You take your muddy platforms off at the door and walk on the wooden floors in your striped stocking feet. Each laborious step you take is filled with exhaustion and hunger, but the coolness of the marble floors feels refreshing against your tired soles.
You're in no mood for any more tricks, so you stick to the rooms you're familiar with. Unfortunately, this means the only place you can clean yourself up is the room you stayed in last night. "It's fine," you tell yourself. "The shower or the soap or the bed or whatever it was has already made me younger. Maybe it's done with me." Hopelessly wishful thinking on your part, you admit, but you're so tired you don't even care.
You yank at the knot in the front of your bodice and it slips apart. You slowly pull the dress over your head and then strip off the arm warmers and leggings. The collar is the last to go. You toss everything into the closet in a dirty, crumpled heap. "Here's your dress back. I hope you choke on it," you say to the closet before slamming the door.
Naked, you sit down on the bed and reach for one of the two apples you plucked from the tree on your way back. You're starving, and you can't sleep on an empty stomach. Once both apples are chewed to the core, you find a small trash basket next to a large dresser and toss them in. Out of curiosity, you double-check the drawers (they were empty this morning when you searched for your clothes) and confirm they still had nothing to offer.
You stand in front of the mirror for a moment. Your face and hands are smudged with dirt, but the rest of you looks as gorgeous as ever. You don't remember looking this good when you were in college. Although your skin was a bit paler now--despite having spent half the day in the sun--you still couldn't say you looked bad. You also note your hair's white streaks are more pronounced than before, no doubt an effect of the apples you just ate. Without the platforms on it's trailing on the ground by about three inches, and you can tell it's taken its fair amount of dirt from your fall.
Your eyes flit from the dragging ends of your hair to your feet as you feel a tingling arise. A dark spot appears on each toenail. Watching intently, you stare as the spots slowly enlarge, darkness creeping across each nail. You sigh resignedly as as the latest apple finishes the work of the previous two, and your toenails are now as uniformly and permanently black as the ones on your fingers.
After drawing the bathwater, you slowly slip yourself into it. It feels great to your aching body, especially your feet, having been cramped in those boots all day. You clench and unclench your toes, enjoying the feeling in the warm water. Soft tingles dance about your tiny toes before sliding up your arches. You bite your obsidian lip softly at the sensation, involuntarily sucking in a sharp breath through your nose. Forcing the feelings down, you reach for a scrubber, conveniently provided on a nearby shelf along with soap and shampoo and start soaking your long hair.
You stay in the bath for quite some time, trying to get the dirt out of your hair and to get your muscles to stop aching. You let the water drain, taking with it the filth from today's excursion, and set the shower spraying. You make a final sweep of your body with the soap and then start shampooing your hair. This takes more time than you anticipated, but you find the experience very enjoyable. How many girls could claim their hair was this long and this gorgeous?
Finally finished, you towel yourself off. Even when damp your hair retains a bit of its body. You wrap it in another dry towel and head on into bed. The sheets have somehow been cleaned and prepared for you, as you noted earlier, and feel even more comfortable than last night. You have no trouble at all falling into a deep, restful sleep.