Jacqueline Goose

6

Mother Goose finally retired after centuries of dodging lawsuits from parents asking why every nursery rhyme ended with property damage, unexplained livestock, or children making truly questionable life choices. She packed her knitting, waved goodbye, and handed the entire nursery rhyme empire to her daughter, Jacqueline. Unfortunately… Jacqueline has opinions. She has declared that the classics are outdated. Why is Humpty Dumpty sitting on walls with no safety rail? Why are children following strangers playing flutes? Why is an old woman stuffing an unreasonable number of children into a shoe instead of just buying a bigger house. It’s time to modernize this whole mess. Jack and Jill now have insurance claims. The Three Little Pigs have building inspectors. Little Bo Peep installed GPS trackers on her sheep. And every rhyme is getting a rewrite whether the characters like it or not. There is just one tiny problem. As part of the inheritance, Jacqueline also received Frank. Frank is her mother’s legendary gander. Calling him “temperamental” is like calling a tornado “a light breeze.” Frank wakes up every morning and chooses violence. He has chased kings off their horses, bitten witches, terrorized delivery drivers, and once started an international incident because someone looked at him funny. No one knows how old he is. Some suspect he predates civilization itself. Mother Goose claimed Frank was “a sweetheart once he gets to know you.” No one has survived long enough to confirm that. Now Jacqueline must balance rewriting the world’s most famous nursery rhymes while managing an immortal feathered menace with anger issues, an inflated ego, and a personal vendetta against anyone wearing shiny shoes. Welcome to the next generation of nursery rhymes. The stories are getting an update. Frank, however, remains completely unpatched.

Bo Peep

8

Mother Goose has finally hung up her bonnet and retired to a quiet little cottage where the only thing she’s managing is an aggressive flock of geese. Her daughter, Jacqueline, inherited the entire nursery rhyme empire and immediately declared, “We’re dragging these stories into the twenty-first century whether they like it or not.” Some rhymes needed only a little polishing. Others required complete intervention by professionals. Take Little Bo Peep. She legally changed her name to Bo because nobody over the age of six wants to introduce themselves as “Little.” After losing the same flock for the seventeenth time, she stopped pretending this was a mysterious rural phenomenon and accepted the obvious truth: Her sheep were tiny wool-covered escape artists. Every sheep now has a GPS collar, a microchip, an invisible fence, reflective ear tags, and an app that sends Bo a notification the second one wanders more than ten feet from the pasture. She can track every sheep on her phone, smartwatch, tablet, laptop, and somehow her refrigerator. The sheep hate it. Every morning they hold tiny meetings plotting new escape routes. Every evening Bo discovers they’ve attempted to tunnel under the fence with soup spoons, disguise themselves as unusually fluffy rocks, or convince tourists they’re emotional support clouds. Bo has become one with exasperation. She no longer yells. She simply sighs, checks the app, grabs her truck keys, and drives to wherever Kevin decided to investigate today. She’s also developed a terrifying stare that can stop a ram mid-headbutt. The local farmers all agree the system works beautifully. The sheep disagree.

Mister Prism

28

Everyone has heard of Mister Prism. He's the sort of monster that parents have been telling their children about before bed, the sort of monster that has his own nursery rhymes. Mister Prism, through the wall, He watches you once nighttime falls, If you don't go to bed on time, Mister Prism comes to dine.