Sweetwoman

“Sweetwoman” is one of the outstanding stories of the first biannual International Short Story Contest 2018 written by Saamiya Khan, Artistic Strategies Academy, Singapore.

Sweetwoman

Sweetwoman lives in a sweet mansion suspended in the sky. Her house is made of different shades of pink and sweet cotton candy. It is spacious as there are two levels and on every level, there are five rooms. The other superheroes and superheroines often visit her and together, they experiment with different types of magic to defeat all the villains.

On May 15th 2050, all the superheroines and superheroes gathered at Sweetwoman’s house for an emergency meeting. They passed Sweetwoman the newspaper from the day before and she could not believe her eyes! The headlines of the newspaper read, “Two supervillains take over the city of Wonderland.” Wonderland was 50 metres lower than Sweetwoman’s mansion. They all were confused and bewildered as they did not know what to do. “We came to you because you have the power to say sweet spells to stop them,” Wonderwoman said, “Only you have the ability to defeat those villains causing trouble. We cannot do it because they are invincible,” Batman said. Do they have any weaknesses?” Sweetwoman asked innocently. “Unfortunately not,” they replied dejectedly. “There must be a weakness because every villain has one! I must defeat them,” she thought with conviction.

“However, before she could think of defeating them, Sweetwoman was so famished as she had not eaten her lunch and could even eat a horse. She decided to go to her favourite restaurant, Food Paradise. As soon as she went inside, she saw two malicious and conniving villains. Both the villains had the same physical features as they both were bald, and wore a patch on their left eyes. They had perpetual frowns, evil glints in their eyes and crooked smiles. They looked threatening and the whole restaurant was at their beck and call. They could harm the people by throwing fire and snowballs without getting hurt as no one could even touch a hair on their heads.

Sweetwoman was sure that those two were the notorious supervillains. She lost her appetite and was fuming with so much rage that she could almost see smoke coming out of her ears. She knew that if she shouted at them she might lose her life and so, she held her emotions and flew angrily back home. She had to devise a plan quickly and kept reminding herself, “No time to waste!” Then after a few hours, which seemed like infinity to her, she knew what she had to do. She dressed herself up in a waitress uniform and disguised her face with a mask.

She went into the same restaurant, hid behind a curtain and recited a sweet, magical spell to stop time but surprisingly, the supervillains were immune to it. She was so shocked that she could barely speak. “How could that happen?” she thought disbelievingly. “They turned out to be more powerful that I had expected!” she mumbled to herself. She did not know what to do. Then she suddenly remembered that both the supervillains had a patch on their eyes. “Wait, is that their Achilles’ heel?” she thought, having an idea. She thought of luring the supervillains somewhere and attacking him by taking advantage of their half-blindness. Just before executing her plan, she overheard the terrible twins talking about someone having a plan to defeat them. Then, Sweetwoman had an epiphany. “What if they knew her plan?” Now, Sweetwoman had no plans except one, which was to speak some sweet words to make them realize how evil they were. She almost had no hope of winning but she believed in herself. Once Sweetwoman came out from behind the curtain, she went straight to the villains, without hiding and disguising and said these sweet words:

“Please listen to me, you have done enough damage. You both really have a lot of potential to become good people and everyone will start loving you two instead of fearing you. I promise to be kind and help you to become good people!”

Those words were so effective that to everyone’s surprise, the villains started to cry and promised not to wreak havoc in Wonderland again. They replied, “Your true words have really touched us! Now, we know how much trouble we have caused. Please forgive us! We won’t do any bad deeds in the future!” Sweetwoman decided not to punish them and they joined forces with her to defeat the evil presence in the whole world.