Fractured fables, p.13
Fractured Fables, page 13
In Sleeping Beauty stories, I’ve come to recognize certain moments—tropes, you might call them, repeated plot points—that have an echo to them. Pieces of the story that have been told so many times they’ve worn the page thin: the christening curse, the pricked finger, the endless sleep, the kiss. You can almost feel reality softening around you, at those times.
I feel it now, as the wicked stepmother whispers to her mirror.
I don’t know what she sees in the glass, but the queen’s throat moves as she swallows. “It’s too late.”
“Yeah.” I make a face, hissing through my teeth. “I recommend you decline this invitation.” It never made much sense why the wicked queen showed up at Snow White’s wedding, anyway.
A scathing glance in my direction. “Do you really think I have a choice? Do you think she sent all those men as an honor guard?”
I shift in my seat, stomping the tiny worm of pity in my stomach. “So pull some witchy shit. Disguise yourself. Knot your sheets together and climb out the window. Run.”
“That would buy me days, maybe weeks. And even if I somehow escaped her reach, what would I do? Hide in a little house in the woods, rotting away?”
The pity vanishes. “Oh, you mean like Snow White did? To escape you?”
Her eyes narrow to vicious slits. She says, “I. Have. To. Get. Out,” with extra periods between each word.
“That’s what I just said.” But I know that’s not what she means. I reach, not very casually, for the straps of my backpack.
The queen stalks toward me, the mirror still clenched in one hand, the air thickening around her. Stray hairs lift in an invisible breeze, tangling like dark branches across the cold moon of her face. “You will tell me how it’s done.” This time it’s not a question or an order; it’s a promise.
So, okay, it was exciting to find myself in a different fairy tale, to feel for the first time the possibility of diverging from my own dreary road, but it’s time to go. I stumble out of my chair, backing away, running my free hand against the shelves in search of something, anything sharp. A knife, a splinter, a tooth, a shard of bone. There’s nothing.
The queen is close now. She reaches for my collar and twists it in one clawed fist, drawing us together. I can see the plain bones of her face beneath the creams and cosmetics, the hard line of her lips.
And I have no spindle and no tower, no roses or fairies or handsome princes, but I have a monarch close enough to kiss. It’ll have to be enough.
I straighten my spine and tilt my face recklessly upward—and, oh God, I have to stand on tiptoe to close the last inch between us, which is both embarrassing and embarrassingly hot—and kiss her.
It’s an undeniably weak kiss: a nonconsensual crush of lips and teeth that I would feel pretty bad about if she hadn’t been on the verge of nonconsensually torturing me. She breaks away, of course—but not instantly. There’s a tiny but critical delay, a moment that makes me wonder how long it’s been since the queen met someone outside of her control, and if she might harbor a low taste for sickly, sarcastic peasants.
Then she’s glaring and panting, reaching for her knife while her cheeks turn patchy pink. I shouldn’t care, because I should be disappearing right now.
Except I’m not.
Nothing is happening. The world is not thinning around me, the infinite pages of the universe are not rustling past. It didn’t work, and both of us are extremely screwed.
Something draws the queen’s eyes away from me. She looks more closely at the mirror in her hand, and her eyes go wide.
She drops my collar and catches my hand instead. Before I can pull away—before I can even begin to form the word hey!—she presses our hands to the glass surface of her mirror.
Except there is no glass. Just our hands, falling into nothing at all.
4
IT’S COLD, BETWEEN worlds. There’s no air, but it whips past me, smelling of frost and first snows. The only warm thing is the queen’s hand locked tight around mine, dragging us into a story that doesn’t belong to either of us.
My knees hit earth, moss-pillowed and green, and the queen falls beside me with a squashy thud. She makes a sound like air leaking out of a tire, and I’d make fun of her if I didn’t feel the same way. My cells are frazzled, as if my entire body was recently microwaved, and it takes me longer than it should to stand and look around.
Trees. Soft, springtime air. Extremely melodic birdsong. The whole scene has a strange haziness to it, like a pre-Raphaelite painting or an old VHS tape.
The queen staggers to her feet in front of me and spreads her hands wide in triumph. “I didn’t need you after all, Zinnia Gray. I saved myself, as I always have and always will.”
I roll my eyes so hard it hurts a little. “Oh yeah? Then who’s that?”
The queen’s victorious smile sags a little at the edges. She follows my gaze over her left shoulder, where a glass coffin lies between the trees. A girl with a cute black bob is lying beneath the glass, her face lit by a single, perfect sunbeam, her hands folded limply around a bouquet of flowers.
The queen stares. She opens her mouth, closes it, and opens it again. “I don’t know,” she answers.
“Are you serious? Did you hit your head?”
“No, I know who it is, but—” The queen swallows, her eyes fixed on the unsettling white of the girl’s face. “That’s not my Snow White.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” I tuck both hands in my pockets, squinting around at the scenery. “Your world was a little more Gothic, but this place has a ‘now-in-Technicolor’ vibe.” I can tell she doesn’t understand, so I say meanly, “Congratulations, you made it to a different world! But you’re still in the same story.”
The queen looks dazed, staring down at Snow White with the beginnings of revulsion creeping into her eyes. “Why is the light like this?” She reaches her hand tentatively into the sunbeam. Something violet drifts into her palm. “Are there flower petals falling over her?”
I don’t answer because I’m busy sidling behind her. I snatch the mirror out of the queen’s hand and fling it sideways at the trunk of a tree. I’m hoping for a dramatic shatter of glass, but the frame just thwumps disappointingly against the bark and falls to the ground, perfectly whole. There’s a half second’s held breath before both of us dive for the mirror.
The queen shoves past me and I tackle her around the waist. It devolves quickly into a wrestling match, our clothes streaked with moss and dirt, our breath coming fast.
The queen is stronger and meaner than me. “No,” she pants. “I am—not”—she pins me between her knees and lunges for the mirror—“staying here!”
I try to slap the mirror out of her grip but she turns the glass to meet my hand, and it flies through it, passing back into that cold nowhere.
The last thing I hear is the queen laughing.
* * *
THIS TIME WE land somewhere dim and damp, like one of those basements that never quite dries out. Opening my eyes takes more effort than it should, and I can’t tell whether it’s the GRM or the unwilling trips through nowheresville.
The first thing I see is a stranger’s face smiling down at me. It’s a cute face: freckled and gap-toothed, framed by tangled hair the color of coal. Her lips aren’t red as blood and her skin has seen too much sun to be compared to snow, but I know a protagonist when I see one. “Hi,” I rasp.
“Good morning!” God save me from princesses and their exclamation points.
“Morning. Where’s—” I sit up abruptly, blinking the room into focus. But it’s not a room. It’s a cave, with a sandy floor and tidy fire pit.
The girl—woman, really, she’s got at least a decade on the cherubic kid in the coffin—settles cross-legged beside me. “Your angry woman?” She has a burbling, throaty sort of accent.
“She’s not my—yeah, her.”
She gestures with her chin toward the entrance of the cave, where more than a dozen men are struggling against a tall, dark-haired figure. There seems to be a lot of swearing from all parties.
“Who are those guys?”
The stranger smiles fondly at them. “Mine. They took me in when my mother tried to murder me, and I’ve been here ever since.” She confides this without much concern, as if attempted filicide is one of life’s little misfortunes.
“Ah.” My brains feel like hot Cheez Whiz, but I distantly remember versions of Snow White where she’s adopted by robbers or brigands rather than dwarves. Spanish, maybe? Or Flemish? Either way, I’m pretty sure her mom takes another shot at her, and she deserves a heads up. “Listen, Snow White,” I begin.
“Sneeuwwitje.”
“Listen, Sneeuwwitje—”
The queen shrieks from the cave entrance. “Zinnia! Tell these ruffians to unhand me!”
I shout back without turning, “Tie her up tight, boys, she’s super dangerous.” There are muffled sounds of fury in response, a definite uptick in swear words.
I try again. “You might already know this, Sneeuwwitje, but your mom is definitely going to try to kill you again. So if anybody shows up with an apple, or a comb, or whatever, just say no.”
Sneeuwwitje nods solemnly. “She gave me a demon’s ring, which sent me into a deep sleep. How did you know?”
I squint at the stained leather of her clothing, the calluses across her palms. “If she already put you to sleep … how come you aren’t married to a prince right now?”
“Oh, I told him no. I have seventeen husbands already.” An extremely compelling dimple appears, presenting a convincing argument that a man might share one-seventeenth of this woman and count himself lucky. “Eighteen just seemed greedy.”
“Sure, yeah,” I say faintly, making a distant mental note that not all princesses need saving.
Someone shouts a warning. Footsteps pound across the sand. The queen’s fingers close around my ankle and she grins fiercely up at me, a doubled trail of blood leaking from her nose and a mirror in her hand.
I have time to say, “Oh, for fuck’s sa—” before the world dissolves again.
* * *
THE NEXT WORLD has the sleek, blue-lit aesthetic of far-future science fiction. The walls are stacked with cold metal coffins. Waxen faces stare from their small, frosted windows, dead or sleeping, their lips a sickening, poisonous red.
The queen hisses between her teeth and flings us back into the void.
We land on a steep and lonely mountainside. For a moment I think we’re alone, but then a branch cracks. A long-legged dog trots past us, its coat silken silver, its eyes fixed on some invisible purpose. Six more follow at its heels, a soft river of paws and skulls and sterling fur.
“What—” the queen begins, but a woman comes loping into the view after the dogs. She has hair the color of the moon and a dress the color of snow, and her eyes widen when they land on the queen. For a moment I think she might bare her teeth or set her hounds on us, but then her eyes slide to me. She bows her head, as one would to a fellow soldier in a long war, and runs on after her dogs.
The two of us are left standing together in the pine-scented silence, unsure whether we’ve been blessed or cursed. The queen takes my hand almost gently this time before she lifts the mirror again.
A college campus full of ivy-eaten buildings and signs in Korean, where one extremely beautiful boy is offering an apple to another equally beautiful boy.
A sumptuous wedding feast that seems to involve seven ogres and a princess in a gown of richest red.
A hunched woman offering a comb to a little girl, her lips curving in a cold smile.
I can feel myself coming undone, unspooling into the endless whirl of dead girls and coffin lids, wicked mothers and poison apples. The same story repeated again and again, like a woman standing between two mirrors, reflected into infinity.
And then another forest, curled and black beneath a starless sky. I wrench my arm away from the queen and pluck the mirror from her other hand. She’s too weak to stop me, her skin clammy and chilled, her limbs shuddering.
She rolls onto her stomach beside me, panting into the dark muck of leaves and earth. “This is where you draw the line?” she spits. “This is where you choose to stay?”
She has an extremely good point. The woods around us bear no resemblance at all to the first forest we landed in, with its flower petals and birdsong. The trees here are knotted and bent, like snapped bones that have healed poorly, and the darkness is the kind that makes your eyes ache if you look at it too long. I’ve hit a couple of versions of Sleeping Beauty that edged into horror, and returned with new scars and probably some undiagnosed PTSD. Charm threw a fit about it, and the next time I left home I found a new pocketknife and a first aid kit in my pack, along with a note reading Don’t die, bonehead in Prim’s fancy calligraphy.
So, no, I don’t love the Grimm-dark vibe of these woods, but I’m tired on a subatomic level, my muscles shaking and my teeth chattering, and I’m done channel surfing at someone else’s whim. “Why not?” I make an effort to crawl away and manage several consecutive feet before collapsing against my own backpack, mirror still in my hand. “Look, you’ve got to give it a rest. You’re going to kill yourself at this pace.”
“As if you care about my fate.” Her voice darkens, silky and low. “Beyond your base desires, of course.”
“My what?”
The queen raises herself to her hands and knees just so she can do a haughty glare at me. “It’s a little late to feign indifference. You kissed me.”
I’m torn between explaining that my kiss was actually a failed escape attempt and clarifying that there’s nothing especially base about desiring a tall, dangerous woman with terrible vibes (whomst among us, etc.). Instead, I say, “Whatever. I just need a break from that mirror, okay?”
“Then tell me how to get out of this damned story.” The queen’s voice is ragged, pushed far beyond exhaustion but still unwilling to bend. It would be admirable if it weren’t extremely annoying. “Tell me, and I swear I’ll stop.”
“Bite me.”
“Now is not the time for your crude fantasies!” She climbs unsteadily to her feet, takes two wavering steps in my direction. “You have no idea what it’s like to fight for your own right to exist. To know yourself doomed, yet to keep striving—”
I throw a wad of leaves at her. “Cry me a fucking river, woman. You just found out how your story ends last week. I’ve spent my whole life under a death sentence.”
The queen is clawing wet leaves out of her hair, teeth flashing white in the gloom. “You think I haven’t?” Her voice is a strangled hiss. “I may not have known about the iron shoes, but I was always headed for a bad ending. I was an ugly second daughter with uncanny power, and then I was a foreign bride who bore no heirs. Now I am a queen who is feared only slightly more than she is hated, and my time is up. But I have fought tooth and nail to survive, and no pretty little princess is going to stop me.”
This little monologue leaves me with two not entirely comfortable sensations. The first is the sudden, lurching shame of my worldview being wrenched out of shape as it occurs to me that Snow White might not be the only victim here. The second comes from the word pretty, which the queen tried to hurl at me like a slap, but which faltered mid-flight and landed quite differently. I find myself struggling to form a sufficiently scathing response, or any response at all.
But she’s not even looking at me anymore. She’s staring into the abyssal black between the trees with a long-suffering expression. “Oh, not another one.”
There’s a fragile amber light flickering closer, like a candle held in a shaking fist. Scurrying footsteps. The terrified panting of someone running for reasons that are not recreational.
The queen looks inclined to melt into the shadows and let this character pass us by, their narrative uninterrupted, but I stand woozily and say, “Hello?”
I catch a glimpse of a young girl with brown skin and terror-struck eyes before I realize the lantern has left her night-blind. She slams into my diaphragm and we go down in a pile of limbs and elbows while the queen gives a small, pained sigh.
The girl scrambles to her knees, already trying to launch herself back into the tangled dark of the woods, but I catch her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”
She shrugs my hand away. “I have to hide—they’re coming—”
“Who? The huntsman?”
She nods, wheeling to look behind her as if she expects to find a henchman lumbering out from behind a tree. The woods are perfectly still.
I know she’ll be all right on her own—she’s due to find a friendly bunch of dwarves or fairies soon, and the huntsman probably isn’t even chasing her—but she’s a lot younger than the other Snow Whites we’ve seen, and much more frightened. I find myself saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll help you find a safe place.”
The queen makes a strangled noise of protest and I shoot her a repressive look. “Won’t we?”
“I don’t see why I should,” she huffs.
“God, you’re the worst.”
“You think you’re such a hero, but you won’t help me—”
“Maybe if you acted just a smidge less evil I’d consider it.”
The queen lunges, fangs bared, but I raise her mirror and waggle it warningly. “Ah-ah. You wouldn’t want to break this, now would you?”
It’s at this point, when the queen’s face is a twisted rictus of fury, her eyes fixed on her precious mirror, that the young girl shoves between us.
She raises her lantern high and says, “I’ll find it myself,” over one shoulder as she passes us.
I pause long enough to give the queen a “now look what you did” face before hurrying after Snow White. I rummage in my pack one-handed and produce a battered wooden box. “Here, this’ll tell us where to go.” I open the compass and wait for the needle to wobble to a stop, directing us northeast.
