Her Toes
It must be love.
Absalón Rodrigo Jeremía Constantino Divilla III was certain of it. This girl, right here, now, dancing in his arms, was the love of his life. He didn't know her name, her family, her town let alone her country, but he knew he loved her as certain as his name was Absalón Rodrigo Jeremía Constantino Divilla III.
The girl (whose name was Marissa Cintia, her family Rios, and her home was in fact no less than a stone's throw away from this very castle) took another step and wobbled, but stayed upright which was the best she was hoping for at this point. She wondered why the prince was grinning like an idiot. Did he think it was funny that her arches were collapsing?
And the reason why he knew it must be love was her toes. He had been staring at them for hours as he danced with her. They were an angry red, crushed, and not in any way beautiful. Dancing must have made them very hot; the insides of her glass slippers kept beading over with condensation, which made her feet slip about even more, squidging the little digits ever harder against their crystalline prison. No man in his right mind could find them attractive. And yet he wanted to touch them, to gently bathe and massage them until they were as delicately pale as the rest of her, and he wanted to do it every day from now until the final judgement. It must be love.
As hard as glass was a simile people should use more often, Marissa decided when the dance called for stomping and she bruised every one of the twenty-six bones in her foot. The ball had begun three hours ago and she was feeling every minute of it. Why couldn't her slippers been made of flexible, forgiving material, like fur or something? Or why hadn't she said, when the prince asked if she would like to sit down, 'Yes, yes, please I'm begging you, yes'? Up above her head, a bell began ringing midnight. Though this had been her one chance to escape her stepmother and maybe find her one true love, Marissa was never so glad of a reason to leave.
She limped as quickly as she could out of the ballroom, only stopping when she was hit by a flurry of fresh air. The steps up to the palace entrance were quietly beautiful in the moonlight. She flicked off the glass slippers and revelled in the feeling of freezing marble against her abused little toes. The footman watching the door grinned at the girl who hobbled off into the night, leaving her sparkling shoes behind her.
They are Spanish for no more reason than as I was typing in a long list of names the language on my spell-check changed from English (New Zealand) to Spanish (Spain-Traditional Sort). I have yet to figure out why.