Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,16

Do this thing and you can call me mama. Do this thing and you can have anything you want. She dragged it down over my head. It hung so heavy. Everyone trades their heart for their children, you know.

“I know you can do magic,” I said to her. I said it to hurt her. I said it to make her wear a dress of fire, too. But she wasn’t hurt. She never hurt.

Mrs. H stopped strangling me in the stays of that beast. Her heart-shaped face didn’t ever show anything to me I could understand. “And what do you think magic is, my little Snow White?”

“I saw in the mirror. What you did in the forest. And how the lady in the mirror had that baby.”

Mrs. H stared at me for a long time. I was as tall as she was. We stood there like the same woman except her dress was blue.

“Let me tell you something, kid,” said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. “Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.”

Snow White

Compares

Herself to An Unmovable Rock

I heard a lot of talk speculating on whether myself or Mrs. H was the more handsome. It’s plain foolishness.

Everybody knows no half-breed cowgirl can be as beautiful as a rich white lady. Where’s your head at?

Part III

Snow White and Porcupine Chase

Each Other

Around the World

Snow White

Stops Speaking

This is where Snow White gets off. Where she stops telling a story about other folk and starts being in a story other folk tell. It’s like crossing a cold stream. You don’t even think much about it—water’s not that deep, and only a few miles further on there’s a meal and a bed. But you’ve left one country and hoofed it on into someplace else.

Girl deserves a rest, anyhow. You can tell a true story about your parents if you’re a damn sight good at sorting lies like laundry, but no one can tell a true story about themselves.

Snow White

Steals the

Sun’s Tobacco

Snow White knows when it’s time to blow the scene. Saddle her whole life and get on the road. It’s a sense like smell or seeing, when she looks around at a pretty little zoo and realizes it doesn’t belong to her, she belongs to it. Ain’t never going to be the hero in this story, kid, way things are headed. Just meat for the table. Best be on your way. Kiss the bear and the fox and don’t look back. Spin those slots one last time. Don’t they come up all winter, white as death. Don’t they always. Don’t they just.

So this is what happens: girl gets her gun, puts on a man’s clothes, steals a horse, and lights out for Indian Territory.

Snow White’s heard her daddy’s men talk about Indian Territory. They’re skeered and scarred and when they say those words it sounds like their whole world is surrounded by a jungle of cannibal Oberons and night-blooming thunderbirds. Eat you alive and wear your skin, won’t they? What roads they got are lined with white men’s skulls. If a body gets lost in there he’ll never unsee what goes on, painted men dancing and songs like your mother dying and witches boiling bones and girls what turn into wolves. God don’t open His eye there. It’s Hell or fairyland or both.

Snow White says: sounds good to me.

You’ve read the papers. That girl run off because she got prettier than her mama and oh ho the old lady don’t like that! You know how mothers and daughters are. As if a body don’t just get fed up. As if a kid don’t have a limit on hardship.

So Snow White throws her dress in the furnace to burn like it ought to. She doesn’t even wait for sundown. Just hoofs it while Mrs. H gets herself gorgeous. Snow White straps Rose Red to her hip and rides out on a big apron-faced Appaloosa with spots on his rump like eyes. So what if it’s stealing? She took her daddy’s hat, too. Snow White can ride so sweet you’d think there’s no horse under her, just a girl with four legs pounding the ground. Fuck that mirror and fuck that house. What’s she owe them? Her back, that’s what. The girl is gone. She is plum finished. She walks out through the front door. It’s night and everything smells like the sea.

Snow White points her situation north, toward the queen hanging upside down in the