Chapter 5: Dark dreams

Courtesy of Crystl.

An intermittent unfolding of a short story involving a woman, her luck and a randy cockroach. The earlier installments, in chronological order, are: The fall; The blame; Her very own hell; and What happened next.

*

Their meetings in bed were violent encounters: foot shoved against thigh, elbow jabbed into rib, and he would fall out of bed.

Help me! she'd hiss.

Whaa? he'd say.

He fumbled in the darkness, trying to pull it off his body, but the night stuck to the sheets and in his ears like tufts of thundercloud, dark, soft, ominous.

I need help, you fucking idiot.

Her anger crackled like the static electricity in the blankets he was pushing back. His hands glided over lump and limb until he found a small wet face and silky hair. He lifted the bundle up and she cried with pain and alarm: Not that one, he's nursing! The other one! He'd start again with his hands, feeling, feeling. A tiny mouth latched hungrily onto his finger and he picked it up, triggering a new bout of crying.

Downstairs they'd walk from living room to kitchen to hallway and back to living room, a track so well tread he paced it with his eyes shut, arms jiggling the bundle of blankets. It was neither eyes nor ears, but hands that told him which son he held. There was a stubbornness, a stiffness, that came from one boy, a refusal to be cradled and rocked in his father's arms, so the two walked instead.

When the father needed to pee, he'd walk himself and his wailing son into the bathroom, where, with eyes shut, he'd jiggle his son with one arm, and with the other, loosen his pajamas and piss. There was that one night when he opened his eyes because he was splashing all over himself and found that he wasn't in the bathroom but was standing over a kitchen chair, urine running off the seat and spilling on his feet. But tonight was uneventful. Holding his son he tried to slip into bed quietly, but he was big and heavy and the bed bounced, the second baby cried, his wife let out a sleepy hiss and shoved a new crying son into his arms. Once again he was walking through the dark, eyes closed, arms telling him this was a smaller, lighter bundle whose cries would quiet to whimpers and finally ragged breaths. The father slept.

In the light, she woke, felt for her babies and found one.

Just one.

She kicked him, again. Hard.

Where is my baby?

Whaa?

Where's my baby!

He sat up in bed, the memories of the night unrecorded by his eyes that now opened, blinked, irises dilating, contracting.

I don't know.

The words floated above the bed with the dust dancing in the sunlight. He could hear her calls from the kitchen, then the living room, heard them replaced with coos and then the creak and whisper of her feet on the stairs. She climbed back into the bed that separated them, so big and crowded with young bodies.

You put him in the bassinet. He wasn't even crying.

In the darkness beneath the blankets, her cold feet sought his warm ones, touching them softly and gently, asking to be warmed.

Slate's loss, your gain

This 75-cent jar was the inspiration for a short story contest
co-sponsored by Slate and Significant Objects.

I found the small, glazed pot in the back of the cupboard where I’d placed it five years earlier when we bought our home. Now the house is in foreclosure and I’m packing again. We’re not moving until the bank forces us out, but I want to be prepared so I pack one or two boxes a day. We won’t miss the brown pot from my first job after high school, but before I could wrap it in newspaper, my four-year-old daughter found it and asked to paint. The knobby handle fit her small hand perfectly as she dipped the brush into the paint. I returned to packing.

The pot was given to me by my boss. He was a ranger and I was an aide at a state park. He taught me how to drive a garbage truck, mend a barbed-wire fence, clean an outhouse, use a chainsaw, and kiss. Kissing was the most useful thing I learned. Garbage pick-up produced the best stories.

The job involved hauling trash from fourteen beaches. The bags were heavy and the flies quickly found them, so the bottom of every can held a toxic tea. I wasn’t strong enough to lift a bag straight out of the can, so I’d tip it on its side and drag the bag out. Wriggling maggots slid off its sides. Next the bag had to be thrown into the back of the truck. And, again, weak arms forced me to use chest and knee to heave the bag in, sometimes sliming myself with maggoty juice in the process.

The weekend of Bocce and Barbecue -- an annual competition that drew hundreds to the beach where they’d play ball and roast a pig in the sand -- meant eight hours of nonstop trash pick-up. The bags were so heavy it required two of us to send one sailing into the truck. We drove our way across the beach, hopping out to grab and toss. But at one stop I lost my grip. The bag snagged and innards spilled out. Pig parts, sticky and red, smeared my uniform and splattered my arms and face. Pig blood, I thought, and opened my mouth in horror. I steeled myself for the metallic taste of blood, but tasted tangy and sweet instead. Barbecue sauce.

The next day I found the pot on the lunch table with my name taped to the lid. And because I was just 17 and in love with my boss, I loved the pot and took it home. But summer ended, the job ended, and so did we. The jar stayed. Eventually, it became a handy spot to dump change. Later a boyfriend used it to hold his stash of pot. And finally it served a small artist. My daughter’s painting is of two stick figures, holding hands. I packed the painting. It's time for the
the pot, like the house, to go.

My story was one of more 600 submitted in the Significant Objects Story Contest. The challenge was to write a short story in which a barbecue sauce jar plays an important role. The winning story can be read (and bid upon) here.

The idea behind Significant Objects is: "a talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!"

Significant Objects is filled with many stories about once worthless stuff, all quick reads, well written. I loved R.K. Scher's "Indian Maiden." The comic by Betsey Swardlick, "Dilbert Stress Toy," is fabulous. And "Spotted Dogs Figurine" by Curtis Sittenfeld is bittersweet. Go treat yourself.

Insult and injury

Scorpion tail tip courtesy of mohd fahmi.

She asked for my bag to search it for stolen library books, and she wanted me to come back inside too. I refused. As if I would willingly walk back into the library with a toddler throwing a tantrum. Stupid woman.

"Feel free to take it," I spat out, struggling to hold on to my angry son.

She blinked at me from behind her glasses, than picked up the bag and marched back in.

“Are we in trouble, Mom?” my older son asked, shrinking himself into the shadows of the building.

I shook my head, silently willing the small, stiff child in my arms to calm down. Instead, he arched his back into the curve of a scorpion’s tail and wailed.

I’d hunted scorpions as a kid. Armed with an empty mayonnaise jar, I’d wander out into the vast stretch of sandy desert that was my backyard and start kicking over cow patties. Scorpions burrow small holes under the dung, flat as a Frisbee, and hide out during the hottest part of the day.

Sometimes, my brother and I would capture five or six at a time. From pincer to tail some of them were longer than my dad’s thumb. Others were small enough to fit on a dime. Of the hundreds of scorpions we captured, grew bored with and released, I remember two: The one found under plywood, whose body alone measured three inches and whose tail was thick as jute, and the mother with a million babies on her back. She got away.

That’s what I wanted to do now, just crawl into a hole as people gave my toddler and his meltdown lots of space. A bitter, angry brew boiled in my belly. I'd been taking my children to this library long enough for a few of the librarians to know us by name, but I didn’t know this one, nor had I paid attention to her face when she stamped our books. Instead, I studied her hands, studded with rings that squeezed her flesh and forced it to ooze around them. Those pale, sticky hands usually busy with musty books and cups of sugared tea were poking through my things, pulling out water bottle, bike helmet, knitting.

"She's taking out your wallet, Mom," my older son reported from his hiding spot near a window. "She dropped it."

I'd given the wallet to my toddler earlier in the day to amuse him, and when it no longer held his attention I'd shoved it into the bag without snapping it shut, so when the librarian picked it up it fell open, spilling coins. Quarters and dimes bounced across the table, tangled in yarn, rolled under the bike helmet. I shot an angry glance through the window, and my jaw tightened, my head throbbed, my arms ached.

Hiding under the helmet, a dime turned from silver to pale yellow and unfurled. A set of tiny pincers snapped and a tail tucked into the belly of armor curved upward to expose a venomous dagger at its tip. On eight small legs it skittered across the table unseen, grabbed hold of the librarian's dress and climbed. When it reached her neck, it slipped under the fold of her collar, clinging to the fabric as she walked outside.

Outside, my toddler lay limp in my arms, exhausted from his tantrum. My son eased himself out of his hiding spot, and my anger drained away.

"It’s going to be okay," I tell them.

Doors opened. The librarian set down the bag, and silently marched back inside, carrying my revenge. Pincers clicked, dagger poised, it waited.

A story shard

"Fragments" courtesy of erix!

It was dark when the birds woke her, but instead of trying to go back to sleep she got up and walked into the kitchen. In the shadows, she made a pot of coffee and carried a cup to the rocking chair near the window. She sat quietly, drinking the hot, bitter coffee, watching the charcoal outline of the neighborhood emerge. She didn't notice the tree until the sun had climbed high enough to pour warm, yellow light across the lawns and climb up the sides of houses. When the sun touched the tree, it split into a million bits of light.

Outside, she was blinded for a moment by the sparkling tree. Tiny rainbows danced across the sidewalk, the lawn, the car, the house. Its trunk was smooth and cold, and a breeze blew through the stiff leaves and carried away the sound of tinkling glass. She snapped off a thin branch, held it up against the sun and watched as a bird flew across a green sky. She let it slip through her fingers and watched it fall to the ground where it splintered. Gingerly, she picked her way through the glass and moved to the porch.

The sun climbed. High up a branch broke, tumbled through the canopy of leaves, everything breaking, glass peppering the ground. More branches, more leaves fell until the whole tree came crashing down in one shattering roar. Then silence. She exhaled and the birds renewed their song. Where the tree once stood was a hill of broken glass, green and brown shards stabbed the dirt and littered the sidewalk. The sun climbed and she took a sip of coffee, but it was cold. So she went inside for another cup and a broom.

My skin or my soul

Photo courtesy of amazonactivist.

Shelly followed me around the playground, not close enough for anyone to imagine we were friends, but behind me like some mangy, maggot-eating dog with its tail between its legs, and behind her came a cloud of stink, the smell of old, stale dirt melted with sweat to form a crust over the skin. The other kids were beginning to notice.

"Why's she following you?"

"Who?"

"Shelly. Are you friends?"

And the word was spit out like dirt. For even here, where everyone lived in trailers and most backyards included a junk car, there was a pecking order among us children, a ranking built on insults and exclusions, and at the bottom of the hierarchy was Shelly. She was the fifth-grade version of the thick, polluted froth found along the seashore. She was the brown foam of fat that collected at the edges of a boiling soup pot. She was scum.

And I was her secret ... something -- not friend, though. I felt sorry for her, sorry that she lived in a dirty family with dirty brothers who ate their boogers. I felt sorry for her when I saw her mother, whose skin was gray-brown as the cigarette smoke that hovered around her, and who smelled like B.O, sorry that she had a mother who bought cigarettes instead of soap for her children, lots of smooth, white, clean bars of soap to wash dirt out of matted hair and grime out of clothes. I felt sorry for Shelly, but I didn't like her.

She was surly and sour, stomping on the bus every morning and throwing herself into an empty seat where she'd stare out the window. She had dirt on her neck and knees, her arms, her face, everywhere. I wanted to take a fingernail and scrape the skin, erasing the dirt and leaving a white streak on her arm and crud under my own nail. Her stink settled around her and kids held their noses and moved. Some gagged and choked. Shelly scowled, eyes narrowed to slits and teeth bared, yellow and fuzzy for lack of a toothbrush.

"You have to be kind to her," Mom said, "like Jesus loved the poor and outcast."

I wrinkled my nose and breathed into my jacket for the rest of the bus ride, but I didn't change seats.

I'd been secretly writing notes to Shelly for a little while now, letters penciled, then folded and slipped to my teacher, who slipped them to Shelly. The teacher had approached my mom and me with the idea after her own efforts to share soap and clothing went unused. Maybe, she said, another child would have more success with this angry, filthy girl.

Shelly's only friend was a tape deck and a stack of Beatles tapes. She'd cradle the tape deck against her ear and listen to it on the bus. She listened to it on the playground as she walked the perimeter. But the music that warbled from the small microphone was an insult to the headbangers, ready to pound and pump head and fist for AC/DC. And so when she walked near some boys, one -- David, skinny and round shouldered, face coming to a nosy point like a rat's -- stuck out a leg and tripped her.

She sprawled into the gravel, tape deck bouncing out of her hand, popping open, tape flying. She jumped up, snarling, smarting, palms scraped and bleeding, blinking away tears. David tossed his sheet of hair out of his eyes and laughed.

"Leave her alone," I said.

"Shut up, scum-bag. She's scum, and her music's scum, and you're scum, too."

He kicked at the cassette-recorder, sending small rocks and dirt flying, and spit. Shoulders hunched, he walked away. But David remembered. Shelly remembered. And as kids began to avoid me, Shelly slunk closer, shadowing me during recess, shuffling behind me, not looking, not talking, but there all the same. My fall within the school hierarchy was clean and quick as a knife cut.

I had never been popular, but I had a true friend, a best friend I thought would shield me against the pecking order, but instead she stood back and let me bleed. First, she avoided me at lunch, then at recess, too. I phoned her after school one day to ask why, and she said kids were calling me scum.

"Do you want one friend that loves you, or a lot of friends who just like you?" I asked her.

"I want to have a lot of friends."

I hung up the phone and cried.

Most of the kids in the school were poor, and many of us ate meals bought with Food Stamps. I wasn't scum, I was clean, took a bath, used soap. But now, like Shelly, I was alone -- she with the Beatles and I with my books. I burrowed into books in order to forget I had no one to talk to. I carried them on the bus, took them on the playground, hid them in my desk. This was my routine until a new girl arrived and chose me as her friend. Once again, I had someone to share lunch with and talk with during recess, and, once again, I was being shadowed.

"Why's she following you?"

"Who?"

"Her. Are you friends?"

I turned and looked at Shelly, stared at her dirty clothes and tangled hair and her cloud of stink, and then spoke to her for the first and last time.

"Go away!" I said. "Stop following me. I'm not your friend."

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. It aims to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion. Global issues like poverty are extremely complex. There is no simple, clear answer. By asking thousands of different people to give their viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens through which to view these issues. Each blogger brings their own perspective and ideas. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently. For others, click here.

Chapter four: What happened next

Photo of Mike Cockrill's art by C-Monster

When she woke the next morning, she looked around for the charred bed springs and singed carpet, but the only sign of the night's combustion of words was the soot beneath her eyes. Warm buttery sunlight melted on the bedroom floor. She breathed, and her relief caused the mobile of paper butterflies to dance and twirl above her head. The days that followed were flights on gossamer wings. She danced and sang and smiled as the sun shone, but at night she plunged into the flames like a moth on a suicide mission, only to rise again in the morning to dance with dark rings under her eyes.

"Something is terribly wrong," she told a friend over tea.

But the friend was blowing on the tea to cool it and didn't hear her.

"I've been cursed," she told her husband over the telephone.

But the babies were crying, and when her husband asked her to repeat herself, she threw the phone instead, shattering it against the door and leaving a hole that resembled a small, hungry mouth. Picking up the tiny voice from among the broken pieces, she fed it to the door, which swallowed it and began reciting long passages from "Moby Dick" until her daughter came along and silenced it by taping its mouth shut with Band-Aids.

Chapter three: Her very own hell

Photo courtesy of Smileykt

Because her luck died in the bedroom, it was here she felt the first lick of fire and sizzled skin. The bad luck curled through the room like smoke, choking and strangling her until she woke, smothered by the blankets and babies and man. (There were too many penises!) She clawed her way out of her claustrophobia and went in search of her daughter. The tiny girl was sleeping nearby on the floor, and, sighing in relief at the familiar shape and smell of the girl's small body, she lay down and slept again.

But under the dark cover of sleep, her breasts were discovered by her daughter, who nuzzled and greedily drank the milk, as sunny and sweet as ripe strawberries. Waking to the gulps and tugs, she slapped the girl away and ended up waking her cherubs too. First one and then the other sent up sharp cries of protest when they discovered their milk missing. The husband woke and cursed. The children wailed. She yelled. And the balls of words smoldered and exploded in flame.

Chapter two: The blame

Photo courtesy of ichangedmyname.

Wherever she went she was told how blessed she was, how lucky to have a beautiful little girl and twins (twins!). Women envied her, wished for sets of their own, their covetous fingers lingering too long on her cherubs' rosy cheeks and full tummies. But by then she knew her luck had turned, and she'd smile politely and mutter "idiot" under her breath.

When had life turned wretched? Why, after so many years, was she cursing and spitting like a wet cat? She played back the time leading up to the birth of her babies and gave herself a migraine trying to remember the hazy days that followed in the hospital. And though she knew luck had flown away with her cherubs' arrival, she dared not point a sharp, blaming finger at her babies.

In truth, blame (if any could be found) lay between her toes. It happened one night in the sooty darkness of sleep. A cockroach had spied her luck curled up in its soft nest of dust under her bed, fallen in love with it, and, weaving tales of an exotic nightlife, convinced the luck to run away. At that same instant that her luck was wrapping its thighs around the roach's hard brown shell, one of her cherubs woke her with a round, empty belly wail, and as she stumbled out of bed and went groping for the crib she squashed the cockroach and her luck.

Chapter one: The fall

Photo courtesy of fturmog

Her luck had turned sour and curdled even as the abundant supply of sweet, nourishing milk sprayed from her breasts and was gulped down by the two little cherubs in her arms. Really, it didn't surprise her, because for years her wishes bore fruit. She liked to believe her luck involved a bit of magic from the gnarled pomegranate tree that she and her husband had made love under one desert night. They fucked each other so hard the fruit fell from the tree and onto their heads, but they kept going, their sweaty bodies rolling over and squashing pomegranates, staining them red. And when they were done and lay staring up through the tree's branches at the ocean of stars, she licked the juice from her arms and nibbled on the jeweled seeds.

She liked to believe that for years afterward she carried her husband's seeds and the pomegranate seeds inside of her, and that this was why two times her belly grew round and full, skin taut and crisscrossed with pale red stretch marks. That it was the pomegranate tree that gave her three children, and two of them twins (twins!), when doctor after doctor said there would be none. But if, she figured, there was no magic, if luck were as predictable as the economy's rise and fall, then she knew her time to plummet had come. And so she fell, tumbling and crashing into the depths of her own hell, the fires burning so hot inside of her that it surprised her that her milk spray wasn't a hiss of steam that scalded her babies.

Prompted by [Fiction] Friday's challenge to sketch out a character with wildly bad luck. Make it a character you like, as we will use her again.

For Christ sake have a cuppa tea

Courtesy of the 19th century children's periodical "St. Nicholas Magazine."

There was a house, an angry house, where everyone was fighting.

And in that house there was a kettle, a screaming kettle, in an angry house where everyone was fighting.

And near the kettle were two bickering children. Two bickering children near a screaming kettle in an angry house where everyone was fighting.

And tangled up in the children was a howling dog. A howling dog tangled in two bickering children near a screaming kettle in an angry house where everyone was fighting.

And standing over the dog was a seething mama. A seething mama over a howling dog tangled in two bickering children in an angry house where everyone was fighting.

And from the garage was a cursing papa. A cursing papa listening to a seething mama standing over a howling dog tangled in two bickering children near a screaming kettle in an angry house where everyone was fighting.

And on the papa's back was a happy baby.

A happy baby who kissed the papa, who danced with the mama, who pet the dog, who licked the children, who turned off the kettle.

There is a house, an angry house, where no one now is fighting.

Inspired by "The Napping House" by Don and Audrey Woods, and "Have a Cuppa Tea" by The Kinks.

Quitting

Photo courtesy of Stephen Mcleod, Creative Commons

Steve felt tense and jittery, like he did after drinking the sludge at the bottom of the communal coffee pot. It looked like everyone was feeling the same way when they came into work, heads tucked into their shoulders, as if it'd keep their necks off the chopping block.

He looked around to see if anyone was missing, but apparently no one had lost a job -- yet. The tweakers were still in shipping; Steve couldn't figure out how they were passing their pee tests. And there was the Mexican always trying to sell tamales at lunch. And the two old ladies in the front office who fussed over him like his mother. And then there was the driver -- the big, bald guy who always wore overalls. What was his name? Bob? Steve wished he could ask one of them what was going on, but he'd never bothered to get to know them, hadn't wanted to, and now, after working there a year, it was too late.

He'd taken the job because it was the first one offered after he'd graduated and moved, and because it left him time for his music. But his mom and dad were always bugging him about when he was going to use his degree, and how he was going to pay off the college loans. Fuck 'em, he thought as he shoved car parts into the assigned slots. Fuck 'em and fuck the job, and he pocketed one of the parts, not knowing or caring what it was for. Maybe it'd fetch something on Craigslist.

One of the guys from receiving walked past, biting his lip, shaking his head, not making eye contact. Steve was next. In the conference room were his boss and two men in suits -- from headquarters, the boss said. Papers were stacked on the table. A briefcase lay open. Shit, Steve thought.

"I don't know how to say this," the boss said. "Don't want to say this. But ... well... There's nothing I can do about it, it's the law and all."

The boss coughed, moved some papers and looked at the suits. They nodded back.

"It's about Bob. He's been with us forever, and well, he's quitting. Well, not technically. He's returning on Monday. He wants to be called Tiffany."

"Bob. Tiffany," Steve shrugged and stood. "I'm cool with it."

And as he walked out, the car part lay heavy in his pocket.

Written in response to Sunday Scribbling's prompt: Quitting.

Another twisted tale

One of the Little Golden Book's covers for this tale.

In a house on a hill lived a little red-headed woman and her family. One day, the little red-headed woman got out of bed, walked into the kitchen and surveyed stacks of dirty dishes, cereal all over the counter and a bursting trash can.

"Arrg!" she yelled. "Who's going to help me clean the kitchen?"

"Not I," said the daughter, reading her book.

"Not I," said the son, getting up from the table and leaving his cereal bowl behind.

"Not I," said the husband from behind the newspaper.

"Then I'll do it myself," sighed the little red-headed woman, and she strapped the baby to her back, filled a sink with soapy water and scrubbed all the dishes, wiped the counter and emptied the trash.

The next day, the little red-headed woman was poked awake by her daughter, who complained she had no clean underwear. The baby was down to the last diaper, her son was wearing a shirt with yesterday's spaghetti dinner on it and her husband scowled because his slacks weren't ironed.

The little red-headed woman stumbled out of bed and went to the washing machine.

"Who's going to help me do the laundry?" she asked.

"Not I," said the daughter, discovering a pair of clean underwear in the back of her drawer.

"Not I," said the son, turning his shirt inside out.

"Not I," said the husband, pulling on his jeans.

"Then I will," sighed the little red-headed woman, and she put the dirty diapers in the washing machine. But when she began folding the clean clothes on the couch the baby knocked them over so she gave up.

The next day the beep and rumble of the garbage truck woke the little red-headed woman, who rushed outside in her pajamas to pull the can to the curb. She glanced over at the lawn dotted with buttery dandelions, and she asked, "Who's going to help me weed the lawn?"

"Not I," said the son, strapping on his bike helmet and pedaling away.

"Not I," said the daughter, reading her book.

"Not I," said the husband, buttering a piece of toast.

"Then I'll do it myself," sighed the little red-headed woman, and she picked the dandelions, braided them into a crown and placed them on the baby's head. Then she mowed the lawn.

That evening, the little red-headed woman opened the refrigerator and found one egg, some slimy beets and a pound of hamburger just starting to thaw.

"Who's going to help me make dinner?" she asked.

No one answered. So instead, she mixed up a box of brownies. Then she filled the bathtub with hot water, squirted in some dish soap and took the brownies out of the oven. The warm, chocolate smell filled the house and wafted out the window.

The son sniffed, dropped his soccer ball and ran into the kitchen. The daughter sniffed and walked into the kitchen while reading her book. The husband sniffed, turned off the T.V. and walked into the kitchen, just as the little red-headed woman cut a large brownie out of the center of the pan and poured a glass of red wine.

"Can I have some?" asked the son.

"Can I have some?" asked the daughter.

"Can I have some?" asked the husband.

"I've cleaned the kitchen, I've washed the laundry and I've mowed the lawn," said the little red-headed woman. "And now I'm going to take a bath, all by myself."

Then she sank into the hot water and clouds of bubbles, ate the brownie and drank the wine. And when she was done, she slipped inside a bubble and floated away.

This story is dedicated to my son Samuel William, one hard-working little chick and fellow lover of Ghirardelli's Double Chocolate Brownies. Together, we can polish off an entire pan.

A tale, twisted

Photo of book cover courtesy of
HoldThatTiger, Creative Commons

Once upon a time there was a smart, strong girl named Cindy, who was the new kid at school. Being new, she was lonely, and spent most of her time reading or hanging out on the edge of a circle of girls, listening and trying to fit in.

One day two girls made space for Cindy in their circle. She spent less time reading and more time giggling with her new friends. But as time passed, Cindy became bored with talking and walking around the playground.

She looked at the soccer game the boys played at recess, and wished she could join. Then one day the ball landed at her feet. An invitation! She kicked it back and asked to play. The boys nodded and tossed her the ball.

Recesses became glorious fun! Everyday, Cindy wore her sneakers so she could dance up and down the school yard, racing after the ball and cheering when her team scored a goal. But her two friends scowled and teetered up to her in their high-heeled shoes. "You have no fashion-sense," one told her.

So Cindy set aside the ball and went to a party where everyone painted their nails and curled their hair. When fumes from the polish and hairspray clouded the air, she went outside, climbed a tree and smudged her nails. At school, her friends stopped sitting next to her at lunch. They whispered loudly that she was a geek because she got straight A's.

Their words hurt, and Cindy was lonely once again. The school counselor and teacher tried to quell the squabbling, but the mean words continued. Cindy grew tired of being alone. She grew tired of the fighting. She joined a game of tag and made new friends.

"You're a stupid brat," her old friends told her. Cindy turned and walked away, and the game moved with her.

This riff on "Cinderella" is in response to the [Fiction] Friday challenge to pick a favorite fairy tale or legend and briefly describe how you could update it to the modern day, and it's dedicated to my 9-year-old daughter, Chaja Maureen, who is learning to be a brave, independent young woman.