Challenged by the lovely Mox to write what happens after Cinderella goes off with her handsome prince.Once upon a time, there were two sisters to whom life had dealt a great misfortune. Each was lame in her right foot, and supported herself on a wooden staff; Anastasis with a rod of oak and Drusella with a rod of ash. They hobbled the streets of their village seeking alms, but the townsfolk were not kind to cripples, and all they received was a steady pounding of jeers and rotten fruit. The fruit juices smeared across their faces like a grotesque rouge; it was the only make-up the unfortunate sisters could wear in those days, although they had once been beautiful and taken great pride in maintaining a respectable appearance. Now, though, both were blind, and bound silk bandages across the remains of their eyes.
For there had been a third sister, a step-sister; and she was a witch, and was cold of heart. This sister had used her dark arts to gain a beauty that came to her with no effort whatsoever; whilst Anastasis' and Drusella's self-respect chained them to their dressing tables, the fortunate witch whiled away her day sitting in the fireplace and playing idly with lentils and peas. She called herself Cinderella, and she had always harboured a grudge against her sisters. She had never been able to stand the fact that her father had found happiness once more after the death of his first wife, Cinderella's mother; believing instead that, like the country's royalty, he should have observed the traditional thirteen years of mourning. Her malice was such that - having used her cunning and sorcery to ensnare the heart of the crown prince of the realm – she was unable to enjoy even her own wedding day unless her own good fortune was crowned with misery for her step-sisters. With a foul incantation, she called upon the birds of the air. Two dark and dirty pigeons swooped into God's own cathedral and there, right in front of all the wedding guests and gilded dignitaries, pecked out poor Anastasis and Drusella's eyes.
It was said that Cinderella was fated to live happily ever after with her prince and - in a way – one could say that she did. The fates, however, have a twisted sense of humour and so it was that, whilst Cinderella did indeed live out her days in the joyful company of her royal husband, those days numbered very few and she died just thirty-six weeks after the wedding (one week for every year of her late mother's life, for those capricious fates were also most taken with the concept of symmetry). Cinderella's death was swift and brutal and, although none but she ever saw the strange sight, the truth was that she was mown down by a carriage in the shape of a giant pumpkin, which was driven by a huge and jaundiced rat, and drawn by a team of oversized white mice. She had been carrying the heir to the throne in her belly; when her body was discovered, the royal cooks were summoned, and they cut her open like a side of beef in order to try and save the child. The shell of her once beautiful body was left discarded at the side of the road, and her old friends the crows came and feasted for weeks upon her entrails.
The baby was pulled from its mother's womb alive. To its father's disgust, it was not the son and heir for which he had hoped. Instead, it was a girl, although she looked more like a new-born puppy with her eyes glued tight shut from having been ripped too early from the womb. Her head was too large for her shrivelled body and her face twisted in a permanent sneer as if deriding those who had disturbed her peace and dragged her into the cold wind of life. In no way did she share any of her mother's legendary beauty, save for one thing which was more of a mockery than a similarity. It was well-known that the Prince had found his bride by matching her foot to a tiny, delicate glass slipper. The general opinion was that Cinderella had had the smallest and daintiest feet in the land, and they had been much envied, with her sisters' practice of hacking off extraneous hunks of foot in order to fit into miniature Cinderella slippers being much copied. The daughter, though, barely had any feet at all, for she had been born before they had had time to properly form. Instead, her legs just ended in little nodules, like a pair of knitting needles; and it was clear at once to the Prince that not only would she be a cripple, but that – if he allowed her to live – she would grow up to have the tiniest feet in all the land. The Prince and his courtiers were all in agreement that this would be a great travesty against the good name of the child's mother, and thus it was decided that it would be best for all concerned to throw the baby from the window of the royal carriage and to leave it to a peaceful death from exposure, or at the teeth of wolves.
It did not take long for predators to scent the baby, still bloodied from its mother's womb. As night fell they circled - wolf, lynx and even a particularly bold fox - each daring the others to make the first move. For each was cunning, and each knew that when one moved towards the child, another would have to challenge the first, and that neither of these would carry home anything more for his dinner than a lick of his own blood; because whilst the first and the second fought, it would be the third who would slip in, unnoticed, and carry the baby back to his den. So they waited, pacing on silent pads, whilst the insidious cold crept in to stake its own claim upon the naked child.
But as it happened, neither fox, nor lynx, nor wolf would take the baby that night – nor even the winter chill. For, as the tiny deformed face began to turn the blue-black of the darkening sky, a murder of crows alighted; and in a wild black carnival they pecked the flesh of the predators to ribbons and warmed the child beneath their wing-feathers. When at last the baby was restored to her original pinkness, the largest of all the crows lifted her in its talons and flew with haste to her grandfather's home, where it deposited her in the chimney, to tumble to the ashes below where her mother, Cinderella, had once idled away her days. When Anastasis and Drusella's mother found the creature, she screamed, for she thought it must be a minion of the Devil, but the sisters heard its cries and knew that it was just a poor, frightened baby, and that all it needed was a little love. And although both were blind behind their silken bandages, both sisters were quite certain that this must be the most beautiful child to ever have been born, and that it could only be a gift from God himself.
Ignoring their mother's protests (the days when their father had any opinions of his own had long since passed), the sisters cared for the child as though she were their own. They named her Robin, for the bird that had borne her, for in their blindness they had no idea whether it were eagle, crow or sparrow, so they chose the bird name that they liked the best. By sheer force of will, Drusella managed to feed the child from her virgin breast, whilst Anastasis busied herself knitted her a suit of lamb's wool. Although she stabbed herself with her knitting needles so many times that the whole town save Drusella believed her to be covered in the scars of the pox, Anastasis never uttered a word of complaint. When the suit was finished, they dressed little Robin in it, without ever realising that it had three arm holes and only one leg hole, and then they were quite sure that they had not only the prettiest but the best dressed child in the land. Both ladies were so proud and so contented that eventually even the harshest of the fruit-tossers began to feel some pity for the blind, limping sisters who would never know that their child was not the most beautiful creature in the world, but a sad little mutant thing whose eyes were closed and whose legs were like knitting needles.
Amongst the royalty of that country, it was the custom that a widower should mourn his wife for thirteen years. The Prince, therefore, was obliged to spend these years of mourning in the company of his manservants. As it happened, he found them far more to his liking than he had ever found his bride, in all but one respect. He was at the height of his virility, and whilst the ever tractable manservants did all that they could to assist him, the one thing that they were unable to do was to bear him a child. This displeased him greatly, and he arranged a grand ball on the very last day of the thirteen years, to which all the youngest and most beautiful woman of the country were to be invited, so that he could choose himself a bride. In spite of the fact that he himself was no longer as young nor as beautiful as he had once been, and in spite of his clear preference for his manservants, every young lady in the land was eager to attend, in the hope of winning the heart – or, at least, some lower part – of the country's most eligible bachelor.
When Anastasis and Drusella heard of the grand ball, they were determined that young Robin would attend. She was, after all, the most beautiful girl in the country, and the owner of the tiniest, daintiest feet – and had not their own step-sister, Cinderella, won over the Prince with the self-same gifts? They dressed her in one of the old dresses that they themselves had had made for the previous ball, and made the best attempt they could at painting her face with expensive make-up, although it was a little unfortunate that they had confused her mouth and nose when applying the lipstick. Robin thought she had felt something peculiar on her nose but, her vocal chords never having properly formed, was unable to mention it. Finally, to aid her in walking with her stunted (delicate, beautiful) feet, the sisters gave Robin their own walking sticks, so that she was able to hobble along with the rod of oak under her right arm and the rod of ash under her left, and only rarely tripped over her ball gown, which was at least three sizes too big and which, over the course of the preceding thirteen years, had suffered somewhat from the attentions of moths.
The ball was magnificent, the palace decked out in seventeen miles of pink satin ribbon and an entire acre of plucked roses. Whenever Anastasis and Drusella tried to ask for a dance for their Robin, however, the manservants' peevish reply was always the same; he was dancing with a small-breasted, pert-bottomed, boyish blonde and, in their opinion, it seemed likely that he would take her for his wife.
At the end of the evening, the sisters took Robin home without her having received the even tiniest mote of royal attention. However, the years that had added lines to the Prince's face and inches to his waistline had done little for his wits and, as at his previous ball, his dance partner slipped off home, leaving behind only her slipper. The Prince set out once again, shoe in hand, seeking his bride; once again, he came to the house in which Drusella and Anastasia were living with little Robin. He requested that the sisters try on the shoe, but their feet had become so sore that they couldn't face the thought of forcing them into something so tiny and delicate.
“Are there no other ladies in the house?” asked the Prince, rearranging his pink-feathered hat. Anastasia replied that there was, of course, another lady, and that she was the most beautiful in the land; so Robin was brought, her face covered in a veil as a surprise for her husband-to-be, to try on the precious shoe.
The slipper, of course, fitted with ease; in fact, if Robin had had any toes, there would have been room for her to wiggle them. “This is my bride!” cried the Prince. He lifted her into his gilded carriage, whilst the sisters hopped for joy. Then, with a flourish, ripped away her veil, hoping to gaze once more upon the androgynous features of the most beautiful girl in all the land. Instead, he saw the grotesquely twisted features of a mutated child, gazing somewhere over his shoulder with the pouches of skin that held her unseeing eyes.
“Begone!” he shouted. “Get from my sight, creature of Satan, for you will never be my bride!” He turned in disgust but, as he did so, Robin's contorted lips opened and for the first time in her life, she spoke.
“Father,” she whispered with asthmatic breath, and tears fell from where her eyes should have been. The Prince turned and knew at once that this was the child he had abandoned to the wolves. But before he could acknowledge her, Robin's poor, laboured chest burst open and from inside of it flew a flock of tiny birds – sparrows and starlings, blackbirds and thrushes. And they pecked out the hearts of Anastasis and Drusella, but they did so gently, and the sisters were not sorry, for they had grown tired of life and wished only for peace. And once that peace had been granted, they turned on the horrified prince and began to peck at his groin, and continued to do so for the rest of his life, so that he could never father another child, nor even enjoy the company of his manservants, for his pain was too great.
And on the roof of the palace, every night, a robin sang; but the Prince would never hear it, for his groans drowned out every note of its song.
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nostalgic
drained
creative