a tweet from Fairy Tale Fragments that reads: Once upon a time, there was a blacksmith who had a glass slipper.
a tweet thread in a series of images from Olivia Waite
I already love him. Hands so used to metal and sandpaper, and here is this fragile, delicate thing. He balances it between the calluses of his fingertips, turning it back and forth, watching it turn firelight into rainbows.
But it’s only one of a pair.
He goes to everyone in the village, asking: is this yours? Some laugh, some sneer. A few try it on, but it’s always too big or too small.
Finally, someone tells him a name, and points to a house a little ways into the wood.
Someone strange lives here, they’ve always said. A witch, copper f skin, who prays to foreign gods. But the blacksmith respects copper. He knocks on the door.
The witch answers. Firelight limns her. Her arms are bare, as muscular as his. Silently he holds up the slipper.
“Ah,” says the witch. Is that a flash of sadness in her dark eyes? He hopes not. He can’t keep his eyes off the line of her mouth, the proud tilt of her nose. He wishes he’d changed out of his work clothes.
“Come with me,” she says.
She takes him through a door and into a workshop, bigger than his own and full of different smells. she hands him a metal pole and says, “ Turn this until I say stop.” One the end is a glowing orb, liquid and searing hot.
But he’s a blacksmith. He’s not afraid of the heat. He spins the metal rod at her command, back and forth, while she works the hot glass with spades and paddles and surfaces he doesn’t recognize.
Much later, they clip the glass from the rod into the witch’s waiting hands. “It needs to cool until morning,” she says, as she places it into the cupboard.
The blacksmith pulls out the other one, and sets it on the shelf beside its mate.
The witch’s long mouth twists. “If you’re looking for who could wear that, I can’t help you,” she says.
The blacksmith snorts. “Wear this? It’s a bauble. I was looking for who could make it. Something familiar, yet beautiful. Magical, yet ordinary.”
The witch looks him up and down. “I could teach you how.”
“You could – but what I want is not knowledge. It’s just…” He shifts. He’s not good with words. “I want to find someone who thinks of beauty like this. Who is strong, but careful. Who knows about fire, and fragile things.”
The witch looked at him a long, long time. “I want the same,” she said.
The blacksmith smiled. “Then I’d love to ask your name.”
Decades later, her name was carved beside his, on a single stone. Beneath it, a pair of slippers, ribbons wrapping them together.
dededos
romaincrisis
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
stormborns
