Cinderelloello / Loello - Chapter 1 (Excerpt)

Self-portrait photo by The Mollusc Dimension. He is wearing a black suit jacket, a white shirt and a dark hat. His head is tilted and he looks moody. Instead of a pocket square, half a clock-face is visible from his jacket pocket.

Self-portrait photo by The Mollusc Dimension. He is wearing a black suit jacket, a white shirt and a dark hat. His head is tilted and he looks moody. Instead of a pocket square, half a clock-face is visible from his jacket pocket.

Cinderelloello (or Loello as he preferred to be called) was one of the cleaners who worked under the troll queen's palace in the old land of magic and mystery. 

Things hadn't always been this way. 

As a young woman, he had also mopped the floor at the local cheese shop, answered the phone at the local pizza shop, packaged and posted nude photos to the older women who had ordered them, secretly hugged long sacks of popcorn in a cinema up north, and (accidentally) told an evil boss to have a nice time at his cousin's funeral. 

This CV could go on for much longer, but someone told him he should only put the last five jobs and describe the best things he had done.

Applying was a struggle. Like the palace it was issued from, the form appeared to be paper but was complicated by a maze of binding spells. He filled it out seventeen times and made twenty-five and a half phone-calls before he managed to complete one successfully. Some of these phone-calls were to cats, but most of them were to the people whose job it is to tell you how to fill out forms. 

Despite these people's patience and kindness not one of them told him to simply burn the form.

And his memory isn't... what was I saying? His memory is more than it used to be. His heart was a kitchen of stories – and the aroma of possibilities drew strangers and unstrangers from beyond the dimensions of time and space.

He remembered, as a child, his parents telling him the palace was made of precious stones called Dust Stones. The sacred dusts were carried by ants (Serv Ants) for many miles and re-compressed into stones under the scrutiny of the Watchful Eyes. The building glowed with a special light which kept the troll queen's skin a perfect shade of cruelty.

Excerpt from Cinderelloello by The Mollusc Dimension

 
writing, storytelling, creativityThe Mollusc Dimensionintersectional feminism