What ever happened to those ugly stepsisters
Cinderella left behind like dirt on the soles of her glass slippers?
They sacrificed everything for the prince:
One tore off her heel;
the other severed her toes.
They jammed their feet into the slippers,
vainly feigning a perfect fit.
The ceding of blood and flesh
were not good enough for him.
Their sullen frames
did not fit the conforming silhouette.
A size ten could not woo the prince.
What ever happened to them?
After the money from the jewels and dresses
they once loved were not enough
to keep them afloat,
their mother had to mortgage her home.
No one blamed the monarchs
who were happily collecting tariff after tariff.
No one pointed to Cinderella, who,
in her infinite charity,
took them in to the castle as slaves.
She submitted them to the same degrading fate,
Yet her hands were clean of the ordeal.
They awoke at dawn
to clean up the cinder soot
that had once stained their sister's face.
They took in the seams
so that the clothes would
wrap around Cinderella's sixteen-inch waist.
Once a symbol of her neglect
now signified her royalty.
The sisters feasted on scraps from the royal table,
and later cleaned up the vomit from her last meal.
No one blamed Cinderella,
A Daddy's Little Girl,
Who alienated her sisters
and refused to love her new mother
because she would never live up to her own.
No one blamed the Prince
for his impossible standards and narcissism.
No one acknowledged his foot fetish,
how he only loved a size six,
and late at night would wear Cinderella's glass slippers
when on one was looking.
No one noticed the fact that
a long war raged for years
over a piece of land for her second home
while many others did not even have one.
And girls from the village
would nurse their blistered feet
from the cage of their glass slippers
as the stepsisters hid their mangled roots
behind oily bandages and ill-fitting boots.
Written by Lindsey Piper