“I’m Cinderella’s wicked stepmother,” the horribly stern, unyielding woman explained to the journalist who interviewed her.  It’s my place in folklore to represent mankind’s dark side, in government and authority in general.  I’m what happens when people abandon all notions of a rightly ordered system of governance and allow their lives to be taken over by a Frankensteinian counterfeit, with my apologies to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.”

“Continue, please,” said the interviewer.

“It all started with Adam and Eve’s Apple, or was it a pomegranate?” she went on. “Pandora’s Box and Prometheus explain it so well too.  Mankind has always been quite the sucker for power, a need to reconfigure the world in his own image and likeness.  I, as Cinderella’s wicked stepmother, represent the way in which the world is understood when mankind abandons all responsibility for his actions.  Her ugly stepsisters, of course, represent the malevolent fruits of…