Cinderella in Ashes by Samantha Holt
The carriage was supposed to last until midnight, but I was ten and it was nine and the day was eleven, and there was the damn pumpkin.
They? Since when is there a ‘they?’
She tries to hide her red eyes. Her legs wobble, so we sit criss-crossapple-sauce on the floor with glass slippers hanging in the air
The TV is loud. Loud enough to hear glass break people shout steel crash
between us. There was an accident, one slipper crashes as she speaks, the only thing meant to last.
Turn on the news. Not you. Take your sisters somewhere else, you don’t want to see this.
sound?
Does death make a
Let’s watch a movie. My older sister pulls out a VHS tape. Cinderella. She knows.
Not Dad? Not Dad.
The clock on the VCR says 10:28 but it might as well be midnight since it eats the tape.
A plane. A passenger plane. The towers.
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo can’t fix our broken VCR and it can’t bring Cinderella back from
How does a plane crash into a building by accident? How many people were on it?
Why are you crying?
tangled masses of black film, cracked plastic, a body exploded on the pavement.
He comes home from work early and the second slipper shatters— kids can be scared, not fathers.
The door opens and I see it coming but I close my eyes because this isn’t happening, this is not the clock striking twelve on my childhood, this is not the defining moment of my generation, but it all goes silent and he says
They got the Pentagon.
It wasn’t an accident.
Another one. Oh, God, not another one.
LITERARY-ARTS MAGAZINE | 11
