What Remains: After Happily Ever After

After Happily Ever After
A short allegorical novella (approx. 4,500 words)

What happens after the spell is broken, the wedding celebrated, and the story is supposed to end?

This short novella begins where fairy tales usually stop. A young Queen awakens into a kingdom that appears whole, orderly, and grateful — and slowly discovers that its smooth functioning depends on quiet, constant labour that no one notices until it stops.

As the days unfold, she feeds ovens that should already be warm, corrects accounts that should already balance, and listens to problems that should never have reached her. Her husband is kind, loving, and sincere — and entirely unaware of how much of the world is being held together just outside his field of vision.

Told in restrained, precise prose, After Happily Ever After is a compact allegory about invisible labour, unequal responsibility, and the moment when care becomes expectation. It is not a story about villains or cruelty, but about systems that drift into imbalance — and what it costs to stop compensating for them.

This is a brief, self-contained novella — designed to be read in a single sitting — for readers interested in quiet literary fiction, feminist allegory, and stories that examine power not through spectacle, but through attention.