“That’s what happens when you eat something!” the Pied Piper said. “It goes away! That’s how food works!”
And the kid cried harder. A lot of kids were crying, actually. Even though he’d bought them all McDonald’s.
The Pied Piper wanted to drown the children more than ever. But they were still miles from the river, and he was getting sick of playing “Baby Shark” on his fife. And so he led them back to Hamelin, where the townspeople were waiting for him—with his thousand guilders!
“Thanks for taking them for a few hours,” the mayor said. “It felt so good to get a break. I went to the gym, took a shower. It was unbelievable.”
“We had sex,” the freckled boy’s parents said, looking startled. “Unplanned. It was like being on acid. We just did it spontaneously. Then we cleaned our kitchen for the first time in a year.” And a lot of other townspeople said a similar thing: that they had used the time to clean, because their homes were filthy.
“That’s probably why your town had all those rats,” the Pied Piper said.
“What rats?” the mayor said.
“The ones I lured away,” the Pied Piper said. “Remember? Yesterday?”
And the townspeople confessed to the Pied Piper that they had such mental fog from parenting stress and sleep deprivation that they were losing the ability to form memories.
“If you don’t remember hiring me,” the Pied Piper said, “then what’s the thousand guilders for?”
“We want you to be our regular babysitter,” the mayor said.
“I don’t think I’m qualified,” the Pied Piper said. “I’m a ratcatcher. I also just tried to murder all your children using magic.”
“O.K., two thousand,” the mayor said. The Pied Piper agreed, and the parents were so happy that they stayed up singing and dancing until 9 P.M.
Most people believe that this story is just a myth. It’s impossible, they say, that the people of Hamelin could have lucked into such an affordable babysitter situation. Because, if you do the math, it works out to, like, fifteen guilders a kid. And he’s luring them out of town, which means they’re getting exercise. And there’s music, too, so it also counts as enrichment.
We’ll never know if the Pied Piper truly came to Hamelin. But if you visit today you will see a stained-glass window depicting two middle-aged parents having unscheduled sex in the afternoon. Some say it really happened. And, if that’s true, who knows? Maybe, just maybe, it could happen still. ♦
