Shards scattered, glass slipper splintering—
One I once believed fit so perfectly.
I swung the hammer—striking, shattering, fracturing
pictures of us I’d gathered from our walls.
Wooden frames cracked, weakening,
heart beating a thrumming, buzzing in my ears,
syncing my system in a pumping, rhythmic hymn in rhyme.
All the same, like pistons on a train,
moving steam, fire boiling, spark igniting, pressure moving
—like tracks on a line leading me here.
To knees cratered in carpet, hammer lifted—
methodically,
metaphorically,
concretely,
finally agreeing to what I know is true.
Pictures broken, art representing life representing art.

It was like I discovered your lies with the hammer in my hand.

But I had already known. Before the first swing. Before the glass powdered to dust.
I had known before my sighing hand slid along book spines, fingers blankly tracing
titles—hesitant, halting—until my haunted eyes met their reflection in the glass that framed our
love.
I had known.
The day she threw a Yankee candle at our door, denting it with the force of her rage.
Before I’d found the card beside it, with a Maya Angelou poem traced in ink, signed inside in
your bold capitals: I LOVE YOU.
I ran.
He chased me down like in the movies, kind of.
Told me he’d had an affair, and I didn't know my line.
I left again. He chased me down again, talked to me in circles until I could not think, could not
place myself in the timeline he kept weaving.
He'd had cancer, so he'd been confused, he said.
It meant nothing.
She meant nothing.
He said this again and again and again until alligator tears— he had never feigned to cry
before— fell from his eyes.
And I said okay, okay, okay.
I had forgiven him by then, hadn’t I? Had let him fold me back into the story, had let him rewrite
us.

And yet, in our apartment, something pulled me forward. A need to see what lay beyond the veil.
Alone, the apartment felt like an abandoned stage, props frozen in place.
My hand brushed against his mouse pad.

The screen flickered to life like an oracle whispering what I had refused to see.
His password translated: a servant of Christ.
Inside, the truth unraveled—
An apology to her for wearing his wedding ring.
A promise of their future.
A plea for trust.
A vow of more secrets to come.
And me—the other, an irritant in their entanglement.
My innocent gesture of bringing his ring to work when I thought he’d simply forgotten it.
The root of their disagreement.
I thought I’d been the princess who could understand the troubled prince, but I was just a pawn in
his game. I’d been waltzing with a wolf while he was eying other prey.
My body bowed—left hollow.
As though I’d finally found my lines,
only to hear them spoken in another voice.
Not mine.
Not mine.
Not me.
The curtain fell.
My body slumped to the floor as the final scene played out.
Our smiling pictures pounded, powdered, powered down—
to dust like cinders burned in a fire.
Shattered mirrored glass,
a thin shard like a smirking wedding band,
poked out of my foot as I stood, surveying.
I had not felt its invasion.
I did not feel it now as I plucked out the razor-sharp, blood-tipped point and held it aloft.

Incense, like hot anger burning, bleeding out,
a sliver of my hazel eye stared back at me in the glass;
confused, ego defused, empty felt so good.
Clean, light, like I’d scratched off a layer of myself
with a hammering that went deeper than vows broken, lies told, and secrets kept with another.

The truth was jagged, ugly, and flawed, but it was real, solid—the only thing I could hold onto as
all I had mistaken for love shimmered away, dissolving like a carriage collapsing into a heap of
spoiled pumpkin. My body sang with the truth of it, hammering away every belief I’d held, now
that this spell had finally broken.

Because isn’t that what trust is—a belief in magical realities?

I didn’t know him.
How long had that been?
At first sight, I knew not him, but I did not trust my inner knowing.
He saw a challenge.

I thought Pride and Prejudice.
I thought Anne and Gilbert.
I thought friends to lovers and other romantic tropes,
and I didn’t want to miss my line;
my head said, Somebody… wants… you,
and reminded me, Nobody else does.

With one hundred roses on a college budget. With secluded candlelit dinners in the park blocks.
With picnics on the waterfront. With a romance spanning over a year when Bible college
classmates raced to the altar. With dinners and jewelry and the naiveté of believing he wasn’t
bankrolled by his mother. Proposing, guitar in hand, our first dance to the song he wrote for me.

I wanted to believe in the fairytale version of us, the one where love conquers everything and
princes never falter. He, always entertaining, explaining, bragging about our marriage, even to
her, I remembered, perplexed. But, was that so bad, I’d thought, to preach of its perfection?

A good liar forces you to make up half the lie. Then you believe it as though it were your own.
You are playing connect-the-dots, conjuring the picture emerging like a ballgown from tattered
scraps, a coach from an overripe pumpkin, horsemen from befriended mice.

I wanted to believe him. In him. In us. In the story, he’d told me from the beginning.
I wanted to believe I was lovable. I did not want to have fallen for an illusion. But midnight
always waits in the shadow of glass slippers. Cinderella’s shoe fit—but in Grimm’s version,
women carve themselves down to be chosen.
Had I been a stepsister all along—
trimming myself down, molding myself to fit,
slipping into a role, ghosting myself to get this part?
They’d carved off her toes to squeeze into a fantasy.
What parts of myself had I disguised, sanded smooth,
swallowed whole—just to make the story feel true?

And who had I thought was a prince?
Who was he? Who had I done this for?
But, really, who was I?
How could I stitch back the pieces of me I’d so easily shed—
the voice I’d softened, the roles I never meant to play?
If that was never really love, what had I accepted instead?
What had I settled for?
I thought I’d been known to my bones—
Imperfections laid bare, he’d vowed to care.
But now, it all lay broken.

Every memory darkened by the scepter of deception, discarded, afraid to mention.
My college years… my first trip across the pond… my first drink in a pub… my wedding
night…these memories… lost, tainted by the lies I believed.

How much of that was real?
How much was only shadow, echoes of my fantasies? A whisper of what I believed to be true.
How much does this change all my stories?
He had rewritten me, erased our story— replaced it with one where I was the outsider.
Midnight struck, like a fairied-veil torn from my eyes, and I saw I had been wearing rags all
along.

She knew him, he said. In four months, she knew him, and now I did not. I was not the
protagonist in their story. He’d conjured a new fairytale… and his narrative held.

And as I stepped out of a story I no longer belonged to, the slipper shattered—
glass slicing, splintering, exposing my feet to the bare earth.
The mark where I’d been nicked formed a scar,
like the one on my knee from crashing my bike into garbage cans,
or taking a fly ball to the face in softball.
Marked, but not broken—
each scar carved deep, like tattoo ink,
as if an ember’s fairytale still smoldered beneath my skin.
Lessons, body-deep, my soul-to-keep,
stretched and rendered, hammered and remade,
until they fade from red to pink to white—
like a cinder’s final whisper of heat into the night.