Glass Slipper

"And there he is! Happy founder's day!" They exchanged brief kisses on the cheek, each of them in their holiday best, a pair of golden haired heroes celebrating a patriotic holiday together, mother and son. She wore a snug black dress, high neck and sleeves that met her opera gloves seamlessly. He wore a tuxedo and a tie so red it was almost black but couldn’t be called dower His blonde hair caught the light and all the black made a backdrop for his smile. For a moment, they were about the be genuinely happy to see each other.

The boy broke the moment.

"I wish you wouldn't wear those shoes every year."

Her shoes were tall pumps, black soles with a clear plastic body and an open toe, almost too small for her, but she was careful with her body even if she was getting old. She only wore them one day a year but she would be damned if she would let herself stop. She needed these shoes. They were traditional, "glass" shoes for the women of the nation, but for her, this pair, these shoes, even if you could call them retro, out of style, old after all these years, these shoes were her tradition. The shoes she wore the night she met the prince.

She put her hand on his shoulder, smiling. "Oh but I wear them every year. And they're so beautiful."

He sighed, and his smile grew in that forced way that smiles grow when their owners don't want to let them shrink. "You look beautiful in anything."

She turned and stepped quickly into the living room, small steps that fit inside her dress, but graceful; dainty and quick. She called him to follow her with her fingers, painted nails like red jewels curling one at a time comfortably into her palm. She lifted a golden bottle in one hand and two glasses deftly in the other. She curtsied. Both glasses already has an ice cube in them, not yet begun to melt even in the summer air, almost as if she'd been watching her window, waiting for him to start up the elevator, ready to make sure as soon as he arrived that everything would be as perfect as she could make it. "Oh but it's not about me." she said with a smile, nodding to the tension in the air by pretending she couldn't feel it. "Have you seen the tele?"

He set his coat on the rack and pulled at his tie. "No I haven't.". He took a class from her, their fingers brushing. "Good news I hope?"

She lifted the remote in one hand and the bottle in the other. The general murmur of patriotic bluster crept up until the words could spell out the night's propaganda just as the camera zoomed in on the prince, and... she poured into his class until the ice just crested the surface of the whiskey. By now, the ice had begun to melt.

He sat down on the couch and she on the armchair, legs crossed, and she let the bottle and her glass down with an elegant clink on the crystal table between them.

He held his, and rolled his first taste over in his mouth a second time, using the excuse to mask that his grimace was more than was patriotically acceptable.

"I hope the parliament stands up to him this year." he said. She could feel her skin getting hot already.

She smiled, playfully, conspicuously absent any offence. "I wouldn't know about that, but don't you think she's beautiful? The mother batted her eyelashes for her son, and he looked as he knew she wanted him to. She smiled the wide smile of someone who doesn't know how not to smile. "I like to think we have the same eyes."

On the television was the prince, and a new woman high on a balcony. Time had been there was a new woman every year, but he'd gotten old, and it had been years since a woman had last leaned on his arm, smiled for the nation, pretending like everyone else, in the way that only someone who knows that it might be true can, that she could still be hanging from the arm of his trim velvet coat in the morning, grinning pearls and waving with gold on her fingers.

Her son took a gulp of whiskey. "How can you talk like that about him." He sighed, expelling his reservations by convincing himself that they were naturally leaving him, billowing out with his breath. "I feel sorry for the poor girl.

There was a pause while the moment hung in the air until she couldn't pretend it was smalltalk anymore. She waved her hand, to dismiss him, glass on her lips. "Oh you." she said, letting out a laugh like a summer breeze as golden as the whiskey but cut short by a door that should have eased shut but swung, sharp, closed. "You never could let him be, even on founder's day." She smiled, even as his lips began to form the response, because she knew that she could only pretend to be happy until those words came tumbling into her evening.

"But he did rape you, didn't he?"

She looked down into her glass, and for just a moment let her smile peel away like makeup. "Yes of course he did." she said, raising her chin, scolding her son, not with the rage and horror that she knew she ought to have, but as a mother scolding an impertinent child. "You know he did. But you know I don't like you talking like that."

She leaned back into a position of regal relaxation, forced, fake, fooling herself as much as her son, one leg reclining on the other, her body curving up into her chair, one arm relaxed at her side, and the other leaning gently on the arm, holding her glass a few inches from her lips, like a servant waiting at the edge of their master’s reach for a single command. "Besides, the man's a gentleman. He always treated me well."

The boy scoffed, and she sat bolt upright.

"What was that?" she said it sharply, too sharply; she could feel the tears at the corners of her eyes; she didn't blame him. She blamed herself, all the more for being too sharp with him, all the more because she couldn't control her own response, all the more because he was the last one, all the more because…

"After all, he gave me you."

And the tears welled up, because she couldn't find a way to make sense of it, the blaming.

His hair was short, but not buzzed. Manly, old fashioned, just long enough that in moments like this, at the end of a long day, with his tie hanging undone and crumpled but somehow still symmetrical, his hair hung, too, pointing down, drawing the line from his face to the bottom of the glass without hiding his eyes, eyes that drew the same line at first but began to peal desperately away. She imagined that he never shaved, and that the shadow across his face, as neat as it was, just lived there and stayed much shorter than it would for other, lesser men, like twilight on a winter day. Even now, after everything, the boy was still beautiful, like his…

"I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'll always be on your side, I'm just saying... I don't know what I'm saying." He looked up, and ran his hand through his hair. His eyes caught the shine of the TV. "Life's just been complicated is all."

She smiled at him. It was the kind of wide grin she'd always given when she met a new man. She knew she was getting older, god did she know how old she was, but smiling for a boy like this the way she used to smile for boys like him made her feel like she was young again, scared, foolish, so foolish, but young. And wasn't that just the most foolish thing about it all.

"I know." she said, and she put her hand on his cheek, letting herself believe that he felt like her little boy again. "Life is difficult for all of us." Her hand was shaking. "I don't care what anyone believes but you, you know."

He took her hand. His eyes weren't focused on hers anymore. He smiled, but his eyes were far away, and he held her hand in his long enough that his became stiff but not long enough that hers relaxed. "Happy founder's day." he said, softly, like he cared.

He stood up to leave.

"You're not staying for the fireworks?" She said it too quickly, jerking forward in her chair to keep her eyes on him in the hallway. As soon as she did, she hated herself for it. She hated herself for being cross with the boy for blaming him, all the more because she blamed herself, for blaming the boy, for blaming the prince, who she didn't blame, because he gave her the boy, who she blamed, for blaming the prince, who she couldn't blame, because-

"No." he said, smiling with less feeling, less effort, but more comfort. "I promised some folks from the office." he clicked his teeth. "There's a girl. You always tell me I need to find a girl."

"She can come here, I'd love to meet her." the mother said, her voice cracking. She didn't let herself notice.

"Next year." he said. He didn't even say goodbye.

She fell apart into her chair, her smile unfolding into the cracked face of an old woman. There wouldn't be another next year and she knew it.

She stood up, suddenly, holding her limbs close to her body, unsure of herself, afraid to take up space in her own home. She could already see her makeup running. She held her glass, shaking, for almost a minute, eyes on the television, on him, and she threw it.

She missed the television, and she knew that was right. It was right that her own failure should save her from ruining such a lovely gift. It shattered on the table, and she collapsed into the carpet, wet with the smell of scotch and her own sweat and perfume, and blood. She stared down at her hand, cut by the glass. Sobbing she held it up. How stupid could she be? She was nothing but a girl, a stupid girl who couldn't even control her own emotions, who was silly enough to think about something like how beautiful the blood and the glass looked on her fingers.

And through her fingers she saw, in the flickering light of her new television, the prince, blood and glass tangled in his hair, falling, and the young woman, scared and angry and tiny and giant all at once, her golden hair flowing as the clock struck midnight and the world behind her lit up in patriotic expression, a single, broken, glass slipper in her hand, and the world saw the truth.

And the mother cried, really cried, sobbing great wet heaving sobs that she couldn't control, and held herself, doubled over in the wreckage of her living room and her life. She cried because the girl on the television was young and she wasn't. She cried because the girl was beautiful and she wasn't. She cried because she was afraid that no one would believe in that girl the way they never believed in her, and because she was afraid they might believe the girl they way they never had her. She cried, as she cried every year on the same night, because she wasn't as strong as that girl; she cried because she didn't want to be as strong as that girl, and she hated it.