The Shoemaker's daughter

There once was a little girl of six or five. She lived in her little world, jolly and ignorant to the evil around her, she went along bouncing from one day to another.

All the people of the town would cheer up watching the little girl hoping to the small shoe shop her father owned, bringing him lunch every day. The shoe shop was across the street from the town hall, but the father still had to work very hard to get the daily bread on the table every night. Although the shoes he made, nobody could make such from the woods to the cliff, not everyone thought so thus he never had much money with him and every loaf of bread the family cooked and every thread the family sewed, he paid for in pair of shoes. And so by the value of the barter system and the niceness of the village folk, he was the richest man on earth.

The little girl, her father and her mother lived in a small hut outside of town and when the girl would go around the house playing along with pretending friends, she would often see her mother scribbling on paper the next shoe design. This was the girl's fondest memory, her running across town to her father with his lunch and her mother's designs. And when her mother got sick and left them, the girl who was no longer little carried on with the chores as her mother would. And on her way back, she would go to her mother's grave and place a white rose on her grave.

When she had placed enough roses to cover every corner of the grave, her father found someone else to spend his life with. A widow herself, she brought her two daughters with her. And so the family of two which was previously reduced from three, grew to a family of five.

Since her stepsisters were twins, they were given the other bedroom to sleep in and the father's daughter moved to the room beside the kitchen where they would previously keep coal in. Although the room was cleaned, the girl would often find herself covered in black ash from her frequent brushes against the walls, hence her nickname, intended as an insult, became Cinderella.

The sisters came from a rich house, so they never worked a day in their life even when the money was scarce and the mother had to find a new husband to cover her expenses, they did not want to change their lifestyle. And the one thing that did not fit into their new beautiful lives was their new stepsister, the dirty thing was detested by both the sisters and their mother.

The sisters would often find pleasure in tormenting the poor soul. They would snatch her bread and would not return it unless she did each of their hair perfectly. They would often play these trade games, strawberries for cleaning their room, cake for washing their dirty linens. And even then they would rather throw the food at her than hand it over, and often times Cinderella would have to brush of the twigs from her food.

With the family now expanded, her father spent even less time at home, and everytime she step out the door to give him lunch, they would shove her to the ground and steal the lunch box away shouting, "Cinder princesses do not get to go to the town." And Cinderella would be left alone sobbing on the ground, trying to collect her designs ruined by their footprints.

And every time their father would bring something pretty for her, they would snatch it away, "What is she going to do with that, where will she wear it?"

The father was too busy earning for his family to notice how week she had got, or how she was up before sunrise doing chores and how she went to bed after all of the cleaning after them.

And the days when she finished early, the sisters would never let it be. Often as Cinderella would be done with the peas, the sisters would spread it in the twigs and the poor soul would have to spend hours picking them out. They would also sometimes tear apart her dress or break all the buttons on her blouse just so they would have the pleasure of seeing her struggle to sew in the dim light by the door.