Cinderella

As the darkened room unreddens, Cinder-breeches, Cinderella, on her knees upon the hearthstones,

fishes out the half-burnt splinters, moving round the hissing sanctum of the dying household dragon,

sweeping up the drifts of ashes. Clouds of desiccated vapour rise up like a wraith before her.

Loki’s acolyte, custodian of the tongs, the brush, the poker, she builds a ziggurat of firewood

for tomorrow morning’s ritual. No one knows as well as she his frail and raging incarnations,

Moloch, Holy Ghost and phoenix. Skin besmirched with his stigmata, she must wear his smudgy surplice.

Now she climbs up to the attic, lies down on her scratchy palliasse listens to the rain repeating

on the roof, your mother’s dead.

That’s her full-length in the mirror’s crystal oval scrolled in ormolu: grey nymph with bouquet of feathers

by the still-unmade four-poster with its gold-and-blue striped coverlet puddling on the zigzag floorboards,

one hand resting on the writhing walnut serpent of a chairback. This is her stepsister’s chamber,

pearl-lined shell without its oyster. In the other room she hears them giggle through assorted finery,

petticoats and layered ruffles, scarlet velvet with French trimmings, gold-flowered manteau, diamond stomacher,

building hair into pagodas, pressing beauty spots on dimples. She must scrub and brush and polish

while the sisters rise and wobble, each in turn under her flounces, practising their stately totter

for the grand ball at the palace.

Now they’ve gone, leaving the clatter, whinny, wheelgrind of their carriage to re-echo in the drawing room,

too aloof and cold to cry in, though she makes a throaty effort, watched by patronising shadows

and her godmother in the doorway, cosy-startling as a dressing-gown dangling headless on a hanger,

half-belonging, half-uncanny, intimate with the mousetrap’s inmates, what grows in the kitchen garden,

all the house’s inner workings. Standing in the lamplit courtyard, they assemble an equipage.

Who’d have thought a mouse had fetlocks? Now she sees its neck extending to a glossy arch of muscle.

With six horse-mice, one bewhiskered rat enthroned as portly coachman, footlizards clinging by their fingers,

she rolls off in her gilded pumpkin.

In a gown like molten jewellery stepping from her carriage with the tipsy clink of glass on cobbles,

princess of some made-up country mostly consonants and mountains, she takes the princely hand that meets her –

settles on it, butterfly-fashion – finds she is already dancing as the ballroom froths around her

and the slippers’s fragile vessels find their way over the polish, spilling not a droplet of her.

While her sisters gorge on sweetbreads in a frogspawn glaze of aspic, lemon sherbet, candied violets,

how it feels to whirl, a planet in the golden clutch of Phoebus, long-limbed sunburst of a partner!

Trying to listen through violas for the clock to chime dismissal, all she hears is the pizzicato

of the heartbeat in her ears.

Afterstroke of midnight fading, but her mind’s still pirouretting with the chandeliers in the ballroom,

so the courtyard won’t stop dancing, heaving horses, shuffling servants. Lanterns curtsey in the darkness.

One foot frigid on the marble, back against the door, she hears the guards’ cacophony behind her,

feels the air sag from her ballgown, clutches off the other slipper, hard and smooth as a champagne glass,

pads off down the steps, then stumbles on a clumsy hulk of pumpkin where her carriage ought to be,

eyeless, grinless jack-o’-lantern, feels a scurry round her ankles as the mice run chittering from her.

All around her men are calling. No one sees the smoky phantom pass the porte-cochère and set off

down the shuttered Paris street.

Outside, a heraldic morning burnished with the blare of trumpets, proclamations surging, fading.

Inside, dust’s revolving sparkle where the sun has gained admission sets her memory pirouetting.

Important silence on the doorstep, Ceremonial throat-clearing. Three knocks with the weight of statutes.

Sabres, epaulettes, gold frogging in the drawing-room. A powdered chamberlain presents the glassware.

Mademoiselle will be pleased to try it? Each in turn the sisters wrestle, plait their toes and clench their arches,

try to breathe in from the ankle, while Cinderella plies the shoehorn, kneeling by the crystal capsule

that her foot will find next moment, stretch itself inside, and wriggle. No one but herself will fit there

in the glass case of her story.