“Cinderella” by John Everett Millais
CINDERELLA AND THE MUSE: or the adventures of a bewildered writer
One midnight, while Cinderella looked wanly upon chaos and confusion, she was disturbed by a noise behind her in the fireplace.
She turned, and stared at the figure brushing itself down in the grate. “You’re not the fairy godmother!”
A tall gentleman in full evening dress – white tie and tails – was flicking a glowing cinder or two from his golden hair. “Do I look like a fairy godmother? No: don’t answer that. There are those who might think differently.”
“Differently? Who?” Cinders was confused
“Now, listen carefully. The fairy godmother has brainwashed you.”
“Brainwa…,” began Cinders, only to fall silent at a frown.
“Please stop repeating things like a parrot.” said the gentleman in evening dress.
Cinderella bowed her head.
“Do not put your faith in princes,” he announced. “They come with baggage.” He brushed back his shiny hair and began to count on his fingers. “Mothers. Previous partners. Meddlesome friends. Odd habits. Unexpected debts.”
Cinders eyes widened.
“What you need to do, my girl,” said the gentleman in evening dress, “is to write a book. And not just any book. A best seller.” He performed a graceful Fred Astaire twirl. “A fast seller! A mega-seller!”
Cinderella pointed silently to a pile of tattered manuscripts, then to a heap of seventh-hand writing magazines. These had promising headlines: “Battering Down Writer’s Block”, “Rocketing to Success with Erotica”, “From Vampire to Valetudinarian and Back: six easy steps”, “She Could if She Would – a beginner’s guide to modality”, “Killing off Characters, Part One”.
“Bah!’ said the gentleman in evening dress, gathering up the magazines. “I will help you, but I require of you three things. Now, concentrate!”
“Three things,” said Cinders obediently, realizing there were times to act like a parrot.
“Yes, three things. One, a List of Lost and Lasting Ideas…”
Cinders began to scribble on the back of a shopping list.
“Two, a piece of The Cloth of Dreams. Three, one of The Crystals of Creativity. Got that? Yes? You have until dawn. Good luck!” With that the gentleman, still holding Cinderella’s writing magazines, stepped into the fireplace. “Oh, and the fairy godmother… A long holiday, I think. Have you actually done any serious writing since that dance?” He paused delicately.
Cinders lowered her gaze, flicking away a tear.
“Thought not. Well, there’s still time – get to it.” With that the gentleman in evening dress vanished.
Taking a deep breath, Cinders looked at her notes. How was she to find a List of Lost and Lasting Ideas? And how could Ideas be Lost if they were Lasting? Or Lasting if they were Lost? It made no sense. Was she just to make them up? She remembered all the articles she’d read: “Eleven Ways to…”, “Five Keys…”, “Thirteen Sure Techniques…” Yet all her magazines had gone. She began to think deeply.
#
A deep Kro-ak! from the window made Cinders drop her pencil stub.
A raven was perched on the open window sill, one of The Ugly Sisters’ glittery garters in his claw. “Flyer for Ms. Cinders,” the raven croaked, then, espying a trailing silvery frill on a gown waiting to be mended, fluttered over to work it loose.
“Flyer?” asked Cinderella. “You mean an advertisement?”
“Don’t be literal,” said the raven thickly through the frill. “Me.”
“You’re the flyer?”
The raven was now gathering up a length of glossy pink ribbon. Tossing ribbon, frill and garter about his neck, feather-boa style, he held out a wing. “I suggest you simply believe me, Ms. Cinders. This is what Salman Rushdie would call A Process Too Complicated To Be Explained – a P2C2BE. Don’t ask: just do it.”
Cinders reached out a tentative finger to touch a glossy black wing feather.
The flight was a dramatic, exhilarating adrenaline rush – and far too short. All too soon, the raven, with Cinderella clinging to his back, was winging towards a vast shopping centre, down a lit-up street and through the open doorway of what was during the day a rather sad bookshop.
Cinders hardly recognized its new incarnation. A large bright banner covered the daytime shop sign: The Emporium Of Fantastical Fabulous and Lost Ideas – All For Free. Once through the doorway, the sad bookshop, Tardis-like, opened into a vast, vaulted space full of tables, cupboards, shelves, bureaux, escritoires and compactuses. These were crammed full of a myriad written materials: papyrus scrolls, cuneiform
tablets, rolls of vellum and rice-paper, sheets of parchment, quires of paper. There were codices, diaries, travelogues, pamphlets, legal decrees, political polemics, journals, tracts and many many books
There was also a large number of people.
Most of the manuscripts and books appeared well-used, even tattered. To Cinders’ shock, she saw people tearing out sheets.
“Don’t worry,” said the raven. “They all regenerate.”
Cinders watched as origami birds and paper airplanes sped through the air, to nestle surely with a soft sigh in just the right place.
The Emporium was crowded with people.
A brisk bearded gentleman in Elizabethan attire was ticking off items on a list with a goose quill pen. “Star-crossed lovers, yes. Death in a tomb, yes. Political assassinations? Now they’re always fashionable. Stabbings, they always like a good stabbing. Stabbings in the back – definitely. Witches? Fairies? Always in vogue. Pirates? Do I want pirates?” He stopped short to consider, apologizing to a small lady in muslin and a mob cap who bumped into him.
The lady too had an armful of paper. “Star-crossed lovers, yes; but a happy ending –eventually. Marriages, but not too quickly. Muddles, misunderstandings, mistakes, misconceptions, mothers. Pride, willfulness. Letters and charades and puzzles and playacting. Witches, hardly. Gypsies, perhaps. Pirates? Do I want pirates?”
Cinders saw many people in modern dress, including an intent blonde woman with an overflowing sheaf of papers and a peacock feather pen. “Witches, yes” the woman said, “but in a new way. And a Dark Lord, with minions and a snake. An orphan boy. And a school for witches and wizards. Dragons, naturally. And a powerful wizard: grey? white? Pirates? Do I want pirates?”
The raven pecked Cinders’ finger. “You must hurry. Do it!”
Sometime later Cinderella was once again sitting before the kitchen fireplace, arranging and organizing her new ideas into a series of bright Kikki-K folders that were part of a free offer of writerly gifts from the Emporium.
“Hmmm… Mountains. Ice. Climbers. Snow Leopards. Star-crossed lovers. The Yunnan Tea-Horse Route to Lhasa. A Dark Lord. A Princess in a tower. Light behaving strangely. A satanic rainbow. A gambler who cannot lose. Another shut-off country. There’s more than one book here, I think.”
#
Cinders paused in her list-making, distracted by a movement at the periphery of her vision. A spider was letting itself down from the mantelpiece by a glittery braided thread of its own weaving.
“Arachne Designs at your service, madam,” announced the spider.
“Arachne?”
The spider gave an angry snort and revolved on her thread. “Pray do not ask. We won’t talk about the Athena business.”
“Of course not,” said Cinders hastily.
“I’m here about The Cloth of Dreams,” said the spider. “As a designer, you understand, a creative industry worker, an artiste, a conceiver of conceptual creations. I exhibit in all the best galleries.”
“Of course,” said Cinderella.
The Cloth of Dreams. This was the second item on Cinders’ list and it bought a couple of lines by the poet Yeats to her mind. She spoke them aloud to the spider.
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
And night and light and the half-light.
“Exactly, madam!” The spider swung ecstatically on her thread. “Contrast. Structure. Design. What sort of cloth do you want? A length like a scarf? Something gauzy? Straight? Circular? Drapery?”
“Something memorable!” announced Cinderella, growing ambitious; then, remembering who she was with and not wanting to raise the spectre of the Athena business, she added, “But not too overwhelming. Sort of everyday, but not. Commonplace, but unusual. Ordinary, but utterly magical.”
“Very clear, madam. Arachne Designs will oblige.” The spider looked assessingly at the raven still perched on the windowsill. “Go, you heard! Black, dim, dark; blue, dark, half-dark.”
“I don’t do dark,” protested the raven.
“Tonight you do!” The spider turned back to Cinders. “Time to take notes.”
An hour or so later, Cinderella sat with a fabulous glimmery, shimmery shawl about her shoulders, scanning a series of keywords written with her free Lamy fountain pen in free sea-blue Waterman’s ink.
“Plan. Design. Structure. Warp and weft. Interweaving. Foreshadowing. Backcasting. Contrast. Ideas fed carefully. Symbols. Motifs. Textual schema. Cohesion and coherence. Everything must serve a purpose. Just do it!”
Cinderella’s writing was becoming hard to read, even for her, and she didn’t see the albino lizard until the spider and the raven both shouted, “About time!”
“A little delay,” said the albino lizard, his breath coming in gasps. “I had to avoid the fairy godmother. But don’t worry! The travel arrangements are now complete. All done and dusted. It’s up, up and away for the fairy godmother.”
Cinders stared into the lizard’s glittering red eyes. “You’ve come about The Crystal of Creativity?”
“Yes, but you’ll need all of us to get where we’re going next,” said the albino lizard.
Getting involved a longish flight by raven-back, a hair-raising scramble underground following the glimmer of the white lizard, and a nail-biting lowering by spider-silk into an airy dark space.
“Lights!” called the raven.
Cinderella gasped.
Where was a fabulous subterranean cavern lavishly decorated with spectacular formations. The creamy-white lights lovingly embellished a wealth of stalactites, stalagmites and columns; twisting, spiraling root-like helectites; hanging shawls and chandeliers; and half-hidden on one wall, a mysterious, phantasmagoric series of chambers, an enfilade of salons leading to a hidden throne-room. They were standing on a narrow walkway, about half-way up the cavern, above was a sea of icy stars, below was a silvery, milky pool, quite still.
The lizard was speaking as Cinders gazed above and below and about her, trying to memorise what she was looking at. “Water… carbon dioxide… humic acids… calcium carbonate. Super saturation… Crystallisation… Millions of years… Sealed from the outside world… Many spectacular speleoforms… Untold millennia… Best not to touch…”
Cinderella shook off her reverie. “Are those The Crystals of Creativity?” She pointed to a wall set with a myriad tiny gems of light, each a minuscule needle-like flower set in a frieze of frost-lace crystals.”
“Yes,” said the albino lizard. “You only need to take one.”
Cinderella reached out her hand: just one, just one small thing from so many. It would not be missed. She already had her List of Lost and Lasting Ideas and her Cloth of Dreams; now she only needed A Crystal of Creativity. Just one. Just one tiny thing. One from among so many.
She reached closer.
“I can’t!” she cried. “It wants to stay.” Sinking to the walkway floor, she cast the shawl over her face to hide her tears. A long dark future lay ahead.
There was an intense silence as Cinders wept bitterly. Her tears fell to the floor, glittered, then seeped away.
A sound of hurrahs and clapping diverted her; she looked up in confusion.
The gentleman in evening dress stood before her on the walkway, even more elegant and distinguished in this fabulous setting. He held out his hand.
“I couldn’t,” wept Cinders.
“You did,” said the gentleman in evening dress. “Look at me!”
Obediently, Cinders surveyed him: tall, golden hair tied back with a black riband, young-old, an intense suffering hidden beneath that indomitable lightness.
“Who am I? Come! You know me…”
Cinders green eyes met the grey intentness of his gaze. “I don’t understand… How? You’re Fafnir, Lukas Fafnir. My Fafnir.”
The gentleman in evening dress laughed, then pulled Cinderella to her feet and whirled her about him. The raven swooped and soared; the spider performed an astonishing sequence of arabesques and pirouettes on her thread; the albino lizard draped itself lovingly about Fafnir’s neck.
Cinders was enchanted at being swept off her feet by a creature of her own imagining. “The Crystal of Creativity?”
“Think it over,” said Fafnir, setting her back on her feet. “Super saturation: ideas so bright and alive and energetic they make something out of very little. Like me.”
Cinders didn’t want to take her eyes off him. “You are so real – so very, very real.”
Fafnir smiled and took her hand. “Just don’t kill me off.” His grip tightened on her shaking hand. “Ah! Thought so! Believe me, I’m much more use to you alive! I’m one of the rare ones. I roam between the pages.”
“And us!” chorused the raven, the spider and the albino lizard.
On the next midnight, Cinderella opened her new (unlined) Moleskine notebook and sharpened her 2B Faber Castel pencil – part of her free gift of writerly supplies from the Emporium. With a sigh of contentment she began to write: Lukas Fafnir, having lost so much during the war that divided The Isles, found that fortune was still not done with him. A gambling addict, he found it impossible to lose… Ever.”
This was The Crystal of Creativity: her imagining made real enough to spark light in the mind of others.
Cinderella 1863, by Edward Burne Jones
The Vale of Ashburton, by JMW Turner 1816 
Susan Ruth: WRITER 
