Cinderella

Were I to have kissed him, it would have been on the day of ash, when I emerged from the chimney's velvet belly, my skin all glittery with mica and coal, and saw him, standing in the storybook kitchen, holding an impossible shoe against his heart, stricken with knowing. Well we cannot rectify it. Even fairy Godmothers cannot change the past. We never enjoyed the luxuries of the body. Not for us reckless necking on the back seat of a crystal coach, under the sly moon, violet with Novembral dusklight.

But if I had kissed him, it would have been then, with the precious gilt of a crown of light about his head, and his half-smile as he reached for one of the little pears in the white bowl. But the clock struck and we forgot to count the passing of time. And now he has gone.

Well then, let him go: said my stepmother, sewing me a gown of black waxed calico, fashioned from one of her discarded blackout blinds. Let him go, for you have grieved and wept, and it is enough. If he could have stopped it hopping he'd have fucked a frog.

But if I think on it now, trying to connect that day with this, I feel the rush and howl of a prince's soul longing to dwell in flesh and blood beneath the ballroom dome of the sky, and I wish, that black day, that I had understood the story better and kissed him.