Sitting on a large pumpkin, back to the kitchen wall of the small cottage, Cindi lifted the bottle, drank, feeling the hooch burn down her gullet. The air of the cottage was oppressive, hot, thick with the metallic stink of blood, sweat and viscera. Her pale skin sheathed in a sheen of sweat, thread bare dress wet, sticky with blood. Like a gruesome sap. The sap of life. The thought sent a drunken giggle crawling up her throat. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a crimson smear across her chin. Tasting the copper tang on her lips. Cindi took another drink, spilling more down the front of her than she managed to swallow.

“Aw fuck!” she grumbled brushing sticky, bloodied fingers at the spilled hooch soaking into the font of her dress. “That’s going to stain.” She complained to herself drunkenly. She shrugged, took another pull using both hands to steady the clay jug.

Movement drew attention to the carnage on the kitchen floor.

Is that a butterfly?, she wondered blinking to force her hooch blurred vision into focus. Yes, a butterfly.

It was perched amidst the bloodied ruin of her stepmother’s face. A dark body with large colorful wings that moved languidly up and down. It flitted from her stepmother's ruined face to the ragged stump of her stepsister’s severed arm. Its antennae twitched. Lifting its hair like legs as if checking for blood or gore.

“Why?” the butterfly asked in a thin reedy voice.

Whether it was the hooch or the fact that a butterfly was talking to her, Cindi started, slipped from the pumpkin to the wood floor with a thump, managing to keep hold of the bottle of hooch but the bloodied axe with which she had done the deed clattered to the floor.

“Why, Cinderella, why?” The butterfly demanded.

Cinderella took another drink, belched loudly and slurred. “Bitches had it coming.”