Cinderella Cowgirl

by Leslee Green

  Linda, just a tiny bit bothered by the thought, didn’t know how to respond.

  A sound from her pocket came to her rescue and, when she removed her work glove, she found that a message from Blake read, Can’t make it tonight, I’ll come by tomorrow and help, sorry!

  And once again, Linda was left trying to understand her godmother’s parlor tricks.

  “Don’t worry,” the woman said, “I’m here to help.”

  "Great," Linda said. “But let me guess, you’re not going to pick up these brushes and help paint.”

  “No,” the woman said very patiently, smiling.

  Linda set down her paint roller. “You’re just going to wave your magic wand and the whole barn will be painted!”

  “No,” the old woman responded, amused. “That wouldn’t work.”

  “It wouldn’t work or... you can’t do that?”

  “It wouldn’t work. If I did that, it would change back to normal at midnight.”

  Linda almost threw her roller, wondering how she had missed such an obvious answer, but it would have been ruined in the grass so she held onto it and slapped it back against the side of the barn, working at an uneven place between two boards. "Of course," she said.

  “I can help, however.”

  “You don’t have a sprayer, do you?”

  “No, nothing fancy like that.”

  There weren't a whole lot of ways that Linda could think of for someone to help get the red paint from the buckets onto the barn that didn't involve a paintbrush, not even with the strange resources that seemed to be at this woman's disposal. "Gonna find me some more manpower?" Linda asked.

  “So to speak.”

  The odd and cryptic nature of the woman’s words made Linda a little worried that she was going to drag a raccoon over and throw it in the bucket of paint, proving at last that she really was crazy.

  But before any more words were spoken, the woman began shuffling off towards one end of the barn and Linda, returning to her work, tried to remind herself to lock the dumpster before she left (not for her fairy godmother, for raccoons).

  Just as the woman was rounding the side of the barn, Linda noticed something very curious. As the old lady reached into her tattered clothes, the impression of a thin object pitched against them from the inside was made as she removed it. Linda could have been wrong, but it seemed to light up as it emerged into the air, and yet she couldn’t be sure because the woman was gone before Linda had a good look.

  “People have flashlights,” she told herself to convince herself to keep working, “they’re a normal thing.”

  She heard the old lady talking out loud with no response, and she knew that no one else was over in the field on the side of the barn where the woman had gone. But, considering she herself often spoke to herself out loud, and had done so at that very moment, she figured it wasn’t that weird.

  But then a dialogue almost seemed to take place, however one-sided. Again, Linda figured, even if she's over there having a full-on conversation with a horse or a field mouse, it would still fall well within the range of what Linda was guilty of herself on an embarrassingly regular basis, and she ignored it.

  It was only when the next development came that Linda actually was surprised. First, she heard a sound.

  It was a thump like the sound of something very large being pulled underwater and it was coupled with a low, melodic ring. While the volume was not particularly high, it seemed to have a power behind it that she could feel in her chest.

  It was followed by another musical sound that was a little like distant wind chimes, and Linda listened for more to see if anything else shocking could be heard, and it was!

  She heard the sound of a man’s voice.

  It was not Blake. This man had a strange voice that sounded tired but agreeable. They talked for a moment and then Linda heard several more of the thumping noises and when she was just about ready to go investigate, her godmother came around the corner.

  “I brought help!” she said and, as she approached Linda, was followed by not one but five men Linda had never seen before who came around the barn one by one.

  “Who are these people!?” Linda said in shock.

  “I just told you.”

  Linda looked at the men and noticed several things odd about them, but most of all the fact that they were there in the first place.

  “I can’t pay these people!”

  “Don’t worry; I’m giving them everything they want.”

  Linda wondered how the bag lady had come up with the money to hire five men. “They’re all going to help me paint this barn?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you even find five workers around here?”

  “You just have to know where to look,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

  Linda was completely confused. “Like Home Depot?”

  The fairy godmother laughed and the men, without saying much, approached the cans of paint and brushes that were lying around.

  The first thing she noticed about the men was that they all had bare feet. They also must have been related because they all had fairly big ears and teeth that hung over their lip. Their clothes were somewhat odd; consisting of linen shirts and pants with rope drawstrings that made them look like peasants out of a novel, though none of them were filthy or smelly.

  They had big black eyes and nervous movements, but actually seemed quite nice, and there was something very non-threatening about them that made the whole situation easier. As they picked up paint brushes and paint, Linda figured it best to just allow the situation to play out.

  “Well,” Linda said, “At least this can’t get any weirder.”

  The first much weirder thing that happened was that one of the men opened a can of paint with his teeth.

  Still, Linda let them work. Then, one of the men took a brush that was lying around and dipped it so deep into the can of paint that it covered his entire wrist, and neither he nor the other four men took any notice of it whatsoever, they all just continued to paint.

  At one point, all five men at once suddenly froze perfectly still and Linda, having joined in the painting by then, instinctively froze also. She turned around slowly and looked for the tiger that was sure to be ready to pounce, but there was no tiger or other threat anywhere in sight, only a hawk flying high overhead. But even if, for some reason, they were startled by the hawk, they couldn’t have seen it without looking up, and no one can hear a bird in flight.

  In time, they went back to work.

  There were little things that were strange too. The men often stood very close to each other, touching each other, disregarding personal space in a way that you would never notice that men usually don’t do until you saw it being done. They also seemed to smell a lot of things, and put some things in their mouths.

  Linda approached her fairy godmother about it, who was hanging around, observing.

  "These men are acting a little strange," Linda commented.

  “Yes, they also like to mark their territory so, keep your eyes peeled.”

  Linda would have rather not kept her eyes peeled for that, but she was not going to prevent this job from getting done either.

  "I'm not complaining, but they seem to be going over the same spots multiple times," Linda said.

  “Nothing wrong with a second coat.”

  “Yeah, but it’s kind of like they can’t tell what they’re doing.”

  “Well, truth be told, they can’t actually see red.”

  “Red?”

  “It’s a color.”

  “I know what red is, why can’t they see it?”

  “They just can’t see some colors.”

  “All five of them are color blind?”

  “By your standards, yes.”

  “Right, okay, by my high viewable color standards. You make me sound so judgmental.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “Does it run in their family or something?”


  “Yes, all of them have it.”

  “Weird.”

  “You could paint the barn a different color?”

  “What other color? It’s a barn.”

  “They can still see that something’s there, it’s not invisible, red just looks like yellow to them. They can’t distinguish between the two.”

  “Well I don’t have paint that’s yellow and nothing else here is yellow so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Linda's godmother did not respond right away as she seemed to be contemplating a problem.

  After a moment she said, “I better talk to them about marking their territory,” and walked towards them.

  "That's really gross," Linda said quietly to herself.

  The job went on, everyone working, and nothing really that out of the ordinary ended up happening. The men were very good on the ladder and the high places were reached, though Linda would have to figure out how to paint the peak of the barn where her ladder wasn’t tall enough.

  No one marked their territory after all and the sun came down and Linda didn’t have any work lights and the barn didn’t really have outdoor lights, just a porchlight at each door.

  The men began having trouble.

  “They can’t see very well in the dark,” Linda’s fairy godmother said.

  “Well neither can I, but we covered quite a bit tonight.”

  One entire side of the barn had been painted at least twice, maybe more, along with parts of two other sides. It looked hopeful, even if they didn’t come back, that she could finish the whole thing herself before the rodeo if she had to.

  “Do these guys need a ride home?”

  “No, they can walk home.”

  “Good ‘cause I am too.”

  The men set down their brushes and, one by one, approached the base of a nearby tree. Together they bundled up near it, ending up kind of on top of each other in a way that seemed bizarre to Linda.

  “What are they doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “Midnight.”

  For some reason, Linda was really spooked this time by the mention of midnight. She hoped the talk of witches wasn't real.

  “I’m going to go clean these brushes.”

  Linda took the brushes and rollers and anything else she could wash inside and hosed it all down in the wash rack, pressing the bristles into the cement slab to clean them to their roots.

  When she was done, she came back outside and the men seemed to all be asleep, sleeping partly on top of each other under the tree.

  “My barn is painted,” she told herself. “That’s all that matters.” Ignoring how weird things had gotten.

  “It’s not done yet,” the old woman reminded her.

  “No, but we got days of work done in a matter of hours. Thank you for the incredible amount of help you’ve been, again. I’m not sure how to repay you.”

  The old woman smiled. They heard a noise near the parking lot and Linda realized she had forgotten to lock the dumpster after all.

  Together, Linda and the woman stepped around the barn to see what was afoot and at least two furry animals scurried under the dumpster with a clang.

  “I forgot to lock it.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” the old woman said and began heading for the dumpster.

  Linda was tired enough from painting to let her do it. What’s the worst that could happen? She pulled a few cans out of the dumpster? And Linda wouldn’t have even minded if the woman did toss the raccoons in the paint after all, none of it that was on the barn was coming off and that was the important thing.

  But were those raccoons?

  “Did you see what that was?” Linda asked.

  “The night shift,” Linda’s fairy godmother said and she turned to give her a big wink as she headed towards them.

  This was far from the oddest thing she had heard the woman say, but as she walked in the opposite direction towards home in the dark, she did find herself thinking about it quite a bit.

  The night shift. Even assuming the old woman was intending to pull off another one of her unexplainable tricks, what on earth could it be?

  She walked home and tried texting Blake a couple of times but, apparently, he was busy. Maybe he's out on a date? she thought. That's fine. He's not really your boyfriend. Just go home and go to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The morning sun and the birds were outside the car window on the way to work, riding along, and thoughts of Blake were out there too, along with the cows and trees, as real as the grass.

  Maybe the men who helped her the night before would return that evening, along with her fairy godmother? But, hang on, she didn't want to finish the job too quickly. If she did, her stepmother would simply come up with something else for her to do. She couldn't decide if she wanted them to come back or not.

  As the barn approached, she leaned close to the window to see how much of a mess they had made the night before and, as it expanded in her view, starting from a small seed in the distance that grew larger, she finally got a good look at it and dropped her phone, gasping.

  Her sisters turned back and looked at her, their mouths open in anger with their jaws pushed forward in disgust. It was the barn. It was painted. All of it!

  They pulled into the parking lot and came around another side of the barn, confirming that the paint job was somehow completely finished.

  “Did you stay up all night painting, Linda?”

  “Gosh, how desperate are you?”

  But Linda was too concerned with the barn to listen. She got out of the vehicle and began to circle the building on foot, looking for signs and evidence of what had happened. There was not a lot to be gathered, and she spent most of the time holding her hand over her mouth, completely shocked.

  Her sisters disappeared into the office, and Linda pivoted three hundred and sixty degrees, looking for someone else there, not feeling alone. There must be someone, after all this work, waiting to take credit for it. But there was only wet grass. Even the fog was gone.

  Inside the barn, the painting tools were washed and laying on the cement slab. They were disorganized, but they had been run under the water and cleaned. Linda picked up a paint roller. There were scratch marks on the handle.

  What had happened? Only the horses knew.

  “Carl, why can’t you talk!?” she asked. The look on his face made it seem as if it was because he didn’t want to as he turned back into his stall.

  Outside the barn, Linda found that the dumpster had been ransacked; rummaged through like she had never seen before. The lids were wide open and the contents had been entirely overturned, but nothing was thrown outside of it.

  Boxes inside were crushed and torn in half, not an inch of trash left undisturbed. Someone had done a very thorough job on it, but looking for what!?

  The old lady couldn’t have done this, she was too frail. Neither could raccoons, they were too small. A bear or other animal would have left garbage spilled everywhere, but there wasn’t a piece that wasn’t still neatly inside the dumpster, though any food scraps were gone.

  She concluded that the men who had helped her must have done it. They were the only ones there, after all. She could see the paint cans in the trash, but she had also seen how blind they were after dark. Yet they must have finished the entire barn in night somehow, and then dug through the trash? Barely able to see?

  The old woman did have a flashlight, at least that’s what Linda thought it was, but that could hardly explain things. Even if it was powerful enough to light up the whole area, how had they reached the high places on the barn? It was painted all the way up to the peaks above the hayloft. The ladder couldn’t reach that high; someone would have had to climb!

  None of this made sense. Would she get in trouble for this? How could she? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Oh, but she had...

  The completed task would do nothing but infuriate her stepmother. It
was not a chore intended to be finished, not on time anyway. But maybe she wouldn't find out. Linda's stepsisters might forget to tell their mother by the time evening came, or maybe they just didn't think anything of it and wouldn't mention it.

  Neither was likely. They were there in the room when she had had the conversation with her stepmother about going to the rodeo, about earning a day off. But, so what if they did tell? Linda would tell a different story.

  If her sisters said it was painted, she would say it needed a second coat.

  If they said there was no more work to be done, she would say they hadn’t seen it up close.

  If they said what had happened was impossible, Linda would agree, and say that they were exaggerating.

  Linda could find a way to negotiate any scenario short of her stepmother coming down to the stables and inspecting the barn herself, and that wasn’t going to happen; her stepmother never drove. She insisted on being chauffeured around, usually by her daughters, and always sitting in the back seat.

  The town was too small to have any taxis or ridesharing cars, and she knew the woman wouldn’t bother to come anyway, not until Linda herself said that there was no more work to be done on the barn, that’s when she would come so she could try to find more.

  And so, Linda was safe. The barn, according to her, would only be finished at the exact right moment. According to her, it would still need a final touch up the morning she was to leave. She wouldn’t be sure she would finish even then! It would be close. She would push it right up to the end, apologizing to her stepmother, fooling her.

  After working it out in her head, Linda became calm again and hopeful that everything would work out. All she had to do now was stay late after work each day, pretending to paint the barn and going horseback riding instead.

  Worry floated away and it was replaced by excitement to attend the rodeo, which seemed to be inevitable now. Beginning her workday, she cleared the stable by turning the horses out into the field, contemplating the mystery and wonder of everything that had happened.

  But nothing was ever so easy.

  In less than an hour, Linda’s heart sank as a sleek, black SUV pulled into the parking lot, its tires crunching the gravel below it.