The Farting Pig

By Ella Wong

The farting pig and the foolish princess. (Illustration by Megan Chan)

Once upon a time, there lived a very foolish princess. It was a surprise how foolish she was, because her mother was an excessively clever queen, and her father an extremely wise king.

Anyway, the princess was foolish and that was that. Nobody could change the fact.

One day, the foolish princess decided that she wanted a farting pig for her birthday. 

The king sent for his soldiers and declared, “By my most wise and royal decree, I order you to find a farting pig for my princess!”

And off they went.

Among these soldiers was a man named Sir Randle, who thought it was just like the princess to want something so foolish. 

Typical, he thought as he trudged off. Well, I’m not going to run around searching the kingdom for a farting PIG.

So, he didn’t. He went home instead, and after a month, he smeared his armour with dirt and mud and went to meet the king, saying that he hadn’t managed to find a single farting pig after his long month of hard work and labour.

The princess was not impressed.

Half of the other soldiers reported the exact same thing, and so the foolish princess did not get her farting pig — much to her disappointment and nobody else’s.

One day, just as the princess was about to throw an enormous tantrum, a soldier came back from scouting the kingdom. His face was beaming, his armour smeared with soil and mud and dirty water.

He raised an equally dirty pig up into the air, and shouted triumphantly, “I HAVE FOUND THE FARTING PIG!”

The princess squealed with joy (so did the pig, but out of terror) and rushed to pick up the pig, delighted. The horrified pig scrambled to get away, and, in a hurry, farted—right in the princess’s face.

The foolish princess screamed and coughed. Her lungs filled with the stinky, burning farts of the pig, who dropped straight out of her arms and ran up the staircase, releasing more stinky farts as he went.

Everyone collapsed in a heap of stinkiness.

The soldiers (wearing gas masks) found him hiding in the princess’s bedroom later, when the farts had somewhat dissipated.The princess, meanwhile, changed her mind and decided she didn’t want a farting pig after all.

As was typical of foolish princesses who didn’t think properly, she decided to run away, since it was the sort of thing children did on her favourite television show, which she really shouldn’t have watched as it was titled Foolish Children do Foolish Things and only made her even more foolish than she already was. But she was a princess, and didn’t princesses have the right to watch television?

And so, nobody had said anything about it. Back to the story...

She ran, screaming all the way into the forest, and was nearly gobbled up by a giant white wolf who she’d foolishly mistook for a large ball of snow, and had tried to poke it. (Why she thought it was snowing when it was in the middle of summer, who knows?)

She ran away, screaming again, from the giant white wolf, and stopped, panting, to rest in a grassy clearing. Breathless, she looked up — and was nearly shot by an ugly prince who was organising a hunt in the clearing.

After the ugly prince was convinced she wasn’t a screaming animal of the sort no one had ever seen before, the foolish princess was rescued by the ugly prince and they lived normally ever after in the prince’s kingdom. (They both decided not to marry. It was the first and only wise decision the foolish princess had ever made.)

What happened to the pig, then? The king ordered Sir Randle to plop the pig down in a remote forest far, far, far away from the kingdom, where he lived happily ever after in the backyard of a couple who loved to smell farts.

When Sir Randle came back, he was so exhausted he simply rolled into bed and fell asleep. 

And so, rid of the farting pig and the foolish princess, they all lived happily ever after.

The End