"Sir, I think we found something! Wait… stone …in a pumpkin field?"

The archeologist's assistant stepped out of the small hole he had dug, in his hand a sheaf of parchment incased in a stone box. Wiping ancient pumpkin remains off the paper, he slowly translated the story out of Latin.

Pepi Cinderellae

(The translated version)

Hi! My name is Perpalya. I live in a pumpkin patch. I am a pumpkin… but I prefer to call myself an 'orange veggie'. It's sounds so much better, don't you think? As I said, I live in a pumpkin patch… or used to. Now I live next to one.

I am… or was… a rich golden hue. My mother was… slightly pale, an albino and my father was from the south and extremely tanned. I was a mixture of both colors and a bright yellowy golden shade. I won ten pumpkin contests for best shade, without even having to be removed from my vine!

I always knew I was destined for stardom, but I never thought it would be so subtle. I am Cinderella's Pumpkin… orange veggie. You see, it was in the middle of a warm summer night and this rude, fat, old woman comes along and points this stick at me. Them she started singing in some kind of gibberish, about bippity-boos or something. Suddenly I was flying through the air and I was expanding. All that dieting for nothing! Then all of a sudden I was hollow; with wheels and a little bench thingy.

Now, imagine how I felt, having to bear the indignity of being sat in. The fat old woman yelled something about 12:00 pm (that early?) and then this girl with tons of itchy blond hair climbed in. She obviously had not been dieting, or maybe she was just really tall, but she was heavy. And to add to my discomfort these men climbed in and someone attached horses to my front. Then I started bumping up and down all over the place. The wheels seemed to be designed to get in every single rut. Finally we got to this huge house and I was pushed among all these wooden square things on wheels. The horses stayed in front of me and just generally smelled. And we were there for hours, perhaps even days. Finally I heard this big tolling sound and I felt myself shrinking. I began to sigh with relief when I realized that not only were the horses turning into little disgusting mice, but I was falling in the dust. That couldn't have been good for my pores!

I sat in that dust for another hour and almost got squashed. Contrary to popular belief, I wasn't run over, but it was a near thing. It had begun to get cold and the sprinklers had gone on when the old woman, looking rather drunk, came (or rather staggered) back. She had been muttering something about Cinderella's slipper and having stayed out at the club too long when she saw me on the ground. I'm assuming she took pity on me, or it could just have been some kind of a cruel, twisted joke, and she waved her stick at me again. This time I became a human girl. And I was right about the dust thing because I had pimples.

The woman helped me up, summoned clothes for me (it wasn't like I automatically had them!) and told me to go home. I had no idea what she meant until she sighed and zapped me back to the field where I had lived. The farmer adopted me, and I don't want to get into the rest of my life because I had acne and it was depressing. However, before I died I wrote this down and had it buried beside me so that you will know the true story. Or perhaps the other story. Or maybe just a story someone made up for English Class because they were required to. But regardless of what it is, remember this: Before you lie in the dust for an hour, make sure there is a working shower that will be available in the next day or so, not the next millennia.