The Ugly Story of Beautiful Beth

Once upon a time there was a beautiful model, with beautiful green eyes and a beautiful beautiful checking account, that lived in an far off land called Manhattan. Her castle was in the upper east side of the city. She used to go to many balls and enjoy dancing, drinking, smiling and shining with the beautiful dresses that a foreign seamstress called Prada made for her. She had been told about some other models that were blessed with gifts as a narcoleptic girl known as the Sleeping Beauty was.

When Beth, that is the name of our model,was a child, she was not so beauty as today. Nobody invited her to balls and she never thought about herself as something shinning at all. So, teenage times finished and a young manager called Adam Prince told her that there was a method to become a star. It was easy, the only thing she had to do was to put two of her fingers inside her mouth and pull. This practice plus the seven magic words “just a glass of water, thank you” made of her what she is now. Every day she looked at her reflection in the mirror thanking god that it was not a speaking one, to see how magic had turned her into one of the best paid models in North America.

She never understood how people could find desirable features in the bag of bones she had become, but they did. Dark times arrived and the prince run away in his horse leaving her alone, without money and suffering from a serious digestive disorder. One day that she was walking down street, she suddenly stopped to look at the mirror of a cake shop. The hole that lived in her stomach roared as a dragon. It was the dragon of hunger, the one she had fought every day during five years without the help of any fairy god-mother...what did our heroine? You will ask.
Well, she finally “lost” the battle and entered the shop. She bought a whole tray of cream cakes and ate it by herself. She felt satisfied for the first time in her life and made up her mind while finishing the scrums of the last filled cake.
Next day she packed her expensive clothes and return to her parent's humble castle in the middle of nowhere. Albert, the king of the sweet corn in the state of Iowa welcomed her daughter happily.

I cannot tell you that the process of adaptation of our beautiful and refined model was easy, but she finally fitted there when she learned how to ask a beer and “complete” sandwich without feeling guilty. She married Philip, her father's partner in the corn factory. His surname was not Prince but he loved her more than anything in the world.

Beth does not return to a ball again, although she missed them. I am not going to tell you that she was happy ever after, but she never felt as an ugly duckling again.

María Suárez Alonso