The Cinder Maid [Short Story]

Sometimes we forget that our most beloved stories that we heard as children were once fables and long tales told generations ago, normally in a completely different light. If you asked me "Who/what was Cinderella about?" I'd have slung you the Disney version, probably cutting it down to the main point, but all in all feeding you the happy fairy tale version. The Cinder maid was born nothing like that marketing giant's child. It is the older sister of the two, cold and broken by the world she lived in and now too bitter to sugarcoat the world.
These stories do have their similarities. Both "Cinder maidens" have evil step sisters and a just as evil step-mother. Both have some magical entity devoting their time and energy from world hunger to help a girl out and both stories involves the desire to win a prince's heart and just dance the night away. Overall, the story arc follows the same path but it's all the things you'll see along the way that differs. In Cinderella, a young girl forced to stay home on a party day and clean is greeted by her fairy godmother and is given the chance to wear some funny shoes and a snazzy dress and just enjoy herself for once. In Cinder Maid, however, she is not met by any old godmother of any sort. Instead she goes to the family tree where here original mom was buried and from the clothing lands from the tree inside acorns and other assorted things. In, The Cinder Maid, the father had 'Cindermaiden' with another woman then she died and he remarried. It is assumed that the dead mother has been helping her daughter all this time by giving her the opportunity to attend the Prince's ball. Cindermaid's theme all seemed to revolve around the spirits and nature, something that was most likely prevalent in the lives of the people who first spun this fable. A more jarring difference from the Disney version is the famous glass slipper scene where everyone tries on the slipper to prove that they are the girl that the prince fell for. In the Cinder Maid, it displayed the determination the step-sisters had to be married off to royalty as they snipped away at their toes and shaved off their foot size just so it would fit in those slippers. It never worked the first time they brought the bloodied footed step-sister to the prince and I couldn't help but wonder why he didn't just draw a picture to save the shoes from permanet stains from future desperate girls.
Cinder Maid in the end was a story that did well to magnify social ideas and interests in the time, much like stories of today do. I always wonder how the future civilizations that roam this Earth will see our stories. I imagine, much like now, that society will be a bit different then and our fiction may be silly or comical to them. Or maybe it'll be seen as scrawl from heathens. It could go either way, however, in the end it did hold a piece of our current ideas and the Cinder Maid gave us a snap shot into their time, one that MouseLand did well to write out.