The Hands of Both a Mother and a Sinner

The miller’s daughter leaned against the top of the brown spinning wheel, bearing all her weight upon it. Tears poured down from her stormy blue eyes as she pictured the terrifying new life she had begun. She considered herself a martyr for giving herself up for what could be seen as the greater good while she considered her father to be a selfish, undignified slob. As she sat staring at the decaying, brown spinning wheel, her thundering eyes glazed over the figure of a small man leaning against the open door. The man’s eyes were black as a raven’s wing and seemed to be filled with the devil himself. His wooden leg dragged behind him with a considerable weight that seemed to anguish his every move. “Dearie”, his voice screeched like tires halting to a stop. “Let me spin that straw for you in exchange for your necklace”. The miller’s daughter who put too much of her faith into the books she read rather than her belief in God and miracles sullenly stared at the tiny demon. “How am I supposed to assume you will finish the task”, she said haughtily. The tiny man replied, “Because without me you are doomed”, and from that point on she reluctantly put her faith into the little wooden-legged pest and allowed him to spin the long strands of straw into rich yellow gold. To become queen, the daughter promised the man many things, one of those being her child, and therefore, the man came for three more days and spun the straw into gold until the godly prince decided it was time to marry the despairing miller’s daughter. During the wedding, the sky began to turn a deep, stormy purple color while pitch-dark blackness descended upon the miller’s daughter and her prince. The daughter couldn’t escape this darkness, and during the ascension of it, she gave birth to a severely malnourished baby girl. She looked at the child, disgusted with it and the idea of it. This child would be the rot of her existence, the detriment to her capability as queen. Once she gave it up, her reign would be over, the power that she had begun to develop would fall threw her fingers like the ashes of her dead father. However, she remembered the promise she had made the devil: if she figured out his name, she could keep the child and her power. How she was going to do this, she knew not. At this precise moment, the child bit her and dug its tiny, little teeth into the miller daughter’s finger until a dark flow of blood came out. As the blood flowed from the daughter’s finger, the darkness began to depart and a blood red-orange sky appeared. The beams of rays seemed to stretch out to the ends of the kingdom enveloping the residents in a warm glow of orange, yellow, and red. The miller’s daughter’s vision of her bleeding finger became blurred and then became replaced with a vision of the wooden-legged man skipping through the very depths of hell. He was chanting something over and over again as he pushed a cart of what seemed like babies and young children closer and closer to a burning fire. “These are the sins of the weak, the mild, the afraid. These are the sins I collect. Me, it’s time to collect. Me, Rumpelstiltskin, I’m coming to collect!” The vision disappeared and the woman woke up to a pool of her blood and her baby in two mangy, old hands. Her now piercing, sky-blue eyes looked straight into the raven-winged eyes of the monster while she screamed “Rumpelstiltskin!” The widening smirk on his face began to slowly shrink into a partial smile and finally into a definitive scowl. His once black eyes blazed with the depths of hell, the depths of fire, the depths of anguish and suffering. The sky turned blue again and the Miller’s daughter touched her baby with the hands of both a mother and a sinner.