The laws of cricket rewritten for the fairy world
Batsmen may fly, or even run, after striking the ball, but must never proceed in a straight line.
Wickets are to be baked of gingerbread, with sticky marshmallow bails.
Removing the bails without one purple glove and one paisley will result in the word Nelson being tattooed in orange on one's hand.
(The word will be eighty-seven if the wicketkeeper is an Australian, or a Gnome of the Golden Sledge.)
This process is magical, which is not, by any means, the equivalent of painless.
A second infringement of bail removal will result in a fifty per cent reduction in the need for gloves of any hue.
If this should occur, the severed hand will float into the ether, waving farewell to the game it loved like a wife.
The extremity will, despite these wam feelings, be cold as a witch's tit after she is sliced up by the woodsman who mistook her for a ravening wolf, that same long clawed grin of a wolf who ate the little pinafored and aproned crimson girl who carried marshmallow and gingerbread in her modest yet surprisingly spacious basket, and who was a Test umpire, setting out from Grandmother's House for the MCG, about to catch a tram made of unicorn's horn (freely donated), and human skin (not given so willingly), which skin forms the billowing sails by which the tram wends its windy way towards the Heaving Cauldron of Doom.
That sentence demonstrates how one must run between wickets; all curls and memory and overlaps.
All shoes must be red.
All whites silver.
All pirates cockatooed and all cats Cheshired.
Float the ball down towards the batsman.
If the delivery is sound, it will transform into an ant, which will nibble delicately at the wicket and run off towards the nest hidden in the Ladies Stand carrying a crumb.
In a thousand years a wicket will collapse upon itself, and the bowler may ask Kazam?
If a no-ball is called by the little crimson girl (who was eventually freed by that unseemly, eager woodsman, and managed to catch the tram) the ball will become a bear and will chew off the leg of the bowler.
The bear is to be addressed as Sir Shane.
The little crimson girl may call Light.
The little crimson girl may call Darkness.
The little crimson girl may consult with the Square Leg Umpire, who holds the bearable limbs of all shapes, and the Most Remarkable Key.
If she says Open,