1.
Dear Diary,
Last evening, I found a glass slipper on the way home. It lay half exposed in the soil, oh how cliché. Cracks, meandering cracks. And a strange foul-smelling liquid dripping from its stem. Hmm…I’ve always wondered if it were a matter of fit, or one of strength. Balls and banquets, mazes and masquerades, oh what difference does it make, which limelight we forgot to date, which slipper we chose to break?
Yours,
Me.
2.
Once, the princess invited the poorest pauper in the kingdom to don a mask and come along. He came without one, having spent his last dime on a cut and shave. “I’ve got to at least be presentable,” the pauper thought.
He spent the night explaining where he bought his mask from.
3.
“We choose to accept only the love we think we deserve. The rest, we discard, reject, and if need be, we destroy.”
4.
Rain comes late in the night, and water collects on the tin sheet roof, before flowing off the edges of it. Twilight comes knocking, draught in hand, pleased at the work of Night. A magic circle of rain-turned-water, with each droplet dedicating its body and soul to the earth that sits beneath.
5.
The boy has been coming to the same spot every afternoon since he was five – that bald patch by the banks of the countryside stream. This day, though, he was late. Instead of standing at that same bald batch, skipping stones, he sat by the tree a little further up the bank, digging his bare heels into the soil. At dusk, he hummed a little tune, the same tune he’s hummed for the past five years. The stars soon appeared, sharing their secrets in constellations of Man, in myths that float along rivers of time.
Under the incandescence of a nearby star, he got to his feet and scoured for a stone of his liking.
Someday, he might return with that girl again. Or he might not.
The stone flew across the stream, skipping once, twice, thrice, before disappearing in the currents of old.
Or he might, with another. And then, with a little boy of his own.
No matter, the stars keep signing, the stones keep skipping, and the streams keep flowing. In time this stream would, too, join the Euphrates, taking these stones to the Gulf, where they bask in the moonlight and make up the Spirit of the World.
—
Ugh. Didn’t seem to work out.
Maybe this works better than story-telling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBumgq5yVrA
Wei Leong 伟良 