by Michael Sonray-Kelly

Fairy-mother’s sharp teeth mirror moonlight, promising terrible things for a price. Poor, ash-covered Ella, whose sisters’ cruel laughs echo still, offers Fairy-mother her pet mice, garden geese, a rotten pumpkin.

Fairy-mother accepts, weaves song, fills the air with squeaks and screams.

Mice bones outgrow their splitting skin, stab and snap to equine angles; horse’s heads fix to new flesh, snorting. Garden geese bulge and pop. Skeletal soldiers spill and squirm from feathered viscera. The pumpkin, now carriage, longs for death.

Fairy-mother gifts the girl glass slippers and a burning candle, whispering, “Before midnight, dance on their ashes.”

Cinderella, eager, twirls.

Michael Sonray-Kelly

Michael Sonray-Kelly lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, where the ghosts of his ancestors lament the rising cost of living.