Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,14

I stopped breathing. I hit her across the breast and the chin trying to dig up from that milk that stunk like perfume. The white in my eyes started to go dark and she let me up all the sudden like my skin burned her.

After I squinted real close at the mirror but I didn’t look no different.

Snow White

Covers Her Tracks

With Her Tail

You may not know it but the keeping of a large house by one girl is the hardest work going on earth. I heard there’s fire in hell but I’ll bet the Devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.

Snow White’s Stepmother

Gives Birth

to the Sky

I could not say exactly how Mrs. H managed to catch pregnant. Mayhap Mr. H fired a baby into her from Peru with a better gun than mine. Probably he came home and performed his husbandry and left again before the sun could surprise him at it.

More to the point, I could not say exactly whether or not Mrs. H was pregnant. Her belly did not get bigger nor did she let out her dresses. She said nothing more about it after the announcement which was reported in all the newspapers. I was coming up on seventeen and some noise was made about the necessity of marriage, but Mrs. H did not feel I was fit to entertain suitors and anyway I would not be getting my hands on any of the H money, so there seemed little purpose in it. I’ve half a mind to dump her over the border in Crow territory and let them kill her or marry her or whatever those heathens do with beasts less useful than a horse but prettier than a cow.

Well, at least I knew my worth.

Mrs. H came pretty often to the dime museum. She rolled up the painting of the Chinese unicorn and looked at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she talked to the mirror like it was a person. Sometimes she asked it questions. I never heard it answer but it must have or she wouldn’t keep asking. Sometimes she pressed her cheek to her reflection in the glass.

The woman in the mirror was pregnant.

The reflection of Mrs. H got big in the belly day by day as the winter wore on. Mrs. H stayed slim as a pen. She moved her hand over her flat stomach; in the mirror Mrs. H cradled her roundness in both arms. The paintings in the museum changed to Madonnas, women in blue on seashells and star-points and sitting on silver thrones. The parrots died. I found them with frost hardening on their beaks. I said goodbye to them in French but that is all I know how to say so it was a short eulogy. Whenever I looked in the mirror after Mrs. H left, all I saw was the copy of her, humming a song while she let the waists of her dresses out with a quick, clever needle. Once she looked at me, looked out of the mirror and into me. She put her hand on her stomach and whispered: soon.

I ran.

The baby came at night. I watched it happen from my hiding place and if I live a hundred years I will not see anything stranger. Mrs. H stood stock still while the reflection in the mirror cried and struggled and bled. The blood coming from between her legs wasn’t red. It was the color of a mirror, like mercury beading out of her. She looked like she would die and the baby would choke on her. Drown in her like a dress. Mrs. H just folded her hands in the museum and never made a sound. She watched. She didn’t even fidget. Finally the child spilled out of the woman in the mirror, mirror-blood gushing and a rope of that terrible black wood like stone connecting them. The woman in the mirror cut it with her teeth. The child was a boy.

He did not look very much like Mr. H.

But then, neither do I.

Mrs. H laid her hand on the glass. The baby didn’t cry. Sticky silver stuff covered his skin. The woman in the mirror put the baby to her breast and the mirror flowed out of her body, overflowing his tiny mouth and trickling down his cheek. The woman in the mirror smiled and knuckled the drop away.

And that was it.

The boy did not come out of the mirror, which