Speakeasy Cinderella (Patreon)

I'm trying to get myself to write more so I can rebuild confidence in my writing. I have a couple of novels that I've been working on for what feels like forever. There are bits and pieces that I love in them but every time I try to marshall them into the shape of a novel it just kind of falls apart under its own weight like a giant sculpture made of silly putty. So I'm trying to turn one into a short story. I've only got a little bit so far but I like that bit. Maybe that'll give me a better structure to build on. Maybe it's just meant to be a short story. I don't know. Either way, what better way to start then by ripping off Goodfellas?


All my life I’ve wanted to be Cinderella. And now I’m a hooker, so I’m not far off. A lady gave me pretty dresses so I could charm a living out of rich men, plenty of whom are really into feet. "Gave" might be too generous a word. I made every dress I own from hand-me-downs and scraps I scrounged. That’s no knock on Zelda, by the way, she did me a thousand favors for no reason that I could ever see. Mama always told me not to expect nothing from nobody except a kick in the teeth but Zelda always seemed hellbent on proving her wrong. She’s the best fairy godmother a girl like me could ever have. Where I was when she hired me, a few outdated dresses was just as good as fairy dust to me. Besides, Zelda brought me to the ball, so to speak, to a dozen dancing princes that could make my dreams come true, or at least give me more money than I’d ever made in my whole life. It’s hardly a kingdom but it could become a life one day; a dress shop of my own, a cozy apartment that’s mine all mine. It might not sound like much, but Happily Ever After is hard to come by on the lower east side.

I thought I’d found my prince once. But it didn’t work out. Maybe they never do.

Sometimes in Cinderella, the dresses come from her mother. Not her mother directly, her mama’s always as dead as my own, they come from a tree that she planted on her mother’s grave and watered with her tears. My mama never got a tree or a grave. I could never get it together to try to ID her remains. And even if I had, what then? I was a kid back then, not a penny to my name. She got enough tears to water a tree though. I had to sneak it in between cooking and cleaning for a family on lexington and 75th but, boy, did I get that done. I perfected the art of crying quietly. And you can do almost any kind of cleaning even half blinded by tears. It’s almost funny now to imagine how I looked back then, hands and feet going through the most mundane activities while a three act tragedy played out on my face. Cooking, cleaning, and crying seems like all I did ages eleven through thirteen, til Eleanor became my best friend. But the less said about her the better.

So now I’m one of the Twelve Belles; a group of performers known for giving more than just a good show.