There was once a woodcutter who worked very hard in the forest every day, and came home tired every evening, and never seemed to get anywhere in particular. He wasn't unhappy exactly — he had a warm cottage, a good wife, and enough soup — but he did sometimes think, while swinging his axe, that life might be a little more interesting with a bit of luck. One afternoon in the forest, when he had just sat down against an oak tree with his lunch, everything became considerably more interesting.
A shaft of golden light appeared between the trees. In the light stood a very tall, very grand figure in robes of white and gold, with an expression of dignified amusement. The woodcutter choked on his bread. "I am Jupiter," said the figure. "I have decided, today, to grant you three wishes. Anything you desire. Think carefully." The woodcutter blinked. Jupiter waited. "Anything?" the woodcutter said. "Anything," said Jupiter. Then the light faded, and the forest was just a forest again, and the woodcutter sat with his bread and his axe and three wishes, feeling somewhat dazed.
He ran all the way home. His wife was in the garden, and he seized both her hands and told her everything, talking so fast she had to ask him to slow down twice. When he finished, she stared at him for a moment. Then she said, very seriously: "Three wishes. We must think carefully. We must not rush." He nodded enthusiastically. "Exactly. We must think about what we truly need. We must consider all the possibilities." They went inside and sat by the fire, which was warm and smelled of pine, and began to think carefully about all the possibilities.
They thought about a bigger house. They thought about better land. They thought about a new cart, or a cow, or enough money to last the winter without worrying. They thought about whether it was better to have one very large thing or several medium things. They talked about this for a while, and the fire popped and crackled, and the woodcutter began to feel pleasantly warm and comfortable, and the smell of something cooking in the pot was very good, and he said without thinking at all: "I wish I had a nice fat sausage."
There was a brief, ominous silence. Then a large sausage appeared on the table. Just appeared. No explanation, no fanfare. A large, cooked, glistening sausage, sitting on the table where there had been nothing a moment before. The woodcutter stared at it. His wife stared at it. They both stared at it for a long time without speaking. The sausage, for its part, simply sat there.
Then his wife turned to look at him. Her face was expressing several things at once, none of them good. "A sausage," she said. "We had three wishes. We could have had a palace. We could have had gold, or land, or health, or happiness, or a hundred different things. And you wished for a sausage." The woodcutter opened and closed his mouth several times. He looked at the sausage. He looked at his wife. "I was thinking about supper," he said, which was, everyone would have to agree, not a very helpful thing to say.
His wife put her hands on her hips. She looked at the sausage. She looked at him. She had been very patient for many years about many things, and this was, in her view, simply too much. "I wish," she said loudly, "that sausage would stick to your nose!" There was a brief pause. Then there was a thwack sound. The woodcutter made a noise of pure surprise. The sausage was now attached very firmly to his nose. He went cross-eyed trying to look at it. It dangled. It was extremely large. It was, from any angle, completely undignified.
He tried to pull it off. It held fast. He tried to turn his head so it would fall. It stayed exactly where it was, as though it had always belonged there. He said "mmfph" and several other things that were not quite words. His wife stared at him. The situation she found herself in was: her husband had a large sausage stuck to his nose, they had one wish left, and all the possibilities of wealth and comfort and a bigger house were rapidly becoming irrelevant.
There was a long pause. They looked at each other. They looked at the sausage. They looked at each other again. "Well," said his wife at last. She sat down. She thought about the palace. She thought about the gold and the land and the cart and the cow. She looked at the sausage on her husband's nose, which was dangling somewhat sadly. She looked at him. He was looking at her with the eyes of a man who knows he deserves what he's getting, and is hoping very much that she will decide to be kind about it anyway.
She was trying not to laugh. That was the thing about living with someone for a long time — you knew, eventually, exactly when they were being ridiculous, and the ridiculous moments, once the annoyance wore off, had a way of being rather funny. Her husband was still cross-eyed, still trying to look at the sausage. It was, she thought, quite possibly the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen in her life. She put her hand over her mouth. A small laugh escaped anyway.
"I suppose," she said, once she had recovered somewhat, "that there is no use wishing for palaces with a sausage on your nose." "No," said the woodcutter, from behind his sausage, with great dignity. "I suppose there isn't." "The sausage would come with us everywhere. People would stare. The horses might be frightened." "Very probably." She sighed. Then she said: "I wish the sausage off your nose." A brief pause. A gentle pop. The sausage was on the table again, where it had started.
They sat in silence for a moment. The fire crackled. The sausage sat on the table, looking exactly like a sausage. Three wishes, spent on a sausage, a nose, and putting things back how they were. His wife cut the sausage in half and put it in a pan, and in a few minutes the cottage smelled very good indeed. "Next time Jupiter offers wishes," she said, stirring, "we might think a bit faster." "Yes," said the woodcutter. He ate his half of the sausage. It was, he had to admit, a very nice sausage. Though perhaps not entirely worth three wishes.
