This weeks’s prompt: Write an alternate ending to the popular fairy tale, Cinderella, in which the glass slipper accidentally fits one of the two stepsisters. Make it a comedy, tragedy, satire, horror, or whatever you wish. Start your story from that very scene.
Cinderella:An Alternate Ending
Cinderella watched as her last hope of freedom, slipped away right in front of her eyes. Damn that fairy godmother. The shoe fit her step sister Myrcella perfectly, almost as perfectly as her life had been ruined till now. The glimmer in the eye of the prince almost made her reach for the ax next to the pile of firewood and chop Myrcella’s foot off, but she restrained this fanatic thought in the realm of her tortured imagination. After all, that is not the ideal way to charm Prince Charming, is it? Blatantly, as Myrcella acknowledged the Prince’s love for her, and claimed to reciprocate the same, Cinderella could not help but think, “Is this for the best? A person who can’t even remember my face without makeup and claims to be in love with me. Perhaps I am better off without this kind of love. All it is worth,apparently, is a stinking little glass shoe”.
As these thoughts were crossing her mind, Myrcella and The Prince had left the house with the stepmother and Catherine following suit, without bothering about Cinderella as usual. Perhaps this was the last trigger that Cinderella’s eternally suppressed rage needed. She went to her room, looked at the bag so neatly packed with all her favorite rags, befitting her bejeweled misery. She took it and threw it into the fireplace. She looked at her father’s last belonging that her stepmother had deemed worth nothing and bestowed upon Cinderella- a battered dirty Miner’s uniform and a weathered but sharp ax. She couldn’t hold back a smile.
As she walked down the pothole ridden countryside road that bordered her village, hopes of a faraway lover crossed her mind again. Perhaps her true love was waiting somewhere else, to one day find her, and give her memories to treasure even in his presence. Someone who would selflessly be their for her when she needed him. Someone who would not be a loser, a wimp. Someone… “Who am I kidding”, she thought as she looked down at her worn out over-sized muddy Miner shoes, “No one is going to come looking for a fit for that! I better keep.. Wait, what was that?”.
Cinderella stopped in the middle of her tracks as she heard a distant wail rise and immediately disappear, as if someone stifled it. It came from the direction of the forest. Cinderella decided to see what it was. Who knows, maybe her prince is wailing out for her help. She did have an axe and her instincts gained over years of gathering wood from the forest after her father’s death.
As she walked deeper into the forest, she noticed multiple horse tracks appearing and disappearing as the density of the forest varied. She followed them and soon she came to a clearing. There was a huge tent in the middle of the clearing, and from within, came the most painful screams she had ever heard. All the years of torture and pain at the hands of her stepmother and sisters flashed through her mind in an instant, and something inside her gave way. She rushed into the tent and saw three men in bed with a girl. Two were holding her and one was having his way with her. It was her stepsister.
In a flash, her ax was in her hand and she was hacking at the throat of the nearest man she could find, as if an enraged beast had been unleashed within her. As the prince lay writhing beside the bed, with his men lying dead in pieces around him, he looked at the tall blonde girl in tattered miner’s rags standing over him, blood smeared across her face and dripping from her ax. He gasped, “It was you!”.
“Glad that his majesty could recognize me finally without a fucking glass shoe. Not so charming anymore are we?”, and she raised her ax and dealt the final blow, unleashing a fresh spurt of blood as the light left the Prince’s eyes.
She looked at the sobbing heap of her sister, curled up in the bloodied bedsheets. She sat beside her and patted her shoulder. It was as if she hadn’t seen the carnage around her. “I deserved this. All these years Cinderella, for doing all those horrible things to you, I deserved this to happen to me”, she whimpered.
“Please save it for your mother and Catherine. Be glad that this anger did not come out back home. For once, I am glad that this bastard found the wrong foot. But that doesn’t mean that I would have wished for this to happen to you. Even you deserve much better, but then what could you expect from a nitwit who couldn’t come up with a better title for himself than Prince Charming. My only hope from him was to take me away from you sorry lot. He did something much better”, said Cinderella.
“What do you mean?”, mumbled Myrcella between sobs.
“He made me realize, that their is no magic fairy godmother or prince charming that can save you from your own weaknesses”, said Cinderella as she stood up and started wiping the blood off herself and her axe, “Find some unblemished clothes and go home Myrcella.”
“Wont you wipe your hair? Wont… you come?”, Myrcella hesitated.
“That’s a good one Myrcella. Cinderalla might have gone back with you, but Erza wont. And as for the hair, I think red suits me” said Erza as she walked out of the tent and disappeared into the forest.
Arnab Mukherjee 