Cinderella at Midnight

She knelt down on the white tiled floor of her son’s
bathroom and picked up a small black pin, crimped on one side, flat
on the other, a girl’s hairpin. As she stood back up with it
in her hand she curved her hair out of her face and around one ear,
as women who stand up without the aid of hairpins do. She looked at
the pin, with a towel wrapped over one shoulder and a cleaning
bucket in her hand, the bucket swaying. She was picturing reasons
that hairpins come out of girls’ hair in bathrooms; in this
bathroom, she was picturing blonde hair resplendent and spinning,
because there is blonde hair leafed intermittently on the floor,
barely noticeable, and she was picturing bright lip gloss on buxom
little lips, talking and other things, smudged on the water bottle
next to the sink, which she threw away, but wanted to keep for some
reason. She was picturing her son’s hands on a happy
girl’s back, she was remembering that she used to be the type
of girl who once wore hairpins and took them out at the appropriate
times, she was smiling and approving of her son and whomever his
women are. She set the hairpin down on the sink; her son would have
noticed it there, if he was still home for his short stay, he would
see that she had moved it, that it hadn’t been there before
and maybe he would know that his mother understood the things he
did. A small note he would never read, but one she hoped he had
read before. She opened the sliding glass door of the shower with
her toweled hand and when she looked inside she had to cover her
mouth, holding laughter ““ in the shower on the floor there
were footprints, of two different sizes, in a gyring collage of
dark on white. She would buy hairpins for herself and wear them
now, so that she wouldn’t have to curve her hair out of the
way when she stood up, or like now, as she hooked one foot over the
tub’s edge, and prepared to clean her son’s shower.

Burnham is a fourth-year English student. He is a fiction
editor at the Westwind.