Cinderella watches Get Out and A Quiet Place, and all the horror movies, eating salt and vinegar chips and pistachios in the shell. She watches TV, too, and often binges. When Stranger Things releases a new season, she drinks four double-espressos in the morning. She still cleans the house, gets up while dawn cracks the sky, and sweeps the cinders from the palace fireplace. Cinderella may have married a prince but no one told her the same two-dimensional prince keeps marrying princesses and they all live crowded in the palace, some sort of modern-day harem. She never dances with the prince anymore and doesn’t appear at the balls, either. They go through firewood as if the forest will never end, which it doesn’t, because it’s a magical eternal place where pumpkins turn into carriages — ideal if you want to go somewhere but not the best when you’re craving pumpkin cheesecake. The forest sprouts thick straight trees that timber down in neat stacks of concentric circles. She understands the trees, how they grow fast and green, beautiful in their hopeless realizations that they, too, are trapped in endless cycles of grow, chop, burn. She watches Get Out again, a third and fourth time, looking for clues.
Wendy BooydeGraaff’s short fiction, poems, and essays have been included in X-R-A-Y, LIT Magazine, Ninth Letter online, the Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her middle grade horror story is anthologized in The Haunted States of America (Godwin Books, 2024). Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States.
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