Flash Fiction Cruella: AKA Steampunk Lady Gaga

Cruella de Vil: Murderer of puppies or liquor-drinking, fast-car-driving feminist icon played by Emma Stone? Can we do better than glamorizing the villains of the past, making excuses for their exaggerated cruelty? Yes. Will we? You’re damn right. Will Disney? Not a chance.

Please meet MY Cruella, affectionately pictured in my head as Steampunk Lady Gaga.

No one knew the real reason Veretta owned a crematorium. Turning a profit off the demise of the upper crust may have seemed off-putting to others, but Veretta knew better than to turn her nose away from the inevitable. Smoking, drinking, flitting aristocrats. She attended their parties, dazzled them with her macabre sense of style and humor dark as her dreams. They knew very well that it was only a matter of time before their bodies burned in her cellar. They knew, but oh how they were drawn to the flames.

They begged her to attend their estate sales, insistent that only she could adopt their precious furs and give them a worshipping home. Only she could do their fashion justice. So she went, she smoked, she drank, she watched. She bought their furs, their leathers, their tanned hides.

They simpered, they groveled. They petted her as though she were a hungry dog in the corner, eating up scraps too unseemly for their taste. And then she went home, and she burned, baby burned. Into the furnace went every pelt, every hide, every inch of skin stolen from an innocent animal. She cried for their pain. And she remembered. Every face. Every peacock.

For each one of them, it was just a matter of time. They’d meet their end and say goodbye to their precious skin and sundry in her furnace. Down here, she was saint and devil. She was compassionate and cruel. She was Veretta and Cruella.