I sighed deeply as I hit my big toe on the caramel colored rock the second time, I watched as a tiny streak of blood flowed from my bruised skin to the rock, it gave the rock a crimson shade. I had to rest and yet I couldn’t and I wouldn’t until I saw her.

Some twenty years ago when I was but a maiden and possibly the fairest of all my companions, a disillusioning incident happened, one that I didn’t think much of, not until now. I was cursed. My mother had died through childbirth, and I was the resulting child. My father got married to another woman two years after that, I was then taken away from an aunt who had dutifully raised me and who I called mother. I cried and yanked and screamed for them to let me stay with mother, but they wouldn’t let me, and so began a life of misery and trouble and what have you. Step mother was particular about the way things were done, especially with me. She found faults with literally everything I did. She was the proverbial wicked step mother who could cook her step daughter for soup, and once I read a tale on Cinderella and the prince and as you would have guessed, I could connect to nearly every word in it, reading it as a child soon became my favorite pastime, one in which I could divulge my grievances, the pages were my haven. Stepmother had a son and we were never at par, I spanked him the day he tore a page out of my treasured book to make a boat, stepmother got wind of it and she cursed me. She said I would never conceive a child and if even I did, just like my mother, I wouldn’t live to see it. I thought the curse too heavy for such a seamless act and I so I didn’t give thought to it – not until now.