Fractured fables, p.17
Fractured Fables, page 17
I can feel Eva studying me. “It’s your fault, isn’t it? That’s what that fairy meant. The worlds are merging because you won’t finish your story.”
“Excuse me for not wanting to stand around and wait to die.”
“Oh, I quite understand.” Her tone turns acidic, blackly triumphant. “But then, I’m the villain.”
I don’t say anything in my defense, because there’s not much to say. Maybe I’m the villain too.
Eventually, I feel Eva’s bitterness drain away. “The mirror showed me you, out of all the possible people in all the universes.” It sounds almost like an apology. “Why?”
“Well, what were you doing at the time?”
“I was looking into the mirror, obviously.” She adds, far less sharply, “Wishing for a way out.”
“Well.” I remember standing in that hotel bathroom, on the run from another happily ever after that wasn’t mine. “So was I. As it happens.”
She meets my eyes then, and something passes soft and silent between us. A wordless understanding, a sympathy so profound it approaches symmetry. It makes me think I was wrong, and the mirror in the hotel bathroom showed me my own reflection, after all.
“When you kissed me—” Eva begins, and my heart does a maneuver that feels like jumping off a high dive. “It wasn’t desire. You were just trying to trigger this narrative resonance, weren’t you?”
My heart belly flops. “Yeah. It didn’t work.”
“So, without the mirror … we’re stuck here.” Her voice is ashen.
“Looks like it.”
Silence unfurls between us. I should be formulating unlikely escape plans, but all I can think about is the sight of Red with her parents, the love strung like a cat’s cradle between the three of them. They must have known since the day she was born what fate awaited her, and it didn’t stop them caring. It didn’t stop my stupid, stubborn parents, either, or my stupid, stubborn best friend. The last time I spoke to her she said we had to talk, and I could tell from her voice that it wasn’t about my share of the rent or the laundry I left in the washer until it got moldy. Sure, I said, and then I went to my room, pricked my finger, and peaced out without even leaving a note.
And if I die in this sick version of Snow White, I’ll never get to tell her how fucking sorry I am.
If Eva hears me crying, she has the decency not to say anything. “I really am sorry,” I say thickly. “I’m sorry you didn’t get out of your story, but if it helps—at least you’re not the villain anymore. If you ever were.”
She’s quiet so long I don’t think she’ll answer. And then, when I’m sunk deep in a stupor of regrets and should-haves and aching joints, she whispers, “Thank you.”
A few hours after that, they come for us.
I find, if I tilt my shoulders and wrench my arms to the side, that I can just reach Eva’s hand as they march us through the castle. Her fingers wrap tight around mine, and we’re dragged together toward the climax of our stories.
8
I ALWAYS IMAGINED dying in a hospital room, which is sort of funny because it means some treacherous part of my subconscious always wanted to go back home before the end. I pictured my mom and dad on one side of my bed, Prim and Charm on the other, and lots of really high-caliber drugs singing me to sleep.
I did not picture my bare feet on black stone. I didn’t picture an airless courtyard or a low, greasy bonfire. I sure as hell didn’t picture anyone walking beside me, her fingers biting into mine as if I am her last hope in the world, or she’s mine. My hands are numb and bloodless from hours hanging above my head, but I don’t let go.
The huntsmen unshackle our wrists and toss us to the ground before the fire. We crawl toward one another without speaking, our spines bumping as we turn to face the ringed huntsmen. The queen—or Snow White, or whatever twisted amalgamation she is in this world—comes sweeping through their ranks with a supervillain’s sense of timing. Her hair is still silky black and her skin is still that unsettling alabaster, but her cheeks seem a little less round this morning, her lips a shade less red.
It feels like a good moment to say something quippy and brave, demonstrating my cocky resilience in the face of certain death, but nothing comes to mind. If I had my phone, I would text Charm in all caps: NOW’S THE TIME BITCH
Snow White stops a few feet away from us. “I’m quite cross with you, you know. Children aren’t easy to catch.” She looks petulant, disturbingly babyish. “They were bound for such a glorious purpose.”
“What, dinner?”
Snow White’s petulance darkens. “They were meant to keep their queen in the eternal youth that suits her best.” Eva makes a small noise of understanding beside me, and Snow White’s long-lashed gaze transfers to her. “It was my mother—well, stepmother—who first learned the trick of it.” She says it like a secret, although there are huntsmen all around, their ivory necklaces chattering with every tiny movement. “I don’t know how old she really was when she married my father, but she looked only a year or two older than me. I think.” A doubtful look, as if it’s been so long that she can’t quite remember. “She might have carried on forever if she hadn’t tried to steal the wrong heart.” Snow White’s fingers tap the white hyphen of her clavicle.
“Look.” I wet cracked lips. “That’s super awful and traumatizing, and I’m sure you need therapy, but like … Why did you turn into the exact same kind of monster? Why couldn’t you just chill and live happily ever after?” I’m mostly talking at random, trying to give Charm a few extra seconds to pull off a miracle and rescue me, like she always has before. I wonder if, sometime over the last six months, she stopped sleeping with her ringer on.
Snow White’s head tilts, nose scrunching. “It’s not really a happily ever after if it ends, is it?”
I think I say something here—it’s not like that or you don’t understand—but I can’t hear it over the rising noise in my head, the sudden bile in my mouth. Is that what I’ve been doing, these last five years? Trying to outrun my own ending? Throwing away every chance at happiness just because it was fleeting?
I swallow acid. “Every story ends,” I whisper. I don’t even know which of us I’m trying to convince. Eva shifts beside me so that her shoulder is pressing hard against mine.
Snow White is looking at us like we’re very young children; maybe we are, to her. “Well, yours will. But I have a few questions before it does.” She withdraws something slim and silver from her skirts and turns it to face us. For a confused second I think she’s showing us a picture on a phone screen—I see two faces, two sets of desperate eyes—before I understand that I’m looking at a mirror.
My mouth goes dry and sandy. My mind goes perfectly blank. Eva goes very, very still.
Snow White strokes the mirror’s surface with one pale fingernail. “This mirror of yours. It has shown me things. Other lands. Other worlds, perhaps.” I see the future with helpless, ugly clarity: an immortal cannibal wandering from world to world, plucking princesses from their tales like ripe fruit from the trees. She’s warped her own story into a gory horror flick; what could she do to the multiverse?
She asks sweetly, “How do I get there?”
“W-why would you ever want to leave your own world?” Other than the perpetual twilight and freakshow fauna. “You’ve got a great setup here. A lovely, um, lair, and loyal henchpeople.”
Snow White makes a moue. “The villagers are getting restless. They’re a tiresome bunch, always fomenting and resisting. It’s harder and harder to get what I need.” She pinches the flesh of her throat, where the skin has sagged almost imperceptibly. (I have the unhelpful thought that Dr. Bastille would have an absolute field day with this version of Snow White. “The Fear of Age in the Age of Fear: Representations of the Crone in Modern Folk Horror.”)
Snow White smiles her sweet, springtime smile. “They’re nothing at all like the little lambs I see in other worlds. So I will ask you again: How do I get there?”
I don’t answer and neither, somewhat to my surprise, does Eva. Her silence fills me with a weird, reckless pride. “Sorry, I’m just getting the most intense déjà vu, you know? I feel like I was just questioned under torture by an evil queen like, yesterday.”
This provokes a brief, whispered argument with Eva (“Torture is a strong word.” “Well, if the shoe fits.” “If the shoe fits what?” “God, never mind.”), at the end of which she clears her throat and says audibly, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I shouldn’t have.”
It feels like the sort of apology you make because you’re pretty sure it’s your last chance. I move my hand so that my fingers cover hers, because I’m pretty sure she’s right. “It’s cool,” I say inadequately.
Snow White is watching us closely, looking from our faces to the place where our hands touch. She makes a resigned tsk. “I can see you’re both terribly stubborn. I’ll find my own way. I certainly have the time.” She makes an imperious gesture and one of her huntsmen steps forward, drawing his sword with a sound like scraping bone as he comes for us. It’s all happening way too fast. I thought I could burn more time bullshitting—I thought Charm would still find her way across the universe for me, even without the mirror, because the rules don’t apply to us—
But the huntsman doesn’t impale either of us. He steps around us to the edge of the fire and reaches into the coals with the tip of his sword. He extracts an ugly tangle of iron. It looks like the kind of thing you’d see in a museum, a mass of old metal with an obscure, chilling label reading Scold’s bridle, 17th c. or Pear of anguish, 18th c.
Then Eva sobs, harsh and sudden, and I realize that I’m looking at two pairs of iron shoes, the metal straps glowing a dull, hellish red.
I curl my fingers tight around Eva’s, but her hand is limp and damp in mine. I turn to face her, kneeling, speaking in a desperate rush. “It’s okay, I’m sorry, we’re going to be alright.” But Eva isn’t looking at me, or even at the shoes. Her eyes are on Snow White, who has already forgotten us and is now staring into the mirror’s surface with a chilling, predatory patience.
Eva’s expression as she looks at the queen is not one of panic, or loathing, or even despair. Her face has an eerie coolness to it, a carved-marble quality that makes my chest hurt for no reason. “Hey, listen, Charm knows we’re here. She could still save us, okay?”
Eva’s eyes move to mine slowly, squinting as if the two of us are standing on opposite sides of a very wide river.
“I hope she does,” she says softly. Then, just as softly, she kisses me.
It’s dry and gentle. It feels like an apology, or a farewell. “Thank you.” She whispers the words against my lips.
The very small part of my brain that isn’t occupied by the imminent approach of my own painful death or the salt-sweetness of her mouth manages to say, “For what?”
“For showing me I do not have to be the villain, the evil stepmother, the Wicked Witch of the East Bro. For giving me…” Her eyes move back to Snow White, and her lip curls, revealing a slim white line of bared teeth. “Agency.”
It’s at this point that Eva begins unlacing the front of her dress. My brain splits into two competing factions, one of which is cheering and sounds a lot like Charm on girls’ night at the gay bar, and the other of which is thinking how sad it is that Eva has endured so much, only to lose her mind now. “Eva, babe, what are you doing?”
She doesn’t answer, drawing the ribbon slowly out of her shift. Except it’s not a ribbon, is it? It’s a bodice lace.
A syrupy weight settles over my limbs. I notice small things: the minute tilt of Eva’s body away from mine. The taut cord of muscle in her neck, the divot in her cheek as she clenches her jaw, bracing herself to do something terrible and brave and stupid. I reach for her. Too late. Eva has already launched herself across the courtyard, knifing through the air like a falcon with dirty white feathers. She collides with Snow White, and then there’s a splintering, shattering sound, like a dropped wineglass. Something sharp slices across my cheek.
The courtyard falls into a numbed silence as every eye looks at the ground, at the place where the magic mirror lies in broken shards. I see our faces reflected in the shards, split and doubled, frozen in shock.
There’s a large sliver of glass right beside me, close enough to touch. The face reflected in this piece does not belong to the huntsmen, or either of the queens, or even myself. It’s a face framed by a long wing of bleached blond hair, with a septum piercing and an expression suggesting homicidal intent, or at least serious bodily harm. The lips of the face are moving, repeating the same name over and over, interspersed with swears: Zinnia, Zinnia, goddammit Zinnia.
“Charm, holy shit—” I reach for the shard and my fingers fall through the glass, into the cold rush of the great nothing between worlds. I feel myself tilting into it, falling forward, but I dig my toes into the stones. “Eva, it’s Charm! Come on!”
Eva is crouching before the queen with blood oozing from one nostril. She looks back at me and understanding flashes across her face. But she doesn’t run to me. She could have. I want that on the record. She could have taken my hand and run, and left this world under the thumb of its wicked queen for another century or two. She could have chosen to survive, like she always had.
Instead, she draws the bodice lace tight between her hands. It gleams sickly green in the firelight.
Eva nods once to me, with a fey, rueful smile, as if to say, Well, someone has to, before she surges to her feet and wraps the ribbon around Snow White’s throat.
Warm fingers grab my wrist, pulling hard. The last thing I see before I go is Eva—my not-so-wicked queen, my heroic villain—falling beneath the weight of her enemies.
9
I LAND HARD, flat on my back, feeling like a lump of Play-Doh forced through a cheese grater. The sky above me is no longer low and purple, but a bright, suburban blue crisscrossed by jet trails. A few oak leaves slap peacefully against one another. Damp earth soaks through the back of my T-shirt.
I’m in Charm and Prim’s backyard in Madison, a place I wasn’t totally sure I’d ever see again and from which I now desperately and ironically want to leave.
“Well, if it isn’t Little Miss SOS.”
I sit up—a considerable, even noble effort, which Charm does not appear to appreciate in the least. She’s kneeling beside me, her nose running badly, her cheeks blotched with ash. Prim is on my other side, her enormous eyes crimped with worry. She brushes dirt from my shoulder, plucks something from the greasy nest of my hair.
Behind them is the tiny metal fire ring they bought for their microscopic yard. There’s a pair of flip-flops inside the ring, still smoldering gently, sending up chemical curls of bluish smoke.
I give Charm a quick, woozy smile. “Knew you’d figure it out eventually.”
A look of relief crosses her face, there and gone again. She throws a sullen glance at the fire ring. “I liked those shoes.”
“Uh.” The flip-flops are hot-pink plastic. I can see the dollar store sticker still stuck to the underside of the left shoe. “I owe you a pair?”
Charm shrugs. “It’s fine.” It’s clearly not.
“Okay, whatever. I actually need to go back to where I was, like right now, so if you have another pair to burn that would be great. And maybe a mirror?”
Charm doesn’t move. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Her tone is cordial, but her eyes are thin and hard.
“Thank you?”
“Maybe try, ‘I’m sorry, Charm.’”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” It comes out bratty, audibly insincere. “But I really have to—”
“Shut the fuck up and listen for a second?” Charm’s civility vanishes; she was never a good bullshitter. Prim winces as Charm leans in. “Let’s recap our situation, shall we? So, first, I tell you I’ve got something important to talk about, and you say, ‘Sure thing, babe!’ But then you Spider-Verse into another dimension and leave me hanging.” I have the sinking suspicion that this speech has been rehearsed, more than once, with and without slides. Prim is creeping for the back door now, leaving me to my fate. “Second, you don’t talk to me for six months. Which is very mature and chill. Then, third, you send me a damn Aarne-Thompson-Uther index number—even though you specifically told me that system was, quote, ‘a Eurocentric mess’ that ‘should be retired from anthropology syllabi’—and failed to respond to any of my requests for clarification. Leaving me to spend the last seven hours frantically acting out the goddamn plot of goddamn Snow White, ever more certain that you’d already bitten into a poison apple or been assaulted by a wandering prince or some—”
There’s a lot more to the speech, judging by the rising volume and level of aggression, but all I can think about is Eva’s small, sad smile right before she wrapped the bodice lace around Snow White’s neck. Like she knew the choice would damn her and didn’t care, because at least she was choosing her own damnation.
I interrupt Charm by throwing my arms around her. She stiffens, then hugs me back so hard it feels vindictive. “You’re such a little shit, you know that?”
I pull away. “Yeah. And I’m really, really sorry. I am. But I have to find a way back into Snow White right now. I have to save—”
Charm tosses both hands in the air. “Some stranger? What about us, Zin? What about me, you absolute turdbucket.”
“I know! I’m sorry, but people need me, okay?”
Charm chews the inside of her cheek before saying, in a voice that could only be accurately measured by the Kelvin scale, “That. Is what I’m trying to tell you. Bonehead.”
A small, extremely uncomfortable silence follows this statement, during which Charm watches me with red, tear-sheened eyes and I call myself every bad name I can think of. It strikes me that neither heroes nor dying girls are very good at sticking around, at the ordinary work of living: calling your friends back and remembering their birthdays, going to the doctor for regular checkups, taking care of the people you love.
