Lights and Kisses by Christina Murphy

She crossed the street wearing glass slippers. People thought she was odd, and traffic stopped to look at the sunlight glinting off her slippers as she passed by.

She was not odd, of course. She had recently been shod by a prince who put the most beautiful slipper on her foot and pledged undying love. And a second slipper, while claiming his heart had never known such desire.

She was most proud of her glass slippers and of her prince. He was an excellent prince with a high sense of honor, and he looked into her heart, past the everyday trappings of the life she came from, and into her soul that wished to have all the traffic in the world pause to be dazzled by her—glass slippers and all.

The attention she attracted when crossing the street was larger than the sun burning brightly, larger than the moon shining bone-white in the evening sky, and larger even than her dreams that she, a lonely, misunderstood former char girl and unappreciated stepchild, might find a prince who knew what grace resided within her from head to toe, heart to heel, and who kissed her feet, her lips, with the passion of one who understood that a woman who walks through life in glass slippers reveals the most ethereal light of all.


Christina Murphy is an American poet whose work appears in a range of journals and anthologies, including most recently in the anthology Let the Sea Find Its Edges edited by the distinguished Australian poet Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke.