Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,21

open hand and yanked on her sawed-off hair.

“I weren’t gonna hurt you none,” he hissed in the dark, even though he would have if she hadn’t looked so damned daisy lying there. He’d kissed her just as sweet as his own wife but it weren’t enough for her, no sir. He popped her nose and that felt good. Blood sprayed on her mouth. Blood on her skin. Blood on the ground. Him sitting on her and watching her bleed. That felt good, too. Pretty soon she’d cry and that’d be just cherry.

Snow White got her thumb into the cattleman’s eye and he grunted, grabbed her fingers, fixing to break them to show this cow how it felt, but she rolled him off her onto the floor of the hollow. It was dark and she slugged him hard. He hit her back. They clenched up, fisting and gouging in the dark. The cattleman did not like it. The whiskey in his blood had been surging for a fight with a woman, and a fight with a woman ends in her crying and shaking and a fella hushing her all over. Her dress torn and a bit of tit peeking out and quivering. Simple, righteous pleasures. But Snow White just bit him and pounded him and it was no better than fighting a dude in a barrel-house. Just ugly and bruising and the main thing was not to let anyone get to a gun or else it’d be over on the quick. She didn’t even put up her hands to defend herself. She didn’t even care if he cut her face. Must be the wolf in her, or the lizard.

Snow White took her licks. Nothing she hadn’t done before. Bones creaking and wet blood on her hands, the dark all round and no one coming to help her. Point of fact, that was Snow White’s home country. That bloody punishing ground in the dark was real familiar. At least this time she hit back. At least this time she got hers. When you’ve been hit as often as she has, you don’t hardly feel it. You go to another place in your head until it’s over. Make yourself small and send the part of you that still feels anything to some tiny corner to wait it out. A corner full of tin ducks and red foxes and old bears, where the slots spin up summer every time. It’s just a body. Snow White doesn’t care about her body. A body is just a tool you use for walking around. Make sure it holds together and whatever else someone does to it matters less than spitting.

The cattleman had his fill of Snow White. He staggered out of her hollow looking like hamburger. Never did find out if she had a tail. Wasn’t worth it. When an animal don’t even care if it lives or dies, kicking it holds all the fun of kicking a rock.

Snow White

Plays a Trick

on Porcupine

The dude is flummoxed. It’ll pass.

Easiest track he ever laid his nose to, that’s the Dog’s honest truth. This girl is not sly. She does not know how to come to town and leave it so quiet the hooch-man don’t even remember how his bottle got so low. She does not know how to go so soft and fast her name never hits the ground. That’s okay. The dude knows. That kid has punched out some curly wolf in every shithole from home to the high country. Not a single town left unpunched. She even beefed that short-horn back in Haul-Off—right through the eyes, too. Lucky shot. Every soul gets one. The dude is not troubled by his little angelica blowing smoke through a man. Good for her.

But the trail goes cold as a fish in January on the Nevada side of the Sierra range and the dude cannot re-acquire it. Either she’s had her temper surgeried on or been ascended bodily to heaven and he’ll be damned if he can say which. Nobody’s seen a girl with a ridiculous gun and a powerful eagerness to fight. Nobody’s got whisker or whisper of her. He’d been close enough to cut for sign—the hairs of her pony’s tail, the shed fuzz of her angoras, the shells of her parlor pistol. But nothing. The whole world clean of her. Now the dude’s got nothing but his dick in his hands. Chicago office is not happy. Who’s happy in this world? Maybe a mountain cat with a bead