by Cameron Jace
“I agree. Look at what happened to Rumpelstiltskin when they knew his real name,” I sighed. “Which reminds me, Jacob. Why didn’t you alter Rumpelstiltskin’s story? The idea that knowing one’s real name can kill him might have drawn suspicions and conclusions that the fairy tales were forged.”
“That was my brother Wilhelm’s idea.”
“I am not following,” I shook my head. “Why would he want to tell a story as it really is while all the rest was forged?”
“You know him. He was big on giving hints in the books,” Jacob explained. “Wilhelm was never sure that forging the fairy tales was the right thing to do, so he left hints and clues intentionally for it might help if there was ever someone who would read between the lines and uncover the truth.”
“And what kind of hint did Rumpelstiltskin’s story give?”
“Can’t you get it?”
“Sorry. I am a queen. I am spoiled. I am evil. I am bad. And I am dumb and an airhead. Spit it out, Jacob.” I played with my mirror coins.
“The fact that Rumpelstiltskin is not called something like an evil troll like you were called the Evil Queen should make one the reader question why the names of the characters were never mentioned in fairy tales – true tales have true names. Since in the story, if someone had known Rumpelstiltskin’s name, he would be exposed, Wilhelm thought this would make the readers think about the real names of the characters. There was a time when he wanted to mention the Faerie Godmother’s real name but I persuaded him otherwise.”
“Gah! Don’t even mention her to me. I hate her guts, that silly giggling woman.”
“She hates you as well, you silly evil queen.” For a dying man, Jacob’s humor was as bitter as the taste of the afterlife on his tongue.
The white of Jacob’s eyes looked reddened with vein-like spirals of red blood, curving underneath cinder-blackened eyebrows. A perfect white, red, and black scene. It made me wonder about how long I was destined to stay cursed and hunted by those three colors. Sometimes, I thought I could only see in blooded black and white.
I looked at the cinder on the floor next to the fireplace, wondering why Jacob’s forehead was smeared with it. For all I knew, Jacob could hardly walk at this stage of his illness. The cinder let me suspect that he had found Cinderella. There was no point in asking him. If he did find her, he wouldn’t tell me where she was.
“So since you’re dying, Jacob, I have a confession to make. But first, I have to ask you something, for no one will able to answer me after you die.”
I shook my head and breathed onto my manicured, long fingernails to puff the suspicious thoughts away. It was only minutes before he was gone anyway. “Do you think I am evil, Jacob?” I finally asked.
Jacob looked the other way.
“Look at me. It shouldn’t be that hard to answer. You know what happened. You know what I have done … and what she has done … and what she is capable of.”
“In my book, you’re the evil of all evil,” he whispered. “But when it comes to logic, I get confused sometimes. Many nights, I sat wondering about this but I never got a straight answer,” he turned his head back to me. “All I know is that evil is a point of view, to both: the reader and the protagonist, the predator and the prey, the dreamer and the Dreamhunter. People love me when I retell the stories they have collected. If I retell the story as it really happened, they blame and accuse me of telling a bad story, because readers expect stories to be logical, to have a linear plot, and to have plain good and bad characters, to have a hero and have a villain. That’s the difference between fact and fiction. A great writer is an excellent liar. And I am an excellent writer.”
“Are you saying that this is why you altered the tales?” I laughed mockingly.
“You know damn well why I altered the tales,” If Jacob had fangs, he would be snarling at me now.
I nodded at his words of wisdom and tapped his hands gently as an apology. Although we’ve been enemies all along, I admired the man and his brother who brought tales and bedtimes stories to the children of the world. Tales that they shouldn’t have told, at least not to children. But they did a great job in forging them and making them believable.
I lowered my head and looked him closer in the eyes again. My eyes have sunk huntsmen to their knees and girls to their glass coffins, so he should have feared me.
“You know what she is, right?” I whispered to him, my breath waving like fog upon his face. This time I meant Snow White. “You have heard the stories. They have told you and you know what she is.”
“That’s debatable,” he said, glaring at me. He was not afraid of me. “She still has a choice to choose who she is.”
“Jacob. Jacob. Jacob,” I sighed, pulling back and patting him on one hand again. “You and your riddles. You know that I like your brother Wilhelm more than you?”
“Are you capable of liking and loving?” He slapped back with the last few breathes.
“In many ways, I think of myself as an angel.” I smirked, blinked innocently, and then my eyes glittered.
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Imagine the world with no Snow White, or better, without a Cinderella.” I laughed. The coin mirrors clicked together in my hand as I did. ”If you’re so wise, why did you even bother to write the story? You could have just buried it with you to the grave,”
“It’s better to fracture a myth and let it spread and let it cling to the gelatin minds of children over the years than to burry it. Things buried are sooner or later dug up and surfaced, and then the truth shall be set free. Things altered are harder to bring back to its normal source, because in the mind of generations who have inherited the idea and passed it from one to another, they will refuse to believe otherwise.”
I smirked, not uttering a word. Took a glance at the mirror coins and then back at him. “You don’t know where you are, Jacob. Right?” I said as I kept clicking the mirror coins. The sound drove him mad.
“Oh—“ Jacob shrugged, getting the message. He lifted one hand and stared at it as if to make sure it was real then looked at the cottage and then back to me. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “You know we wouldn’t just call it a dream since the Dreamworld is not that easy to describe. But yes this is a dream.”
“Whose dream?” he asked reluctantly.
“Yours, Jacob. This is your dream.”
“You knew that I am immortal too?”
“All the time. And you know what that means.”
“It means that if I die in the dream, I will never wake up again.” He said absently, but with a thin smile curving on the corner of his lips. “It means you’ve been fooling around with me since you came in here. You actually came here to kill me.”
“Don’t you love?” I wiggled my nose. “When the character in the book killed the author?”
”But how did you enter my dream?”
“I had a Dreamhunter help me.”
“So why don’t you just do it now?” Jacob coughed, instead of yelling, at me.
“You know I am the last person in the world to stop someone from dying.” I raised an eyebrow. “But I am going to be kind. I am to flip one of my mirror coins for you.”
“What?”
“The coin’s head is a mirror that shows your beauty when you look at it. The coins tail only shows your ugliness. Beauty gets you killed – for you know I can’t stand someone beautiful – and ugliness spares your life. Should I flip, Jacob?”
“I’d rather day then live with your ugliness.”
“Wrong answer,” I shook my head. “How about if I tell you about her before I flip the coin?” I offered. “How about if I tell you about three incidents with her from my point of view. Maybe you’ll change your mind and understand.”
“I wouldn’t have you tell me a bedtime story before I sleep for my dreams will turn into apple-rotten nightmares,” He coughed. “And definitely I will not allow you to tell me a dead-time story by no—“
>
Jacob didn’t finish his last words as his breath abandoned him. He was dead, and I didn’t even get the chance to flip my coin. His eyes were still open and I should have shut them close, but I didn’t. I once heard that as long as you have not closed the eyes of the deceased, they still could hear you and pass your story to the afterlife. I was determined to tell him about her.
“Deadtime story? Hmm,” I sighed. “What an idea, Jacob. A storyteller who tells stories to the dying before they leave the world. That would make a great book, you know,” I was unapologetic about talking to a corpse. I was so used to corpses. Corpses of girls. Young, ripe, and beautiful girls. “Let me tell you a Deadtime story, Jacob. One that the world isn’t supposed to know about. Not even you. Although you think you’ve been told the right story, you were so wrong. What better timing to tell you than when you’re freshly dead.”
I put leg on leg and talked to the dead Jacob Grimm, or rather the empty walls of the cottage where Snow White, my daughter, once lived:
I want to tell you about the first time I stopped breast-feeding her. The first time I realized what she really was. Winter of 1797.
I was sitting in my bed in my royal chamber in the castle we call the Schloss at the top of a hill overlooking the Kingdom of Sorrow, the kingdom of which I was its queen and she was to become the most beautiful princess.
It was one of the coldest winters. The snow fell intensively, burying the lovely purple poppy fields and covering it with a shroud of a thick layer of dark white. Somehow, the white of the snow that year would not reflect sunlight or shadows. It lay grisly over the contour-lined land like a dead girl’s white coat made of the fur of dead polar bears, like a white wavy carpet that was in no way magical. The curves of the land made the snow look like there was a beautiful giant dead girl buried underneath it. Little did I know that the time will come and this buried girl could only be Snow White or me, that the world will not be spacious enough for the both of us.
Peasants went broke for they could not seed the earth, and animals were no longer to be found. All except of the crows, of course, those damn crows pecking each other out of hunger, fluttering high in the bruise-colored sky as their blood spattered all over the snow like red rain next to the black corpses of their kind. It was a black, white, and red winter. Those wicked colors that doomed my life.
Looking through the rectangular huge window overlooking the dark Black Forest, I accidentally pricked my thumb while Snow White lay nestled in my arms. I don’t know how I hurt myself that day but I surely know that I was distracted by her beauty and innocent smile. Those lovely doe eyes of hers were gleaming above her chubby cheeks that curved like ocean waves whenever she smiled at me, like a rhythmic sonata so enchanting that the singer’s voice caused the instruments to bend and reform and curve with mirth and ecstasy, bringing dead wood instruments into life.
I don’t know how she possessed such doe eyes. Neither the king nor I had them. Only one other man in my husband’s family did, my husband’s vicious father who had been hunting us for years after we’ve escaped from him, crossing oceans wide. Although his father’s doe eyes were far from beautiful – for they were blackened with sorrow –, I’d rather not talk about it now.
Snow White wrapped her small and almost boneless hands around my pricked thumb, finger by finger, so gently that her touch took my breath away. I almost cried hot tears of joy. As much as she tried to press on my thumb with all her might, her skin felt like silk around my flesh that I wished she’d never let go of me. It was true that I was her mother and she needed me to never let go of her, but little did she know that I didn’t want her to let go of me. In her childish anger, she reminded me of cats chasing balls of thread.
I laughed as her face knotted childishly, staring at the stubborn thumb of mine that she could not pull closer to her. I knew my daughter would grow up to be a kick-ass girl one day, but right now she was still a baby – and yes, the Queen of Sorrow says kick ass and stuff like that. Because guess what? I am immortal, and I have seen everything from Brothers Grimm to Lady Gaga. You feelin’ me?
As I would have granted her any wish in exchange for one look from her ocean-blue eyes back at me, I didn’t mind lending her my thumb, which suddenly seemed to attract her more than the milk in my breasts.
I noticed a drop of blood on top of my thumb where I had pricked it, and my intention was to pull it away, clean it, and give it back to her. But when I tried to pull away, her hands seemed stronger out of a sudden, not strong enough to pull my thumb though but I could notice the unusual increase in her strength. I even thought I’ve seen a vein popping out momentarily from her gelatin-like and almost-boneless neck.
However, it wasn’t alarming enough by then. Mothers are blinded by love for their daughters in a way that if they die during nurturing them, they might barely notice their own death. Only after their responsibility toward their child is over, they would allow death to take hold of them – and if you really have to know, I wasn’t immortal by then. I am the Evil Queen, remember? Always the last to be considered.
So I loosened my thumb for Snow White to pull it closer to her.
At first, she pulled it to her chest, not taking her eyes off it. Her eyes had a sudden golden tint to them. I thought I was imagining.
“Are you alright, Shew?” I asked her, as I preferred to call her. Her father had another nickname for her, a much sillier one.
Snow White didn’t answer me. She pulled my thumb up with both of her tiny hands and sucked on it, which I found mesmerizing and cute like when she was sucking on her own thumb while asleep.
My husband king had warned me many times that she should not start sucking on things, that it was a bad habit, inappropriate for princesses.
Her sucking was ticklish. After all, her teeth had not grown yet so it was a funny feeling that I felt. As she continued with my thumb in her mouth, the golden tint loomed back again in her eyes.
Suddenly, I remembered the drop of blood and tried to pull away. Again, it wasn’t that I couldn’t pull away. She wasn’t stronger than me by any means. In fact, her weakness was her greatest power. It was that I estranged her insisting to hold onto a pricked thumb with blood in her mouth.
Before I could let my mind wander away suspiciously, a most beautiful smile landed on her face the way fluttering stars land onto a cloudy midnight sky.
Shew’s symphonic smile was accompanied by curling cheeks, dancing eyebrows, and a wiggling cute nose.
I patted her as she let go of my thumb and hugged her and told her a bedtime story. It was about a beautiful girl who had been cursed by a witch to stay forever asleep until a most-charming prince came and kissed her awake, and they lived happily ever after. Snow White loved to fall asleep to this story. Always. I wondered if she dreamed about the prince as a sudden lightning stroke outside.
As she went to sleep, I wiped a trickle of blood off her red lips.
This incident never happened again. That was because I never pricked my thumb again in front of her. I did prick my thumb a lot in my years, but not for her – and that’s another story. I was alert enough to her keep at distance from the sight of blood.
Sometimes, she still stared dreamingly at my thumb like a girl standing next to her mother in the kitchen, tiptoeing to see if her mother finished baking her favorite apple pie so she can start eating it.
Seven years later, my concerns were confirmed though, and I knew there was no way back.
It was a festive day when my husband and I welcomed the king and queen of Red, a neighboring kingdom. Times were harsh as we fought the demons trying to breach our borders and threaten the safety of our kingdom that my husband I paid trails of blood to protect.
If I only have the time to tell you about what I have sacrificed for this kingdom, for my husband, and for bringing Snow White into the world?
But who am I to complain? I am just an Evil Queen in your eyes, who wanted to murder her daughter, jealous of her young beauty.
I have to admit that beauty has a lot to do with this story, in an ugly way.
The majestic celebration with the king and queen of the Reds was mainly to assure that the Sorrows and Reds will always protect each other in the ageless war against the demons outside the borders, trying to spread the cursed disease to the locals.
However, that was not all.
After dinner, I couldn’t take my eyes off their nine-year-old prince. Such a beauty, the boy was. He was well mannered and shook my hand in such delicacy I have never seen before, but he seemed bored by the presence of the elders like us. His beautiful eyes were scanning the castle for the princess.
I asked my husband to summon our daughter and introduce her to the prince, hoping that cupid will strike his arrow and bind their hearts with velvet threads of love forever. Who else could I think of being my daughter’s husband in many years to come?
As our loyal servant escorted my lovely Snow White down the stairs, her black hair waved down her back on the white dress she wore. She looked paler today than usual – the sun had become her worst enemy lately and she wouldn’t go out in the light. Her room was darkened with the curtains rolled down over the windows, but she was still looking fabulous like a princess, licking her blood-red lips once she laid her eyes on the beautiful prince. It was appetite at first sight.
The prince seemed to cherish her as well. When the prince and princess’s eyes met, all elders exchanged murmurs and started gossiping about how beautiful they were. The sun splayed through the curtains and suddenly Snow White didn’t mind the sunlight in the prince’s presence. They played together and he chased her across the castle but Shew was deceivingly smart in hiding and manipulating, always with that doe-eyed smile on her face.
My eyes followed them everywhere they went in the castle. I was worried, for the prince was one of the boys with an infinite appetite for girls. However young the Reds were, their men had a reputation of growing up and becoming womanizers, but they also had a reputation for being irresistible to women. Shew had grown with an uncanny appetite of beautiful boys at such age. I could see it in her eyes whenever she met one.