Page 45 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

The Sweeties ran for their lives. What appeared to be a million mice burst into the throne room. Mother Ginger hid the Teas and Gingerbread men and any other Sweetie who’d fit under her skirts. Then she backed up to an open window, where, while the meeslings grimaced and growled, she used her voluminous (which means really, really big) skirts to hide the fact that Sweeties of all shapes and sizes were sneaking out the window, sliding down the roof tiles, plopping softly onto Herr Cotton’s stack of cotton candy, tumbling to their feet, and high-tailing it out of town!
Meanwhile, the Mouse Queen and her sniveling son, Prince Reginald Rhatt, surrounded Princess Pirlipat, who had hopped onto a chair and was holding up her skirts screaming, “Mice! Mice!”
This had the unpleasant effect of bringing the Princess eyeball-to-eyeball with the Mouse Queen, which caused Pirlipat to lose her balance and windmill backwards off her chair. Being the hero that he really, truly was, Franz arrived in the nick of time to save the Princess from falling flat on her caboose and bruising her dignity at the same time.
Franz broke the Princess’s fall and untangled himself from, first her clinging arms, and then her voluminous skirts. (What can I say? Everyone wore really, really, big skirts back then!) He jumped onto the chair and cried, “Unhand the Princess!” like the good guy he was, even though the Princess was nothing more than a pain in the – well, you know. Before anyone could react, Princess Pirlipat pulled him up to his feet and hurried him across the room.
Surprisingly, the Mouse Queen didn’t follow them. Instead, she smiled. And, oh, how Franz hated that smile.
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