A Rural Cinderella

In a dust-blown hamlet where rusted milk-cans outnumber dreams, a lanky farm-girl—her freckles constellations of unpaid chores—overhears the gentry’s gramophone bragging of a moonlit soirée. No fairy godmother materializes; only the barn’s moth-eaten curtains billow like pennants of possibility. She cannibalizes a paraffin-scented lamp-shade, lacquers it with sump-oil iridescence, and sculptures a corset from baling wire; suddenly the Orient is reassembled in a hen-house. Thus armored, she strides past leering scarecrows and gossiping ewes toward the plantation house whose columns glow like incisors. Inside, violins saw away at her future; debutantes titter into champagne flutes that later shatter against her audacity. A bandleader—equal parts satyr and stockbroker—twirls her until the makeshift silk unravels, revealing not rags but radiance. Midnight never strikes; instead dawn’s first cockcrow disperses the masquerade, yet the girl departs owning nothing but the memory of having been seen, and that, for once, suffices.