Cinderella

This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Not a word is cut, and nothing asks you to sign up. The first three pages carry the paintings they were given; the rest of the plates are in the app, where the book is read one page to a screen.

Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. The stepsisters are unkind in words only. Nothing frightening.

"Well," said somebody, "that will not do." A round little woman stood in the kitchen in a lilac cloak, though the door had not opened, looking at the hearth the way you look at a job that wants doing before dark. She said she was Cinderella's godmother, which was true, and that they had better get on, which was also true.

She sent Cinderella to the garden for the biggest pumpkin there was; it took both arms and a rest halfway. It went out through the door a pumpkin and stood in the lane a carriage, pale as candle wax, with a step that folded down. Six mice from the hearth came up six grey horses, still startled, and the old rat from the woodpile made an excellent coachman once he had got used to the hat.

Then the godmother looked at the grey dress a moment, and it went from grey to the blue the sky goes just after the sun is down, with silver thread in it like frost on a window. The slippers came last. They were glass, and fitted the way nothing else she owned had ever fitted. "Midnight," said the godmother. "Not a minute after. Then it all goes back."

The road ran white under the moon, the lanterns swung, and the whole thing smelled faintly of pumpkin, which the godmother had not managed to fix. At the palace the doors stood open and the music came out into the garden. She went up the steps slowly, because she had never had a reason to go slowly, and it turned out she liked it.

Nobody knew her. The prince asked her to dance twice, then a third time, and asked where she was from, and she told the truth — that she lived quite near — and he thought she was teasing. Her own stepsisters stood a yard away and told her all about the ball and their dresses, and she agreed that the sashes did suit them.

The count was wrong, hers or the evening's, and the first stroke of midnight came out of the clock tower like a plate dropping. She was down the hall and out of the door before the second. On the fourth step a glass slipper came off her heel, and there was no time to go back for it. The carriage was a pumpkin in the ditch by the crossroads, and she walked the rest of the way.

The slipper was carried from house to house, and in time it came to theirs on a cushion. The elder sister got three toes in; the younger got further and gave up. Then Cinderella asked, from the hearth, whether she might try, and the whole room turned to look at her. It went on. She took the other out of her apron pocket, put that on too, and stood up. They all went to the palace, and somebody had kept supper back.

The end.