In Sleeping Beauty's Bed Read online

  At the couple’s grand entrance, a hush fell over the crowd and the instruments stopped playing and the dancers stopped dancing. Never had any of the King’s guests set eyes upon such an exquisite creature, let alone such extraordinary footwear. The ladies made a careful note of the elegant style of Cinderella’s hair and gown and the dagger-like sharpness of her heels, while the gentlemen willed the turmoil taking place within their tightening breeches to cease lest they make public spectacles of themselves. The ornate bodice of Cinderella’s garment had been cut immodestly low in the front, placing on view two graceful and luxurious mounds of milky-white flesh that formed a neat and most eye-catching crease down the center. As for the glass slippers, the height of the heels directed the wearer’s carriage into that of an S shape, forcing Cinderella to walk with an exaggerated out-thrusting of the posterior and thereby inspiring desires of a not altogether chivalrous nature to ferment in the minds of the gentlemen in attendance.

  During the entire evening the King’s son refused to stand up with anyone but the mysterious Princess, and hence when the hour came for the magnificent supper to be served, he insisted that Cinderella be seated in the place of honor at his side. Alas, the Prince would be incapable of swallowing even the tiniest bite of the fine fare that was displayed. Despite the many attempts made to engage him in conversation or draw his gaze toward a succulent cut of meat, his attention could not be swayed from the ever-more succulent presence of his female table partner. Be that as it may, the Prince would not go hungry on this eve, for his bewitched eyes gorged themselves on the heavenly movement of his companion’s primrose lips as she chewed and on the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathed and on the delightful wriggling of her tiny feet in the spiked slippers as they sought to create for themselves a restful position beneath her chair. Later, the Prince’s chosen companion wobbled purposefully past her stepsisters, who even close up failed to recognize their Cinderwench. As she was about to identify herself, Cinderella heard the portentous striking of the clock. With a hurried curtsy to all, she dashed outside to the golden coach, arriving at her father’s home mere moments before it and everything else returned to their original humble states.

  As Cinderella replayed in her mind every magical detail of the glamorous ball and the King’s handsome son—who had extended an invitation to her for the following evening—a presumptuous knock sounded at the attic door. Without waiting for a reply, the two sisters barged into the little attic room and proceeded to regale their step-relation with tales of the royal events and the enchanting Princess who had turned everyone’s head with her beauty and her extraordinary glass slippers. “It is unfortunate you did not choose to accompany us,” replied the elder sister with intentional cruelty. “For she was the loveliest of princesses and paid us a good many compliments on our dress and hair.”

  “Indeed,” interjected the youngest, whose fingers scratched and poked persistently beneath her headdress. “She has promised that I may have personal use of her slippers whenever I wish.”

  Swallowing a powerful urge to take them both to task about these bald-faced lies, Cinderella instead inquired as to the identity of this Princess, only to be answered by a matching pair of shrugs. Yet one thing the sisters did know—the King’s beloved son had withdrawn to his rooms in great despair, telling anyone who cared to listen that he would be willing to forfeit half his father’s kingdom to discover the identity of the lady who had stolen his heart. “Dearest sister, might I borrow your old yellow frock so that I, too, may catch a glimpse of this beautiful Princess?” asked Cinderella, eager for some evidence that deep down her stepsisters possessed kind hearts. She was well aware that the garment in question had not been worn in many years and now hung like a discarded rag on a hook in the rear of its owner’s wardrobe.

  The elder sister snorted. “Lend my dress to a miserable Cinderwench? Why, I should be frothing mad to do such a thing!” Apparently finished with their torment of her, Cinderella’s stepsisters fled the musty attic room, their scornful laughter echoing through the house and piercing the heart of the one who had inspired it. A moment later, they could be spied in the moonlit garden, where they set about pulling up the largest and meatiest of parsnips from the earth to take back with them to their rooms. For the remainder of the night, a cornucopia of whinnying and neighing could be heard coming from behind their doors till dawn finally broke over the horizon, at which time Cinderella would be required to undertake the monotonous task of clearing up after her stepsisters, each of whom had left a mound of broken and wilted parsnips alongside their beds.

  The following evening at twilight, the two sisters set jubilantly off for the King’s palace in their stepfather’s horse-drawn coach, leaving behind a disheartened Cinderella, who watched their boisterous departure through the soot-covered panes of the dormer window. The clickity-clack of hooves had not even faded before she fell weeping to the hearth, receiving no solace from the cold flagstones. As all hope of ever again seeing the handsome Prince seemed forever lost, Cinderella heard a familiar fluttering of wings, followed by the diminutive sight of her fairy godmother, whose facial stubble had grown noticeably denser since their last meeting.

  Moments later, yet another from the household was riding happily off to the Prince’s ball, albeit with an entirely new coachman, the previous one having been recruited to remain behind with the little fairy. On this occasion Cinderella would be attired more magnificently than before in a gown stitched with rubies, its snugly fitted bodice propelling the fleshy swellings on her chest outward like offerings of fruit. The very same glass slippers encased her tiny feet, but by now she had become more accustomed to walking and dancing in their steeple-like heels and did not in the least mind the attention that both her footwear and her out-thrust posterior garnered. Having been for so long an object of neglect, Cinderella enjoyed the appraising looks and suggestive comments directed her way by the gentlemen guests, and for some inexplicable reason she found herself thinking of parsnips.

  Once again the Prince refused to be parted from Cinderella’s side, even to the detriment of neglecting his other guests, many of whom were titled young ladies most eager for his company and whose families were still more eager to experience a commingling of fortunes. Of course, no one thought the least bit ill of him for his unintended rudeness, for the charm and the beauteous attributes of the glass-slippered Princess were far too great for any humble mortal to resist. The King’s son lavished so many compliments upon Cinderella that she forgot the warning issued by her fairy godmother. For who could worry about pumpkins and mice, with the fire of the Prince’s breath in her ear and the scorch of his fingertips on her arm? Nevertheless, the clock’s first strike of midnight reminded Cinderella that she must take heed, and, without a word of farewell, she fled into the night, her impassioned suitor dashing after her in frenzied pursuit. Try though he might, the Prince could not keep pace with the spike-heeled apparition who had captured his heart. He stumbled and fell to the dew-dampened ground in an unroyal sprawl. He had been tripped by a tiny glass slipper. Its distinctive heel glittered provocatively in the moonlight, bringing a cry of longing into his throat.

  Cinderella arrived home breathless and shaken and minus the pomp and glory of her coach and footmen, her garments once more the tattered rags that designated her subservient position in her father’s household. All that remained of her former splendor was a glass slipper, its delicate spike-tipped mate having apparently gotten lost somewhere along the way. To look at her now, one would never have guessed that Cinderella was the mystery Princess who had twitched her hips so invitingly on the dance floor or who had willfully encouraged her royal suitor to press his foot to hers beneath the supper table for a time far longer than one might have deemed prudent. For when the Prince quizzed the palace guards as to the direction in which this Princess had fled, he was informed that they had seen only a poor peasant girl hurrying toward the road.

  A short while later, Cinderella’s two stepsis
ters charged into the dusty mice-ridden attic to entertain their miserable drudge of a relative with still more tales of the glamorous proceedings and the unnamed Princess whose behavior on the dance floor they deemed highly scandalous…though neither sister would be above claiming that she had been personally singled out by the glass-slipped Princess as an arbiter of beauty of fashion. This time Cinderella was prepared for them and their outrageous falsehoods. “Dearest sisters, I have collected for you some very fine parsnips from the garden, since you must be greatly fatigued from the Prince’s ball.” She gestured toward a basket of straw filled to overflowing with parsnips, each one fatter than the next. Having returned home well in advance of her sisters, Cinderella had rubbed them with the crushed seeds of chili peppers—her stepmother’s favorite condiment and one that undoubtedly accounted for the woman’s perpetually pinched expression.

  The two sisters flushed to a dark purple, only to reclaim their usual braggadocio when pressed by Cinderella for further details of the royal festivities. The eldest spoke in excited tones of the rather hasty exit of the lady in question and the glass slipper that had fallen from her dainty foot. It appeared that for the remainder of the evening the King’s son had gone moping about the palace grounds, clutching the spike-heeled little slipper to his chest and gazing forlornly at it as if it held his heart imprisoned inside. “Imagine that a prince should fancy himself in love with a shoe!” snickered the older sister, whose crude cackles were immediately joined by those of her younger sibling.

  Had Cinderella’s stepsisters but known the truth of their words, they would have flushed yet again. For the good Prince swore a solemn oath that he would locate the owner of the glass slipper, no matter if it took him till the end of his days. On that night he would be granted no sleep. The last of the guests had not even been escorted out through the palace gates before the King’s son bolted himself inside his rooms, his unfulfilled passions making him dizzier than all the mead he had drunk during the evening’s merriment. “Oh, my lovely one, where art thou?” he wept, pressing the still-warm hollow of the fragile slipper to his nose and breathing in the faint scent of the tiny foot that had occupied it. With trembling fingertips, he caressed the heel, savoring the smooth perfection of the glass as it tapered down to a sharp point. While doing so, the embarrassing affliction that had disturbed so many of the gentlemen guests when confronted with the charming presence of the slipper’s wearer began to make itself known inside the Prince’s breeches. Indeed, it afforded a constriction that proved extremely distressing, and he nearly collapsed to the floor in a faint. “I must seek relief from this wretched suffering!” he gasped, reaching down to loosen the straining laces that kept the front of the garment closed and his manly modesty intact.

  No sooner had the Prince succeeded in doing so than an object of substantial length and girth sprang forth from the escape his fumbling fingers provided. The weeping purple crown at its apex jumped wildly about in his palm, growing so fat that his fingers could no longer contain it. The aggrieved heir to the throne stuffed as much of it as could be gotten inside the diminutive slipper, the fleshy mass bursting out from the jumble of unfastened laces and swelling even larger within the narrow glass confines. Had he not been in such desperate straits, the Prince might have thought better of his actions. The bloated entity promptly became stuck and commenced to throb most painfully, matching the wild throbbing of his love-stricken heart.

  Taking great care not to shatter the translucent contours, the Prince twisted and joggled the little slipper about until he had regained some freedom of movement. Satisfied that matters were at last under control, he cleared all thought from his head in readiness for the task before him. Allowing his instincts to rule, he urged his hips forward and back, thereby encouraging the bulbous protuberance to slide across the slipper’s slender instep. By this time the surface had become suitably moist and slippery, and the Prince discovered that he could slip along it quite easily and with considerable enjoyment to himself. And indeed, the impassioned young royal spent several luxurious moments doing so until, in a sudden flash of memory, the image of the slipper’s lovely owner materialized in his mind’s eye. Ergo, both hands would be grasping onto the heel with such desperation that its gleaming point cut the flesh of his palms to ribbons. A garbled groan caught in the Prince’s constricting throat, and he shuddered as the glass filled to overflowing with an endlessly spurting stream of hot, frothy fluid.

  The very next day, the King’s son sent forth several teams of trumpeters with a proclamation that he would marry the lady whose foot fit the glass slipper. Not surprisingly, every young woman in the kingdom, and even those no longer young, offered up a hopeful foot for the royal equerry, praying that it could be squeezed into the impossibly tiny shoe. At first all the princesses tried, followed by the duchesses, each grouping of toes being greeted by a marshy warmth. For when the avid aspirant removed her too-large foot from the dainty vessel of glass, her bruised and battered toes would be sticky with cream.

  As the search for the slipper’s owner expanded, it eventually came to the house of Cinderella’s two stepsisters. They tried every trick they could think of to force the slipper to fit, curling and contorting their proffered extremities until they scarcely resembled feet. Determined to see a match take place between one of her daughters and the handsome young heir to the throne, their mother brought forth a carving knife so that they might slice off their toes—a tactic that was summarily thwarted by the horrified equerry. All the while, Cinderella had been quietly observing these activities from a shadowy corner, having immediately recognized the distinctively heeled slipper as the mate of the one she had kept with her since the night the chiming of the clock had forced her to flee the Prince’s ball. “Please allow me to try,” she pleaded, stepping boldly forward.

  The two sisters squealed and guffawed, jabbing their fingers mockingly toward Cinderella’s cobweb-covered form. The Prince’s equerry, who had been endeavoring in vain to wedge their clumsy feet into the narrow slipper, looked closely at the raggedly dressed servant girl and, taking note of her natural comeliness, agreed to give her a chance. His instructions had been to try the slipper on every woman in the kingdom—and he dared not disobey an order from the palace, if he placed any value on his head. Gesturing for the pretty wench to be seated, he knelt low to slip the delicate spike-tipped slipper of glass onto her dirt-smudged foot, availing himself of this convenient opportunity to steal a glance up her skirts. Concerned that her foot had become swollen from performing chores all day in her wooden clogs, Cinderella parted her knees just enough to afford the walleyed equerry a better view, thus ensuring that this imperial deputy would do his utmost to make certain that the slipper met up with its rightful owner. And to everyone’s astonishment, it was a perfect fit.

  Turning her glass-slippered foot every which way to admire it, Cinderella removed from the frayed pocket of her apron a slipper identical to the one the equerry had placed on her. All at once a fluttering could be heard, and from out of the air materialized the Lilliputian form of the fairy. Seeing Cinderella wobbling unsteadily on the impossibly tall heels, the stubble-faced sprite broke into a mischievous grin. A hairy arm clutching a tiny wand shot forward from beneath one iridescent wing to tap the girl’s tattered garments, changing them to a gown woven from threads of gold and trimmed with diamonds.

  Recognizing the beautiful Princess they had seen at the Prince’s ball, the two stepsisters threw themselves at Cinderella’s glass-encased feet, begging for forgiveness and lavishing her with honeyed flattery. They even went so far as to bequeath to their previously unwanted relation the next harvest of parsnips in the garden—which, under the circumstances, was no great sacrifice, for their nether parts had been suffering a terrible burning of late. Indeed, the sisters’ woeful braying would keep the entire household tossing in their beds till the wee hours, inspiring many a black look and cross word at the breakfast table.

  A magnanimous Cinderella placed a regal
kiss upon the tops of their falsely bowed heads, bidding her stepsisters only the kindest of wishes, the words tasting bitter on her tongue. Although vengeance might have sweetened them (as might the act of driving the deadly heels of her slippers through their imploring hands!), surely the best revenge of all would be her becoming the bride and therefore the Princess of the King’s handsome son. Besides, she could always issue a decree for a sisterly beheading at a later date.

  Attired in all the magical finery her fairy godmother had bestowed upon her, Cinderella was escorted to the palace for her wedding to the Prince, who found her even lovelier than she had been in memory. Upon seeing both of the exquisitely heeled glass slippers on her dainty feet, he gathered her teetering form into his arms and carried her up the stairs to their matrimonial bedchamber, which had been thoughtfully prepared for this special moment with candles and perfumed sheets and a lute player strumming and singing in an antechamber. Making haste to draw the bolt on the door securely behind them, the Prince placed his beautiful bride with marked gentleness upon the satin-covered bed, where she lay flushed and trembling. Thanks to the parsnips procured from her father’s garden, Cinderella had some small knowledge of the matters that transpired between a man and a woman. Furthermore, she frequently overheard her parsnip-collecting stepsisters discussing the subject with a markedly unwholesome relish, and she closed her eyes in happy anticipation of the loving lips that would soon be covering her own.