Little Bo Peep and the Big Bad Wolf (Satire) by George Held

Little BP went to see her grandmother, who lived deep beneath the sea. So deep did she live that she offered a big cash incentive to Little BP to visit her. Even though the risk was great, Little BP loved that cash incentive as much as she loved her grandmother.

So down she went, farther than Little BP had ever gone before.

At Grandmother’s, Little BP left her air locker and entered the house at the bottom of the sea. After tea and crumpets, Grandma said, “Little BP, I’m going to repay your thoughtfulness with all the black gold you can take to the surface, but you must use only the best equipment, for a leak could cause the black gold to end sea life as we know it.”

“Ooh, Grandma,” said Little BP, “you can trust me to take all the black gold safely to the surface.”

“If you do,” said Grandma, “you’ll rise to the top of the NEPTUNE 500!” Little BP put in place the best equipment she had, but she had never been so far in the deep and did not have a fail-safe device, so when the inevitable rupture occurred, the black gold escaped in a rush and was well on its way to end sea life as we know it.

Dolphins drowned, whales’ milk turned to tar, pelicans, gulls, and herons suffocated until, at long last, the Big Bad Wolf in The White House intervened.

“Little BP,” he said, wagging his paw, “if you don’t patch this rupture right away I’m going to huff and I’ll puff till I blow your granny’s house down.”

But Little BP knew that the BBW in TWH couldn’t even reach deep enough to get to Grandmother’s, much less blow the house down. Little BP curtsied to the BBW in TWH, with her fingers crossed behind her, cashed all her black gold into Pounds Sterling, and flew to her retreat in the Cayman Islands.

All the while, the BBW in TWH could be heard saying, ever more faintly, “Patch this rupture right now or I’ll huff and I’ll puff till I blow . . . ”

Author bio:

George Held is chief correspondent for www.infauxtainment.com, a topical satire blog, and contributes often to The New Verse News (http://newversenews.blogspot.com/), a blog for progressive polical poems. His fourteenth collection of poetry, AFTER SHAKESPEARE: SELECTED SONNETS (Cervenabarva Press), will appear this fall.