Page 55 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

him to the clock. (Which leads me to another word question. Do frogs really march?) She thrust Reggie inside after about the third or fifth attempt, for Reggie really did not want to go inside that very dark, very scary clock. And he clung and clawed and stiffened and balked in various fashions before the Queen Mother pried loose his claws from the sides of the door and used her size eleven feet to kick him through the opening, and into the black interior. Slamming the door shut, she cried after her sniveling, snotty son, “Since you sent them home, then you can go after them!”
But Reggie took one look at the dark corridor in front of him, turned tail and slammed against the door of the clock, so hard that, even with the Mouse Queen pushing against it from her side, Reggie could open the door just enough to stick out his pointy little nose.
“But, Mummy, why do you want them back? Aren’t you glad they’re gone?”
The Mouse Queen whipped open the door so fast, that Reggie fell out on his nose, and three mice that had been standing close by were knocked across the room and into the princess-turned-troll. This caused a moment of confusion, as the princess was still scared of mice and tried to jump back up on her chair. But now, since she was a troll, the chair promptly broke, plopping poor Pirlipat back into the middle of the mice – who, in turn, were scared of trolls in general, and of trolls close-by even more. And they kept bumping into each other as they tried to get out of Pirlipat’s way.
The Mouse Queen threw an angry look over her shoulder, and everyone froze, until her red eyes turned back on poor Reggie. She pulled him up by his ruffles. “I’m sending you
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