...

"When you read a fairy tale backwards, it goes like this: the princesses all had days when they didn't want to shave their legs but it really didn't matter because the princes preferred to be single anyway. White horses would run through mud. Rapunzel's hair broke off halfway up. Snow White baked an apple pie for the dwarfs, and they're still sleeping. The princess will always feel the pea. Alice will fall down the rabbit hole and get beheaded by the Jack of Hearts while Hansel and Gretel get baked in a pie and eaten with carrots and potatoes.

The new shoes I bought didn't fit well, and they didn't match anything I own, but in every other way they did fit. I had them on at a bar where girls rode on a mechanical bull while the boys would cheer them on, knowing that they weren't going anywhere. I wore them when we sat on the beach for the last time together before I had an appointment with an airplane that was scheduled to take off that night.

She kept insisting that we were running late, and I would just turned up the music. I ordered another scotch on the rocks. I tried to make green lights turn red. I had work the next morning and I had no other way home. But these shoes fit in a way fairy tales can't explain. They turned me from a girl who was so poor that she ate her wishes into a girl who throws her wishes out and whose ride home left without her. It's backwards, but it bought me more time, which is the currency of space, the promise of happy endings, the pretend of everything. There is always more of it but there is never enough."