One day as the Little Red Hen was scratching in a field, she found a grain of wheat.
“This wheat should be planted,” she said.
“Who are you talking to,” said the Duck. “Who on earth do you think is talking to you?”
And the Hen had learned not to hear insults unless they were absolutely unavoidable, so the Hen did not hear the Duck say anything.
“Who will help me plant this grain of wheat?” she said.
“Not I,” said the Duck. “How embarrassing for you to ask me that, as if we were friends.”
“Not I,” said the Cat.
The Dog only snapped at her.
“Then I will,” said the Little Red Hen. And she did.
“Then why did you bother asking,” said the Duck.
“Why did you bother the rest of us.”
And the Hen kept very quiet, because it seemed like the safest thing to do. But the others were determined to punish her, and when someone is determined to punish you, there is nothing safe to do about it.
“Keep a civil tongue in your head,” the Cat said, and clawed a pawful of pinfeathers out of the Hen’s back.
Soon the wheat grew to be tall and yellow.
“The wheat is ripe,” said the Little Red Hen cheerfully. (She was cheerful because she had taught herself to forget all insults and harm, so that every day she woke up surrounded by friends.) “Who will help me cut the wheat?”
The Dog lifted its leg and pissed on her stalk of wheat by way of answer, and everyone else laughed.
“Oh,” said the Hen. “Oh, oh.” And she went and fetched water and cleaned the stalk off as best she could. The Dog is my funniest friend, she said to herself as she washed the wheat. He is always playing jokes on me.
When the wheat was cut, the Little Red Hen said, “Who will help me thresh this wheat?”
“Why do you keep asking,” said the Duck. “This isn’t funny anymore. No one will help you. None of us will help you.” And the Duck flew at her, biting and kicking dust into her eyes until she flew to the top of the barn.
“My friends are busy today,” said the Little Red Hen. “I will thresh the wheat myself.” And she did.
When the wheat was all threshed, the Little Red Hen said, “Who’ll help me take this wheat to the mill?” The Little Red Hen had found that the easiest way to deal with injury was to forget it.
If she didn’t forget it, she would be unhappy and in pain every day, and the Little Red Hen did not like to be unhappy. So instead she decided not to remember, and was happy.
The other animals said nothing. They were not interested enough to hurt her.
“How busy my friends are today,” said the Little Red Hen. “My good friends Dog and Duck and Cat must be very tired, and very busy, and they will have lots to tell me about after they are done working for the day.”
She took the wheat to the mill and had it ground into flour. “How my friends back at the farm miss me,” she told the miller. “They do not like it when I go to the mill by myself for even one afternoon. The Duck and the Cat and the Dog all offered to come to the mill for me today, but I said–”
“Your flour is ready,” said the miller.
“Thank you, Miller,” the Little Red Hen said. And so she went home.
“It’s back,” the Cat called out from its sun-spot on the fence.
“Shame,” the Duck said. “I hoped it had run away, or been made into Sunday supper at last.”
Then the Little Red Hen went into the barn and scratched out a bed among the hay. She bent her head down toward the floor and whispered: “I am back from the mill! Who will help me make this flour into bread?”
“I will help you,” said the Little Red Hen to herself in the Duck’s voice.
“I will help you too,” said the Little Red Hen in the Cat’s voice.
“Oh! Let me help,” said the Little Red Hen in the Dog’s voice.
“Let’s all help,” said the Little Red Hen quietly to the hay. And she made and baked the bread. Then she said, “Who will eat this bread?”
“Oh! I will,” said the Duck.
“And I will,” said the Cat.
“And I will,” said the Dog.
And they said little else as they fell on the bread and devoured it. And the Little Red Hen smiled to see her friends so happy.
“Quit staring,” the Dog said, and kicked at her.
Tags: animals, books, children’s stories made horrific
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This piece and others are so good about how traditional liberal values like altruism so easily become one-way streets for girls and women. This is where Mallory’s non-ironic love for parts of Ayn Rand shines through, and this is where I can kind of see it.
I feel like this is the first one where the story has been made horrific rather than just having the existing horrific aspects more clearly highlights. In the version of the Little Red Hen I had, the LRH told the other animals to sod off when they all wanted to eat the bread they had declined to help produce. She was pretty Ayn Randian and badass!
Right, and then I feel like there’s a critique of the presumed moral of stories like the original LRH and the Ant and the Grasshopper to the effect that the worker who toils and then refuses to share is selfish, heartless, greedy, etc.
I just love the way Mallory twists that back around, asking who are these Ants and Little Red Hens of whom husbands, children, or society* demand the fruits of their labor without giving anything in return.
*This is the Randian part!
I don’t think that was the moral of the version I knew as a child, though – there was a very clear moral that those who don’t labour, don’t get to enjoy the fruits of that labour. The LRH was never the bad guy. I love Mallory’s version, because I think it critiques something which is a very real cultural narrative, but it’s twisting a different story to the one I knew. I’m curious now whether the version I had as a child deviated from other tellings of this story!
That’s the feeling I remember from reading this as a kid too. The red hen was like, oh, you weren’t around to help me grow this wheat and make this bread, but now you want to eat it? Too bad for you.
Back when I was a tiny I always got real indignant about that. “but the cat kept the mice from eating the wheat, and the dog kept the hen safe from foxes, and the duck… was just lazy, but she couldn’t have done it without the others’ help!”
And now I am a darn dirty commie. So much makes sense.
Back when I was a tiny I always got real indignant about that. “but the cat kept the mice from eating the wheat, and the dog kept the hen safe from foxes, and the duck… was just lazy, but she couldn’t have done it without the others’ help!”
And now I am a darn dirty commie. So much makes sense.
Same tho (right down to the commie part)
I think you’re right about the standard version of the story, but anon210 is also right that a really common critique of The Ant and the Grasshopper and its ilk is “Why is the ant such an asshole? He’s legit just gonna let that grasshopper die when he can save him?” Which is fair! But I think Mallory’s horrifying version is sort of fascinating in that it turns that critique back on itself. It’s a neverending circle of morality questions!
It’s different with the LRH because the other animals just don’t get to enjoy a treat, rather than dying of starvation
That was my version as well!
You have an unnerving point.
This was horrific in a completely new way. I’m not terrified, I’m just…so SAD.
Crushingly sad.
I have to stop reading these.
I was hoping the Hen poisoned the bread. Alas, no justice for Hens in this world.
I’m going to go re-read about my boyfriend Idris Elba again, because now I am so mournful and kind of want to find a little red hen to hug.
You might enjoy this rendition–unless Benedict Cumberbatch disturbs you (hey, he’s got detractors, you can’t assume).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwCnn7HUWvo
This is quite soothing. Thank you.
It’s the page turning that really seals it for me. That ASMR stuff (see also: crackling mylar on a picture book cover).
Oooh, and he can’t say penguin here either! (There’s a Graham Norton interview with BC where he talks about his difficulties in saying “penguin”.)
I’ve seen that!
If Benedict Cumberbatch was your boyfriend, you’d lie down in separate hard wooden beds at night and simultaneously switch off your consciousness for exactly 7.5 hours.
You’re trying to get the first off-putting edition written, aren’t you?
I might cry a little bit…I need to read the toast soup article and pretend I am a happy bear in a forest…
I was really hoping for a tower of vengeance at the end of this one, severe mockery in return, and possibly a destructive overthrow of the mill. Alas!
I was hoping that at the end she had murdered them all and baked their blood into the bread.
This is so goddamn sad and it reminds me of my attempts to make friends at the first camp I worked at.
I may need a hug.
Yes! I was having flashbacks to my past as an awkward, shy kid. I once overheard one of my friends say she just hung out with me to get answers to math tests and I have this distinct memory of willfully not processing that information.
I distinctly remember one girl in my class saying, “So, now that you’re moving, can I just be mean to you?” and saying, “Sure,” because at least she was talking to me.
Yes. Elementary school was a horror show for me. It’s like in the documentary Bully, the part where the sweet, awkward kid says the kids on the school bus (who are cruel to him every day) are his friends, and his mom tells him that friends aren’t mean, and he says something like, “But if those kids aren’t my friends, then I don’t have any friends.” And I cried my heart out because I knew that feeling exactly.
Oh, honey. 🙁
I’ll be your friend. Hi, Loose_Seal!
That’s how I got through elementary and middle school too. Even now I catch myself keeping upsetting information on the surface and hoping it evaporates instead of letting it sink in.
This reminds me of my job in a certain office in Boston, Massachusetts.
Oh, all y’all.
Memories for me, too.
I think the image of the Little Red Hen smiling helplessly as the bullies devour the beautiful thing she has created actually rings truer to me than the original version, where she tells them to eff off.
Yeah. Well. Last night on the playground, I watched another little kid give my son a small push away from a slide and tell him to “go away.” And my son very cheerfully went away, because if that’s what his good buddy wanted him to do, no problem. The little kid called, “I’m sorry” after him, which I appreciated even though my son didn’t. He already busy on another slide. He doesn’t understand mean, so he also doesn’t really understand apologies. And a few minutes later, he was back worshipfully hanging around the other kid, no clue about a single thing that had happened. And this is why his future terrifies me. His nature is very little red hen, and the world has too many cats and dogs and ducks.
Ack. 🙁 If it helps, I think he’ll grow up to have some epiphanies, and they may be very painful for him, but they will leave him less vulnerable. And he’ll have you to help him!
My little brother was like that, but aften enough people were mean to him he learned to be more wary. I don’t know if it can be considered a happy ending, per se, but he certainly learned not to be a little red hen.
Oh! Oh! Feelings!
Curse you Ortburg! Curse you and your ability to make me reevaluate everything I’ve ever done nice for anyone!
i am the red hen and i’m devastated
I know I’m the red hen because I am trying to think of a way to share it on social media without the other animals seeing it and getting their feelings hurt
Oh Little Red Hen 🙁 This one was particularly dear to me–I had a Sesame Street version (with Bert as the hen!) that I learned to read on, and one of my earliest memories is reading all the “Not I” repetitions with my dad. But somehow its bleak assessment of female domestic labor didn’t enter my consciousness until much, much later.
okay, i just cried at work. thanks mallory
The hen should come to Brooklyn. Everyone loves to make bread around here. (A little too much, if you ask me.)
Also, I had completely forgotten the story of The Little Red Hen, even though it was one of my favorites as a child!!! It reminds me of 1st grade and my awesome teacher, Miss Sullivan. Miss Sullivan was young and pretty and had a wicked sense of humor. At the start of the year, she gave us all pencils that were painted red on the outisde instead of yellow, and each day she’d say (in an affected British accent), “Take out your bloody pencils!” There was also a cat that would jump in through our open classroom window and visit us quite often.
I want to go back to first grade sooooo baaaaaaaad.
!!! She swore at you?! Chat kind of school was it?
Right? i guess it’s not so bad depending on the dialect. i remember a headline from a newspaper we looked at on ANZAC day in grade 3 saying “IT WAS BLOODY AWFUL” and we were all horrified that the front page of the newspaper had this ghastly swearword on it and so confused that our teacher was doing a lesson using the article.
So now I’m regretting telling this story to my daughter when she was young.
Not regretting it so much that I didn’t immediately send her the link, however.
Hey, everybody, were you feeling good today? Well guess what! Mallory is here with a story to fix that right away!
All the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I saw Mallory was reworking the Red Hen. Turns out that was a completely accurate response.
Thanks for the lovely cup of morning trauma!
I need to go cry for an hour.
There’s a book called The Little Red Hen and the Passover Matzah. The Hen lets the other animals eat the matzah she made… but they have to do the washing up.
Jesus Christ, Mallory. (I mean, this was very effective, good job.)
I generally don’t think I’m particularly maternal, but when I read this I was all, “It’s okay Little Red Hen! I will pet you and love you and help you and you’ll never be sad again! Come to my bosom!”
Of course, that completely misses all the great points said above, but I just suddenly wanted to mother everything better.
I haven’t made it past the pissing on the wheat incident and I don’t know if I can read any further because I’ve already got tears brimming in my eyes and I want to gently scoop up the precious little Hen and hug her to my chest and tell her everything’s okay and she can come live with me and my chickens and she’ll always be loved and cared for and no one will make fun of her for the rest of her life oh god I’m crying already goddamnit GODDAMNIT.
Oh, geeze. This is distinctly relatable, and I love/hate that.
You're trying to get the first off-putting edition written, aren't you?
Do we get a sequel the Little Red Hen deserved post to go with this one?
And pow, I realise I have been the Red Hen in a huge part of my friend circle since having toddler. At least my friends haven’t been snarky about it, they just always have other plans / sick toddlers themselves, and I’m always last on the list of people to call when they want company. But yet a chunk of them still manage to come to toddlers birthday party…
Well, this hit way too close to home.
You are a sick, sick, woman – keep up the good work
The dog’s leg cramped up as he was kicking at the Little Red Hen. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry to see that you’re having trouble with your leg.”
“You’re not the boss of me!” The dog growled at her. “You’re just…. you’re… you’re…”
And just like that, the Dog began to vomit blood.
“Oh dear,” the Little Red Hen said. “Here, let me fetch a pail for you to vomit into! I may have forgotten to mention… I chucked a shit-ton of lye into that bread.” She bent down next to the Dog and whispered slowly and sweetly right into his ear. “See? I like to play jokes, too.”
The Little Red Hen fetched a pail and was back in a flash, but not before the Dog’s whimpering and strained breathing stopped. Permanently. The Duck and the Cat were both lying on the ground, each in their own little puddles of blood and feces.
“My, how messy,” said the Little Red Hen. “We should probably get this cleaned up right away before Mother sees. Who would like to help me clean?”
“I will help you,” said the Little Red Hen out loud in the Duck’s voice.
“I will help you too,” said the Little Red Hen in the Cat’s voice.
“Oh! Let me help,” said the Little Red Hen in the Dog’s voice.
“Very good!” she smiled. “Very very very good. I’ll get us all some washcloths!” After eviscerating and decapitating her friends, the Little Red Hen finished cleaning up and stuck each of her friends’ heads onto sticks. She arranged them neatly around her little bed in the hay so they could all finally relax and enjoy each others’ company.
“I really had a fun time today,” said the Little Red Hen. “We all did,” said Duck Stick.
The Little Red Hen was so happy. “Mother, look who came to visit! What? What’s that? No, Mother, we won’t cause any trouble! Mother, these are my friends. What? Oh, no, of course not! Everyone knows a Little Red Hen’s best friend is her Mother.”
THE END
This seriously made me sad 🙁