Short Story: The Handmaid's Tale

There once was a house on a hill. In this house lived a very poverty-stricken creature, she did not have anything but their humble home and little food. This animal was quite typical however in the lowly village, so normal that almost no one knew she existed, see she was a sheepdog, there were tons of them running around so no one gave her a second glance. So this particular canine’s story starts when one sad day right after the ancient and fair king, Gorvenal passed away. The royal guard had been chosen to solve a puzzling venture, for they did not know who would be their new king. See the new crowned head would almost always go to the eldest son, but the treasured queen had also passed away, this time at a younger age and unfortunately before

But thankfully the local philosopher had come up with a straightforward way to answer the laborious problem that did not cost the kingdom anything but a sword’s worth of gold and a needle and thread. And so the finest blacksmith that the royal guard could find, quickly set to work on making the only thing that could decide the new and supreme monarch of the entire kingdom, a tube. But like most crucial artifacts that change the whole plot-line of the story, this was no ordinary tube. For one thing this tube was made out of solid gold, secondly, this tube was twisted into a spring shape, and lastly this tube was about a foot long. You may be thinking, ‘That sounds a lot like an ordinary tube to me! Except for the solid gold part, it sounds as like the same kind of pole you might find in the kitchen!’ But this tube’s purpose was much greater than a common pipe’s. And so the next day after the tube was carefully crafted it was carried into town where the contest rules were

“You will have to thread this twine, through this golden tube!” He announced, holding each object up in turn. All of the animals were howling now, this was the easiest puzzle that any had ever seen in all of the lands. “BUT!” The herald hollered over the square “ There is a simple catch, to thread the twine through the tube, you must use THIS needle!” He held up a simple iron needle. The once rambunctious crowd had turned deadly silent, surely there was no way the needle could thread through the contorted piece of metal. “The thread AND the needle must go through the pipe. The first citizen to get them both do do so will become king.” He let the last words hang in the air for a moment for effect but everyone soon saw that his last words hung heavily in the air for much longer than that. Weeks passed and still no one could find a way to make the inflexible needle pass through the snaked pipe, until one day when the lowly sheepdog came up to the stand and attempted to thread the twine through the metal but to the others indifference, she