Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,15

was what I expected to happen. Mrs. H came to see him often enough, but he was born in the mirror and looked fit to stay there. I came to visit him, too. I wanted to see my brother. The woman in the mirror tilted him up in her arms so I could get a better look. He got big fast—after a week or two he was walking around in there and running up to the glass when I came in, putting up his hands like he wanted to touch me. He liked me to put both my hands up against his, ten fingers and ten fingers.

I guess he was a nice baby. I don’t know much about them. He had small pink fists. He was a healthy white baby who would own the whole world if he could get out of that mirror. The newspapers said Mr. H had a son and heir. But my father never came home to shake his son’s little fist and welcome him into the world that had been made to fit him like a good suit. He never came home much at all. I thought to myself that Mr. H was not his father and I was not his sister but that Mrs. H got a baby from the pool in the forest and he came out in the mirror. But I did not like thinking that. The baby smiled when he saw me. That was nice. Nobody did that before.

I wished the mirror would just show the damn moon again. The rest of it put me in a black mood and that’s the truth.

Snow White

Wears the Sun

I believe the boy in the mirror was about five when Mr. H sent word he would be arriving home on the Saturday evening train.

Mrs. H said I would have to try to look pretty. She took me into her bedroom and thought that was a big favor on her part, but only because she did not know I had already been in there looking for her mirror. The Mr. Buttons had filled the milk bath already. Ice floated in it. I had got a fair sight older and grown breasts (which I did not ask for) and I did not want to be naked in front of Mrs. H but when I held onto my clothes she got out shears and cut them off of me. I stood there with my arms over myself and laundry scum on the backs of my hands. Mrs. H waited and pretty soon it dawned on me that she couldn’t lift me anymore. I got in the milk; it hurt like lye.

Mrs. H screwed up her thoroughness and let it loose all over me. She scrubbed my hair and rubbed that cream into my skin with a boar-hair brush and made me hold ice both my mouth and my womanly parts until it melted. I did not cry but I wanted to. This is what it means to be a woman in the world. You have to get pure. You have to get clean. You just won’t do filthy and indecent and smelling like fox. Do it for your father. You love your father. You want him to be happy.

Mrs. H dried my hair and combed it out. She put oils into it that I did not enjoy the smell of. My hair was very long then and she wound it around and around like a big black snake, fixed it up on top of my head and put ruby pins through it. Some of them pins pricked my scalp and I felt a little blood trickle down the back of my neck. Mrs. H produced a number of contraptions into which she crammed and pinched my body so that my breasts squished up and my waist tied down tiny like hers. She trembled a little bit. I was not accustomed to seeing her tremble. She seemed mighty upset, maybe even feared, though I wouldn’t know fear in that face if I saw it.

Mrs. H pulled a dress out of a steamer trunk and it was the color of the sun. It had a high bustle and sharp pleating at the skirt-hem and a neckline I wanted to run away from. It looked like fire. It looked like molten iron. I didn’t want to be inside that dress. It was going to burn me. It was going to eat me. But Mrs. H dug her nails into my arm.