Photo by Carla Oly via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The night of the ball was a night of joy, beauty and more blood and guts than Cinderella herself had ever seen in her entire life.
There really is no processing the kind of shock a princess receives when people start acting like cannibalistic monsters and attacking others out of the blue. Her night with the prince quickly devolved into a night of chaos and dismay as she frantically tried to think on her feet.
Rushing up the vast staircase, Cinderella manages to untangle herself from the fray— relatively unharmed— and survey her surroundings. Dozens of people were being eaten by what looks like walking corpses, falling to the floor and then quickly reanimating as one of the very creatures that killed them in the first place. Hoisting up her skirts, she shrieks as one of them comes lurching towards her with ugly, yellow eyes and filthy, rotten skin. Without thinking, she takes off her glass slipper and strikes the thing in the head with terrifying force.
Years of scrubbing the floors and being forced to perform an ungodly number of chores for her stepmother and step sisters had left her with quite the muscle mass, even for a girl as small as she. When the slipper comes down over its head, the creature howls and tumbles back down the stairs where it lays still amidst the erupting chaos below. Surprised, the glass slipper remains in her hand— a little bloody— but still completely in tact.
Thank you, fairy godmother, she thinks to herself. Behind her, the prince hides behind one of the statues, staring at her with wide, owlish eyes.
“We need to get out of here!” he hisses. Cinderella glances behind her, breathing heavily as more of the creatures come lurching up the steps.
“We need to help everybody!” she snaps. “You’re a prince, and your people are dying!” She rears back, swinging her arm behind her and bringing the unbreakable glass slipper down on a second creature’s skull. It makes a hard *thump* before the creature groans and collapses where it stands. She does the same to the third, and a fourth, until she’s backed up against the statue where Eric is cowering behind it.
“Surely you must have weapons in the castle somewhere.” Another comes after the prince’s throat, and she knocks it out with her slipper before it can reach him. The prince, trembling from head to toe, nods.
“Um — yes! In the back,” he whimpers. Cinderella glares at him.
“Then go! I’ll hold them off. Get enough weapons to save your people and hurry!”
He nods and scurries off to the back room.
Some prince he is, she thinks to herself. But to be fair, this particular situation isn’t exactly something she thinks anyone has ever prepared him for. Cinderella doesn’t hesitate; she runs down the staircase, taking both shoes in both of her hands, and begins striking at the creatures left and right, pulling the party guests safely outside before they can be mauled by the undead creatures multiplying at an alarming rate inside the ballroom. When the prince arrives with a battalion of guards behind him brandishing pikes and broadswords, Cinderella approaches them. Blood and pieces of rotten flesh hang from her dress, and her hair is let loose from its pins as she breathes heavily in front of the armed soldiers.
“You will answer to Cinderella,” the prince says, a tremor in his voice. “She is your commander now.” He bows his head. One of the guards pulls out a long, double-edged sword and presents it to her.
She takes it with a smile, turning back to the fray.
“Let’s save the kingdom,” she says softly, and charges forward, sword raised high.
Samantha Walsh is a fourth-year student majoring in special education and English. SW850037@wcupa.edu