Cinderella Legacy

A young girl wants to help solve the murder of a "Cinderella" she used to know. Number Four of the No One Special Fairy Tales.

Cinderella Legacy

Once upon a time there was a young, beautiful girl with flowing blonde locks. Her father had died, and her mother was marrying a man who had two older daughters, or at least that is what they had been led to believe.

The girl was nervous about having stepsisters, but was able to meet with them and get to know them several times before the marriage ceremony took place and was content with her future father and his children, and had no objections to the match.

Finally, on the day of the ceremony, the couple was wed and the three girls became sisters. However, the young girl went looking around and exploring on that joyous day, only to find another girl hiding in the woods, watching the wedding feast from afar. She did not wear a party dress like every one else, and her hair was not in curls, but was ratty and short and pulled back. Her clothing was full of patches, and she had several bruises on her face. 

“Excuse me, who are you?” the young girl asked.

The older girl smiled sweetly and kneeled down to look the girl in the eyes. She brushed her dirty tresses away from her face and replied, “Me? My name is... Cinderella.”

The young girl asked why she was not at the wedding feast and the older girl answered, “Although my father is getting married, surely he and my sisters do not want me there.”

The young girl felt saddened by this, but soon went back to the party and quickly forgot about the girl. That is until the next day when it was revealed that ‘Cinderella’ had not been the girl’s name at all. This discovery was made when the morning news revealed her death the previous night. The third, forgotten daughter had been stabbed in the heart that very night, shortly after the feast.

But because she was never talked about, the father, the mother, and the two older sisters eventually forgot about her entirely. However, the sweet young girl could never stop thinking about the girl who had almost been her sister. And as she grew up she became more and more fascinated by different stories of Cinderella.

By the time she was fifteen she had an expansive collection of books and dolls and stories that bordered on obsession. Her favorite version however, was not any of the ones where Cinderella was helped by meek and loving companions, but the ones where Cinderella got her revenge. In particular she loved the version where two crows violently poked out the eyes of the sisters that had tormented her.

“If only we could know who did such a terrible thing to my almost-sister, and that he could be punished for his crimes,” she would think every night when she went to bed.

Finally, the night when the clock struck midnight on her sixteenth birthday, a day which always seems to be filled with magic for innocent girls, she had a peculiar dream. In this dream she had taken the form of a magnificent raven and was flying and gliding through time. She soared backwards through all the days of her life until finally she flew to the night of her mother’s wedding. But instead of flying through her own old footsteps, on this day she perched in a tree and witnessed the murder of the poor Cinderella girl with her own eyes. Two dark perpetrators dressed in black committed the awful sin, one restraining the girl, and one piercing her with a blade. She could not see their faces, but she flew down to them and quickly pecked at their eyes with her sharp beak until they lay dead on the ground.

In the morning the girl awoke from her nightmare with a terrible scream. But with this chilling vision came a revelation. Why had she not realized it before? Surely her older step sisters, the very same girls who recoiled at the mention of their own dead sister, must have been the perpetrators of the heinous act so many years ago.

The girl jumped out of bed and ran to her parent’s room to tell them her new theory, and to demand that her elder sisters be tried for murder. But as she ran to the door of the master bedroom, she was suddenly confronted with the spirit of her almost sister, who stood calmly before the door.

“Thank you,” she said to the young girl, “Justice has been done.”

The young girl was shocked and marveled at the spirit, who lingered for only a few moments before disappearing once again. The door then swung open all on it’s own, and there on the bed with their eyes gone, and with their life’s blood spilled upon the carpet, were the girl’s parents. 

Author's Note

The fourth in the "No One Special Fairy Tales" set. Please see my website for illustrations and more details. Story meant to be told like a classic fairy tale.

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

I love fairy tales and also appreciate alternate versions such as this one. Crows pecking out eyes--that's a classic, too. A good write, for sure.