I don’t care how wonderful it was that she was magically saved. Lots of people live bad lives and never get lucky. Lots of people have evil moms and useless dads and bad sisters and all kinds of shitty people in their lives until they die. Why should we smile when one person gets out of it? Did they hit her? Did she really try harder than everyone else?

The faeries and the animals decided she was special. They made her a carriage out of a melon and just gave her a dress and gold necklaces and a sequin mask and magic shoes so she could go to the prince’s party. Maybe compared to everyone she hung out with, she was special. The faeries did a little trick by saying if she didn’t stop partying at midnight she would lose everything and be embarrassed. But so what? Everyone has schedules, even little kids.

The prince fell in love with her when he saw her at the parties. He put tar on the stairs so he could catch her before she ran away at midnight, but she left early enough to get away even though she lost a magic shoe when it stuck to the stair.

And the prince used the magic shoe to find her. Stupid things work sometimes.

Someone said to me that faerietales are supposed to be missing detail so they can fit lots of different peoples lives because they fill in the details themselves. But isn’t it the other way around? Life is actually so much less than princesses and princes and girls and boys in the stories, even the ones with bad luck.

So what happened is the prince knew where the lucky girl lived with her useless dad and evil stepmom and bad stepsisters. The stepmom wanted her blood related daughters to be princesses so they could become queen, and took them to her room with the shoe and said they would make it fit even if they had to cut their toes off.

One of them did that and cut off her toes with big scissors because her mom told her to. But her feet were still too wide. The other one cut off her toes and her heel, just leaving the pieces of meat on the floor. But she didn’t fit the shoe either. The shoe was magic. After that, they’d had enough of their mom.

Cendrillon (that was her name, she must have been Northern) put her foot right into the shoe and it fit. So with one wet bloody foot she rode off with the prince to get married, leaving everyone else behind and never looked back.

I’m not her and you’re not her. We’re not lucky and there aren’t even any animals around here and princes were abolished forever ago. We aren’t moms and dads and we aren’t even sisters. We’re nothing. We’re just bloody chopped up pieces of feet. If you don’t ruin yourself enough and really push, nothing will ever fit. Even if you fit, you can still be unhappy.

But you can’t just stay the way you are. I know that.