Elves and the shoemaker| Un-fairy Tales by 13 year old from Kolkata

There was a shoe maker who lived with his wife in a small shack. He could barely buy leather to make his shoes but he was a kind hearted, down to earth man.

One morning he saw a perfect pair of shoes in his workroom. He sneaked up to his work room and found out that some elves were making shoes for him. The next night he kept some food and water for the elves.

The elves kept working for the kind hearted shoe maker. Every morning a new pair of perfectly handmade shoes would be sitting on the table. The shoes were selling like hotcakes and no one had seen such shoes in the market. But the only problem was that the elves could only manage to make one pair of shoes every night. So he told the three elves to bring a few more of their friends.

The next day the elves brought five more elves and all of them were showered with love. The shoe maker bought a bigger and bigger shop on the main street and changed its name from ‘leather laces’to ‘Elves on shoe shelves’.

He moved from an old shack to a mansion. The shoe maker and his wife were comfortably off.

After a while, he got lazy. His chat with the elves became very less and the elves were working overtime. He gradually got greedy and stop sharing love with those elves. He did not care about the elves anymore. The elves got sad too. One day the shoe maker overheard the elves’ conversation. They were saying that they will run away from the evil shoe maker’s mansion and live their own comfortable life.

The shoe maker silently shut them in a jar where there was no chance of escape. He kept sending pieces of leather inside the jar to make shoes. Whenever they stopped  working he would talk to them. He would give them less and less food each day and the elves got sadder and sadder day by day. The designs of the shoes were getting less productive. Less people were buying shoes from him. Then he found a way to get the elves making good shoes.

He talked to them in a kind way and gave them lots of food and the shoes quality got better. He understood that whenever the elves were happy they made good shoes.

The store and the elves passed from generation to generation and the shoemaker’s successors knew how to get good shoes from the elves. The elves are still in that same jar, waiting to be set free.