic murder scene in the book, just now you see him and now you don’t. With the fox licking a few crumbs from the side of his mouth in the now you don’t picture.
I remember thinking… did the gingerbread boy have bones? Tiny little crunchy bones like the ones in canned salmon? Did he have guts and blood? Did they all taste like candy? I was disgusted by this act of eating something alive. I think it was the first time I was drawn to a story that made me feel disgusted and scared but I still liked it. Later, Freddy movies and Stephen King’s books would make me feel much the same way.
The last one I’ll mention is The Three Little Kittens. They lost their mittens and didn’t get pie and then found them and got pie. I found nothing strange about cats wearing mittens or eating pie. I did wonder why the mother cat was fully dressed but the kittens were naked except for their mittens, I wondered why only their front paws needed to be kept warm and if the mittens were sooooooooooooooo important, why did the mother cat give them pie to eat while wearing them?
I could clearly see that in the strangely graphic puppet picture the crumbs and filling were dripping on the mittens. For whatever reason, the mother cat who was right next to them didn’t notice until they were dirty. Then she makes them wash their own mittens and smells a rat. Honestly, I still don’t get this one but at the time I was more fascinated with what type of pie these cats could eat that required no plate or fork. I had never seen a pie whose bottom crust would support it while holding it in the air by just a finger and a thumb. Yup these cats had thumbs and I accepted that more then I accepted the magical no plate or fork needed pie.