Chapter 17: Tom Thumb
Once upon a time in a forest owned by King Author the mighty magician Merlin was roaming disguised as a beggar. He tarried to hear a woman cry about being barren,
"Alas why have I no child, I'd gladly be happy with one no bigger than my thumb."
This thought intrigued Merlin who many considered more scamp than magician and he came up with a scheme. He placed a spell inside an acorn and hid it under the woman's hearth. This left the future of the woman up to chance, something that pleased Merlin. If she held the acorn as she wished for a child she would be blessed with one the size of her thumb. The fates decided and the woman never saw the acorn or had the offspring she so wished for.
This acorn, as acorns will, worked itself into the ground and soon sprouted into a mighty oak tree. The fates spared this very oak from the woodsman axe and from the fires and lighting strikes that nature deals out to the forest. This mighty oak grew and amazingly survived until the dawn of the twenty-first century when it was then chopped down to make room for a strip mall. Its wood was cut and honed into choice lumber then sent to a furniture factory where some of it was made into a dining room table. This very table was purchased by a family containing six rambunctious boys who soon ruined it with their rowdy dining habits. They donated it to charity and that is how it landed at the home of a poor childless couple.
This couple unable to have children and with no money for fertility treatments or even a surrogate were destined to remain childless. Mrs. Thamb, for that was her name sat at the only table in their humble abode. She was crying and gnashing her teeth as she squeezed her table trying to control herself. She cried to her husband,
"Oh Horace I so wanted a child, just one child is that too much to ask. I wouldn't care if he was no bigger than my thumb, I just want a child."
That acorn grown into a tree centuries ago, then chopped down and made into a table, yet it still possessed Merlin's spell. Mrs. Thamb slept face down on that magical table as her tears sank into the dry old wood.