20080131

Fairytale Endings

by Samantha Entwistle

She looked at the two women sitting opposite and looked away. Cinderella, primped and powdered within an inch of her life, Snow White’s once raven hair maintained by a bottle; bickering and snarling at each other under a thinly maintained veneer. She smoothed her own short gray hair and sighed, what would the mirror say now, they’d never know, it had been smashed when the first crow’s feet appeared. The competitiveness never stopped even though they now met infrequently now that the princes reigned no more and they were condemned to dowager status. She had hoped that the shared history would have been enough to encourage a little generosity, apparently not. She stood-up, they didn’t notice, too enraged by the achievements of their respective grandchildren, and walked to the cupboard under the stairs; she opened the door and gazed longingly at the spinning wheel.

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Samantha Entwistle, author of Fashion Victim, does not live in a gingerbread house.