Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,20

all share down here.

Snow White has broken a fair number of fingers. Fingers count in this line of work. Fingers are a penny-bid on your future. All that separates a man from a dog is fingers.

Folk stop galling her so hard. Snow White is aware that if she loses one fight it’s over for her. So she does not lose. She cuts her hair off after a short, burly mister starts touching it and allowing as how he’s heard heathen’s pussy’s got feathers instead of hair. I know y’all are just like a blackbird down there. She doesn’t miss it. No mirrors underground, and she’s grateful for that. She swings her ax and does not see the sun. It is like being inside the heart of her father. Close and dark and hungry, pumping wealth like blood.

A month is not enough. Never is and she knows that now. Hell is a company town. Snow White owes the store for the food in her belly, the tools on her back, Who-Shot-John whizzing around her head every night when the all-stop blows. And she might have stayed, told herself the big lie, that tomorrow she’d find a bloody knuckle so big it’d pay her way to the moon with cash to spare. There’s an apple in that mountain with her name on it.

But somebody’s looking for her. Someone’s knocking on the grass up there, and he wants to come in.

Snow White

Gets Hit On the

Head With a Brick

All right, all right. If you stand her a swallow of Who-Shot-John, the girl will fess up.

Snow White lost one fight. Just one, but it was a fuss to be remembered.

The man in question was a no-account out of Laramie. He’d been a cattleman before a flood took his flock and all his hopes came a-cropper. He’d seen his brother exalted for rustling and his wife dead of the lunger the winter after. It cripples a man in the morality to spend his days digging beauty out of dead rock for the pleasure of rich folk he’ll never meet, and this fella was right torqued up. Not that he’d been a stand-up aforehand. He wanted to punch down the hangman who took his kin and the angels who took his girl but they were not present. Snow White, contrariwise, had broken the fingers of a number of his friends and had to sleep sometime. A helpless man swings wide.

So this man followed Snow White back to her hollow with a determination for trouble hanging on his hips. He had once allowed to the boys that she was pretty enough for a godless mix-blood bitch. He’d never ridden Injun, but he’d never et dog before, neither. The world of experience is a broad and unpredictable country. The way the cattleman heard it told, squaws got wolf’s fur on their tits and a tail fit for a lizard tucked twixt their flanks. Snow White being only half-squaw he’d likely have to settle for one or t’other but you can’t have everything. He’d considered it a long while and figured God owed him some pleasure in this life and if she didn’t like it, well, a good pound-down puts anyone in an amenable mood.

Snow White lay asleep. Without thinking about it the cattleman took off his hat when he came into the hollow like he meant to call her ma’m and present flowers. She was awful nice-looking when she was asleep. No scowling or hissing or cursing. Why, if you squinted, she almost looked regular, like some rancher’s daughter who just needed a bath and she’d be respectable as a wedding. If she hadn’tve hacked her hair off he’d have judged her the second or third handsomest girl he’d had acquaintance of, and he’d been to Denver once. The cattleman felt a powerful need to kiss Snow White. Mayhap she liked being kissed. Mayhap she’d wake up and show her wolf-parts. In the storybooks, if you woke a girl up with a kiss she belonged to you. It was like a brand on a cow’s rump. A kiss round and black and permanent-like on the skin, telling the whole world who owned her. The idea of that big burning kiss made him hard enough to drill rubies.

The cattleman kneeled down and put out his lantern. He kissed Snow White real nice, like you kiss a lady. Her fist cocked his jaw good, but the cattleman had the upper position and she could not reach her gun. He slapped her