The Wilful Child
Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm · 1884
In barely a page, a child who will not mind her mother dies and is buried, only for her arm to keep pushing up through the earth until her mother strikes it with a rod. Unsettling by design, this is one of Grimm's shortest and starkest cautionary tales, not a bedtime story in any sense.
From Grimms' Household Tales. See the whole collection.
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do at her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.
Public domain. Text from Grimms' Household Tales (Margaret Hunt translation, 1884), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition