Fit by Feby Idrus

Once upon a time there was an evil stepmother, whose stepdaughter Cinderella would not stop whinging. “My dress is too short, my slippers are thin, my stomach is empty, my loft is cold.” The stepmother slapped her, then rolled her eyes as the blonde girl’s eyes filled with tears. “I barely struck you,” the stepmother said. “My chambers are cold too.”

Her chambers were also dark, the drapery breathing out heavy velvet shadow over the carpet, the walls, the bed. Often the stepmother’s only warmth was the anger that burned like an orange-red coal in her chest. She lay on her back in shadow-blackened sheets, this coal of rage lighting her face up scarlet as it sank deeper through the soft wet tissues of her torso. Nothing could douse it. In her younger days she had tried to ignore this burning, tried to pretend that she was happy being a wife and a mother, that she should be content with such a happy life, in a happy little castle and her happy husband and happy daughters and stepdaughter and their happy comfortable life. She had remarried well. Her daughters were safe. She was safe. They would have money to clothe and roof themselves well, and food enough to clutter many a table through the long years. How happy.

Her husband was now dead, her daughters and stepdaughter as irritating as ever, and the stepmother lay abed, coal heart burning her to a cinder. She fancied that when she coughed, out plumed a puff of ash. Motes of it spiralled aimlessly through shafts of dull morning light.

Every now and then she would steal out of her bedchamber, find some stable boy to fuck, then steal back into her bed. Her damp thighs would cool in her bedchamber air. She imagined that if she moved her legs, she would hear a tiny crack of opaque ice as her thighs broke apart. She had thought such trysts would warm her in a healthier way than her coal heart did, but, in truth, the only thing that made her feel reanimate was her weekly letter from her brother. Each letter was delivered to her on a silver tray, as if she was receiving a morsel of delicious life itself. The first time the stepdaughter interrupted her when reading these letters, she made sure to beat the girl soundly, to send a message like a flare that her time reading her brother’s letters was sacrosanct, and by God she would not be disturbed. Each letter she broke open in the full sun that poured over her shoulder through the largest window in the library, a window so large that to sit beside it was to feel like a bird perched in a wood, free.

Her brother was a lieutenant, serving in the latest war between whoever and whoever, between this decade’s ‘them’ and ‘us’. All that she didn’t care for. She indulged instead in her brother’s descriptions of the skirmishes they had just won, the strategic plans, the deployment of scouts, of foot soldiers, of cavalry. In her replies she pressed him for more detail. What do you do when you train? What is the hierarchy in your platoon? What do the different drum rolls mean? How must you hold a sword? A shield? A glaive? How does your strategy change for a night-time assault? How do you stalk an enemy soldier? What is the budget for heavy artillery?

Her brother answered every question, rarely remembering to ask her the shape and contour of her life, in the way she did of his. It didn’t matter. Her life was boring. Even when she ran the household with a commander’s precision, it was boring. What do the different types of linen mean? How must you feed the chickens for greatest egg laying? How does your plan for lighting the candelabras change in summer? How do you sweep cobwebs from the vaulted ceiling? What is the budget for chamberpots? She knew her sharp questions and clear, decisive leadership had drawn respect from her household staff. But her staff didn’t love her. No matter. Love was unnecessary.

The Prince announced a ball. Her daughters would not stop squeaking about it. “Oh Mother we must go! Oh Mother I must have a new dress for the ball! Oh Mother we must get that girl from the village to do our hair! Oh Mother oh Mother oh!” Oh shut up, she wished to snap at them. But she didn’t. They were the daughters she had raised, and now she must reap what she had sown. And what society had sown, too; all a girl was good for was getting married, and getting pregnant. Society required highborn girls to become fecund cows, and she had raised her girls to be excited to become one. And if you were to become a cow, why not the prized livestock of a Prince? She gritted her teeth and bade the butler fetch the village girl to dress her daughters’ stupid hair.

When the village girl arrived she bore a fey air that no one but the stepmother seemed to notice. The way she looked at things out of the corner of her slanted eyes, the way her pink mouth curved up while her eyes stayed shrewd… She was pretty. Very pretty; as pretty as the dairy maid the stepmother had dallied with for a summer when she was seventeen. But this village girl was much smarter. She noticed Cinderella cleaning the ash out of a fireplace and said to the stepmother, “Will she not also go to the ball? That girl is no servant in her heart, but a lady.”

It mattered not what the stepmother said in reply. She could see from Cinderella’s straightened back and the slight cock of her head that the village girl’s overheard words had planted a seed that would not, could not, be uprooted. Cinderella wanted to go to the ball. She would not rest until she was delivered by carriage to the Prince’s palace gates. How to explain to her stepdaughter that, with her beauty, going to a ball meant going to one’s execution? The stepmother’s own daughters were not pretty enough or sweet enough or smart enough to attract any more than a young baron or knight. But Cinderella was a true beauty, under the ash, and one step in a ballroom would make her the desired conquest of every man in the room – whether she desired them or no. Beauty paints a target on your face, right along with the makeup. If she went, Cinderella would come back either engaged or raped. Either way, she would no longer own herself. The stepmother knew this for a fact.

Later that night, after her daughters had already left in the phaeton to the ball, after night had long since fallen, and after the stepmother had returned from the stables, thighs damp, she saw out her bedroom window two figures circling each other in the garden. Or so it seemed, at first. One figure was her stepdaughter, bedecked in filmy white, a dazzling virgin dangerous in her purity, golden hair a tumble of spellbound curls down her bare back. She twirled in the moonlight. And the other figure was also a girl, but the stepmother could only see her every second blink. Was she there, was she not. This second figure was whorled in evanescent glowing robes that floated around her in an unreal breeze. As she turned, the stepmother saw fluttering wings peacefully opening and shutting, rooted in the girl’s pale shoulder blades. The winged girl glanced over a silvered pinion with familiar, slanted eyes. Fey indeed, the stepmother thought.

The magic happened quickly. The stepmother blinked once, and when her eyes re-opened: carriage, horses, footman. Cinderella was handed into her transport, and away she went. The winged girl turned on the spot and gazed up at the stepmother, who all at once felt like a letter being broken open. Another blink, though, and the girl was gone.

The next morning, the butler informed the stepmother that skirmishes on the border were intensifying. Wasn’t Madame’s brother on the border? The stepmother considered. Her weekly letter from her brother was several days late. She bade the butler ask at the village for more information and in particular to question any mail coaches. There was no point in sending another letter back to her brother – if mail routes were disrupted it would not reach him. But those travelling on mail coaches, and the driver himself, would bring word. Strangely, she felt no fear or sorrow – merely a distant hum of alertness, her body preparing itself for calamity by sharpening her mind to a clean edge. She enjoyed this feeling of clarity and readiness. It made her feel infinitely capable, full of possibility, brimful of energy. The last time she really felt like this was when her husband died. No one could have managed arrangements better.

The course of true love ran smoothly, as the stepmother feared. The Prince came. Her daughters were silly. The Prince chose Cinderella. What a ridiculous thing it was, to watch the kneeling Prince shove a shoe onto her stepdaughter’s hoof, and to see Cinderella pretending to be happy that the man she had run away from had tracked her down and pinned her into marriage in front of her whole family. She should not have gone to the ball.

The stepmother gave her stepdaughter only one piece of advice before the girl made her march down the aisle. In a grand palace antechamber, Cinderella stood in her wedding gown, verily haloed in light, her hope a glowing crown. Even her stepsisters hushed their twittering when they saw her. “Stepmother,” Cinderella said, blushing, “have you nothing to say, as I stand here on the cusp of glory?”

“After he fucks you, take a piss,” the stepmother said.

Cinderella reddened. “Stepmother!” Her lady in waiting smothered a laugh. “Must you be so vulgar?”

“You’ll thank me later,” the stepmother said. What she wanted to say was: When you are sad, and angered by marriage, write me a letter. But the stepmother remained silent. She walked out the door.

She left the wedding early, wearied by the sight of Cinderella’s transformation. The grounds were dark by the time she arrived home, except for a patch of moonlight, a white circle, centred in the garden. The stepmother went to that circle and stood in its centre, looking up. The moon was pregnant with bone yellow light. Held still in the target of that moonlight beacon, carving its circle in the dark ground as if tracing the outline of a portal to another world, the stepmother looked up and wished. She wished hard. The effort of her longing burst vessels in her nose. Blood dripped down her chin.

A hedgerow rustled, and out stepped the girl with the slanted eyes. She was a girl no longer though; in the space of a month she had lost a girl’s pearlescent glimmer and gained an adult’s settled glow. Her robes were black now. Crows’ wings, as long as a man is tall, arched away from her shoulders. She came towards the stepmother on pale bare feet. Was this fairy here to grant her wish? wondered the stepmother. The winged woman smiled in a thin white sliver. “No, my love,” she said, her voice low. “Girls need fairies. Women need witches.” The trail of her black robe snagged on twigs, leaves, black petals. “I hear the longing of your woman’s heart.”

The stepmother closed her eyes. Even sans sight the stepmother could feel the weight of the castle behind her. It bore upon her, yanking at her apron strings in a vain attempt to demand her attention, whining in her ear of chandeliers that hung undusted, eggs laid uncounted, pantry budgets left untallied. How long until her innocent stepdaughter felt hunchbacked by the same weight? The stepmother opened her eyes. “What can you do for me?” she said. A tear rose up, pressed out of her coal heart, and fell down her cheek as a diamond.

The winged witch moved closer. She cupped the stepmother’s face in cool ivory hands. “Not as much as you need, my love,” she said. Pale pink lips. “Some day in the future, a woman like you will be free in the way you wish. A woman like you will be able to keep her rage, and her power, and her womanhood. But such an elixir cannot be tasted now. All I can do – is this. You have until twelve.”

The witch kissed the stepmother. Her lips slid slowly over the stepmother’s and their tongues met, slick. The stepmother pulled the witch into her arms, holding her tight around the waist, her breasts pressed into the witch’s, nipples hard. She merged. She flowed.

She woke up. She was in a low camp bed, covered in a scratchy green blanket. The fire in the grate threw out an orange wash of light that flickered on the broken chair, the boarded-up windows, the bayonet reclining against the wall. On the floor by the foot of the bed were heavy army boots.

She swung her legs out of bed and sat up. She wore men’s long johns. Her bare chest was wrapped in bandages. As she watched, blood began to seep through, blooming forth from her lower abdomen. She looked up and caught sight of herself in the half-smashed mirror opposite. Her brother’s face looked back. Gaunt, bearded, far too pale, but unmistakably her brother. She looked down at her hands, turned them over, and noted the dark fine hair matted over the backs of her hands and wrists. There was blood in her square fingernails, and calluses on her man’s palms.

The boy was sixteen, stringy and hollow eyed. “Sir!” he said. He trembled at the sight of her. “You’re…alive?”

“Fetch the other captains, and ready the men,” she said. Her low voice rasped in her throat. “We attack at dawn.”

“But sir–"

“Now, boy. My wound is mortal; if I am to turn this battle’s tide, there must be no delay. This is the time.”

The boy scurried away. She gazed at her – his – reflection in the mirror. She could perfectly recall every detail of her brother’s letters: the manoeuvres most recently executed, the blasted village they had annexed for safety, the number of troops they still had. Which of her men were daring enough to attempt an ambush under cover of dark.

Her mind sharpened and focused. In her mind she was moving pawns across a real-life chessboard, anticipating enemy strategy, sewing shut holes in her plan. She drew the army boots closer and slipped her left foot in. The boot fit perfectly.