"Mom, tell me another Rusty story?"
Maddie sighed. She was so tired today, and was developing a major headache from dealing with some of the city kids who, despite appearances, she could have sworn had received the bubble-headed operation. She was about to refuse when –
She looked down. Her six-year-old son was looking up at her with That Look. The one with the huge, pathetic-looking eyes, the faintest trace of a pout, and those long, rounded lashes…
How anyone could call that ugly…
Maddie sighed again. "Okay," she said. "Here's the story of —" She searched her brain for Rusty legends, the stories read from the crumbling books. "— of 'Cinderella'," she said at last.
"Once upon a Rusty time, there was an ugly girl named Cinderella. She had two sisters, both of whom were very beautiful. Because she was not beautiful like them, her biological mother forced her to do all the chores and wouldn't let her go to formal occasions and campfire nights. This made Cinderella sad.
"One day, a very nice man came into the city where they lived. He was a prince. Due to his admirable and gracious personality, all of the girls in the town wanted to marry him. Unfortunately, he could only marry one, so he decided to hold a ball for all the girls in the city – "
"He decided to hold a what?" David asked.
Actually, Maddie wasn't exactly sure herself what a "ball" entailed, since it would appear to be an event of some kind, but in this day and age, a ball was merely a spherical piece of playing equipment, and that couldn't possibly be what the story had meant.
"It's a place where a whole bunch of Rusties get together and talk about their looks and the weather, then they dance for a while and compare splurges," she said at last.
"Oh, okay," he said, ever-accepting.
"Well, anyway, this prince was so wonderful and held the ball, but Cinderella's sisters didn't want her to come because she was ugly, so they made her stay at home. But Cinderella's dead godmother came back to her in the form of various small creatures and got her out of the house – "
"Huh?"
Maddie had never been able to understand this part herself. "After people die, they sometimes seem real to the people that they left behind, so thinking about her dead godmother inspired Cinderella to sneak out of the house and get herself a dress to wear," she filled in. What the heck?
David nodded. To him, this apparently made perfect sense.
"Once she got to the ball, she danced and talked with lots of different people, including the host of the ball. He'd spoken with both of her sisters and, though they had pretty faces, he understood the value of looking beneath the surface of someone's skin and quickly figured out that they were not nice people. So he didn't talk with them anymore and they were very disappointed. Then he met Cinderella.
"They had a long conversation, decided that they liked each other, and were dating for many years before they finally got married and lived happily ever after in the biggest house in the city with their many children."
"Oh, okay," David said calmly. He thought for a moment. "Dad told a different story of Cinderella," he said at last.
"Oh, really?" Maddie said, wondering whether she was going to have to murder Az or not.
"Yeah. In that, Cinderella was adopted, and she was the really beautiful one, and her sisters were ugly instead. The prince decided he was in love with her after only one dance because he was shallow and he liked her looks instead of who she was inside and went to seek her out with her shoe, which she forgot for some reason. Her stepsister was in love with the prince and didn't want him marrying Cinderella, so she cut off her own toe to fit into Cinderella's shoe, but the prince discovered this and went back to get Cinderella.
"They married, but they got divorced a month later and he married her ugly but more devoted stepsister because she'd been willing to practically hack her foot off to get to be with him. Then birds pecked Cinderella's eyes out 'so that she wouldn't put so much value on beauty or lack thereof for the rest of her life,'" he recited.
Maddie smiled slightly. They were both trying so hard to counteract centuries – no, millennia – of indoctrination…
"Okay, that's it. Your father's not allowed to tell you any more Rusty stories until he gets my approval first," she said. "Now, it's time for bed."
"Aaaaw, but Mom…"
"Now," she said sternly, smiling to herself as he obeyed, more tired than he'd admit to himself.
Maddie looked up as her husband walked in. "She cut her toe off?" she demanded.
Az shrugged. "Clearly, you were reading a different story from me. The watered-down versions you get from the later Rusty days have little to do with the original myths from a few centuries earlier. That was actually one of the less violent ones. You know that story about Sleeping Beauty?"
"Yeah," Maddie said.
"Well, it turns out it comes from a myth about this guy who stumbles upon this girl asleep in this tower for one hundred years, which, by the way, makes her a good century older than him, and he sleeps with her without waking her up and manages to get her pregnant…"