Contemporary Fantasy Humor Myth

Slipper of Glass

You never know for sure what a fairy tale’s vulnerability is going to be. Yeah, sometimes you have a pretty good idea. With a fairy tale like this, nine times out of ten, if you take out the Cinderella, it all falls to pieces. Take her out, take her place, don’t go to the ball. No Cinderella means no dance, no glass slipper on the step, no search through the country for the One True Foot, and – this is absolutely the key – no happily-ever-after. Job done. Town saved. All of that.


This time it isn’t going to be that simple. I know that the moment they call me in on my night off. I’ve been out with Sian – she’s our Snow Queen specialist, just like I’m the Cinderella specialist, and we only get the night off together once in a blue moon (and don’t get me started on Blue Moons) – and we’ve both got pissed out of our skulls. When the F.I.S. drag me out of bed, I’ve only been asleep for a couple of hours and I’m at that midway point between drunk and hungover when you don’t know whether you want to dance or hide under the covers but you do know you don’t want some asshole in a suit interrupting you. I pop a couple of painkillers, down a bottle of water (refillable; I’m not a fucking monster), and lie out as comfortably as possible on the back seat of the car as it carries me into the night.


The official name of the F.I.S. is Department 23. Unofficially, and out of our hearing, we’re known as the Little Bo Peeps. As far as I know, there are no departments one through 22. We aren’t part of MI5 of MI6 or the Met Police or any of the other security services. Rumour has it that we’re run out of a small, unassuming office somewhere in Whitehall with only ‘Private’ on the door. The story goes that if you’re important enough to need to visit, you already know where it is.


I sleep intermittently on the car journey, helped by the fact that my driver and his companion insisted on talking about football for the entire journey, but it’s still dark when we arrive. That isn’t a good sign, either. Cinderellas are best handled in the daytime. By the time it reaches night, things are getting out of hand.


The F.I.S. have set up base in a couple of trailers a mile from the exclusion zone. Sometimes zones grow, and the last thing you want is to get the whole operation sucked in. There’s something naggingly familiar about the lay-by we’ve occupied, but in the dark I can’t pin it down. I’ve done enough insertions that by now they blur together.


The command trailer is already packed when I push the door open. White walls, screens, people desperately poking at laptops. It isn’t what a girl needs with a hangover.


“So,” I announce. “Who fucked up?”


Continue reading Slipper of Glass in the At the Gates and Other Stories collection.