Step

Today’s prompt: “Second marriage”

Ah, second marriages. That classic start to a fairy tale. Mother dies, father marries new stepmother, new stepmother turns out to be evil. It’s a great way to be propelled through a hero’s journey of varying degrees of peril and eventually marry a prince or princess of the opposite gender as the heteronormative culture dictates. Although occasionally you get a little switcheroo with stories like the Goose Girl, where the second wife is the good princess that the prince was supposed to marry all along, but her servant had usurped her and married the prince first.

But what the stories don’t tell you is that for every woe-begotten stepchild who gets to marry the prince after watering a magic tree with their tears or walking under the head of a talking horse on the way to work every day, there’s thousands of others who just die in poverty, or worse. (Thousands might be on the low side, but I don’t know what remarriage rates were like in the Middle Ages.) And, just like how sometimes rumors are true, sometimes the premise of a fairy tale has its roots in reality. It’s the Middle Ages. Most families are poor. And sometimes stepmothers wanted to make sure that their flesh and blood were taken care of – which might come at the expense of their new stepchildren. I’m sure most stepmothers in the Middle Ages were much more decent people than those depicted in fairy tales. Yours, however, was not. Which is why you find yourself unarmed in a cave surrounded by ogres.