A Topsy-Turvy Tale

Once upon a time, four live dead people were out walking. One of them was blind, the other was mute, the third was lame, and the fourth was naked.

The blind man saw a tree loaded with apples, so he said to the mute, “Tell the lame fellow to climb up into the tree and throw us down some apples.” So the lame man climbed into the tree and threw down an apronful of apples for the naked man.

That done, the blind man went on. Then, seeing what he saw, he stopped. It was a crowded marketplace, so crowded that one wagon was a mile away from another. He went up to a peasant woman and said, “I want to buy a goose.”

She said, “That will be twenty kopecks for the turkey.”

So he bought the duck.

Then he saw a woman who was selling fish—a fish that weighed some twenty pounds, but when he picked it up, nothing was there. So he took it home and said to his wife, “Cook this fish.”

“All right,” she said, “I’ll cook the fish if you’ll bring me a pot the size of three thimbles into which I can put three yards of flour.”

So he brought her a pot the size of three thimbles which could hold three yards of flour, and she cooked the fish.

Now guess what the sly young rascal did? He took the head of the fish for himself and gave the tail to his wife.

A tail is an end, and an end is a finish, and this is the finish of my tale.

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Glossary

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Annotations

TELLER: Yankl Stepanski (b. 1903), Arishtsh, U.S.S.R.; tailor and plumber, since 1922 in the U.S.
COLLECTOR: Rakhmiel Peltz, Philadelphia, 1985.
SOURCE: B.W.A. no. 103.