Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,28

whacks at wood with her hammer and shoots beaver for Ephie’s pan and combs Charming til he glows. At night she makes that not-talking not-screaming not-crying noise down the gulch until the owls light out for friendlier digs. She can’t stop. It feels so good to get empty.

Little Mab and Astolaine help the raising of her walls and the roof will go on soon. Snow White dreams about the dude and sleeps next to Bang-Up Jackson, who holds her when she shakes but lets go before she wakes up. In her dream, the dude looks like Mr. H. He wants to play cards. He calls and shows all court cards. Hands her the Queen of Spades. He says to her: take this heart and put it in a wooden box. Then the dude isn’t the dude but the coyote in his cage in her old zoo. He spits out the body of Thompson the red fox. Howls. The noise coming out of his howl is the noise Snow White makes at night. The coyote says: it looks like a choice but it isn’t.

There’s other women in camp Snow White doesn’t know to look at, and they don’t wear the horse skulls and breastplates but on Sunday for the services run by Woman Without a Name, who’s put her thumb down on the notion of Snow White hunting up her mama’s folk. Don’t you carve your wounds on them. Ain’t no place for you but here. You’re grown—crooked and backbent, but grown—and it’s time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.

Snow White says ok but she can’t do it. Some loads are too heavy to put down.

Bang-Up says everybody’s got to contribute. Turns out a camp is just like a body; you work all day just to keep it alive. A couple of sisters keep up a watch for anyone sniffing too close to Joyful: one day, one night. They don’t so much as look at anyone else. Only see each other at dusk and dawn, sharing out bread and beaver tail in the bloody light. Old Epharim allows as how their daddy was a Pennsylvania preacher of the tongues-and-snakes sort, and on account of the Bible taking a frown to the gossip of women, he cut out their tongues. The sisters have three guns each and Snow White has heard them humming to each other. She likes the sound.

Snow White does what she knows to do. She brings in meat. All day and night blood and gristle. Goes into the forest and kills what will let her kill it. First time she kills a fox she doesn’t talk for three days. She plants onions in the earth like chunks of bone and keeps the bears off with Rose Red, marking the perimeter at dawn. Some of the girls want to get into the cattle business and Snow White allows that she could be talked into it. She likes the idea of a lot of beasts together under the old, cold sky, snorting and smelling like dirt. She likes the redness and realness of meat, the work of turning a deer into another day living in this world. She could do it to a cow. No sweat.

She builds a door strong and bolted and the house is creaky but sound for sleeping. But Bang-Up’s bed is hard to leave and Snow White doesn’t much care to. She goes to hers in the morning and comes back for supper. One day. One night.

Time trots along. Snow White chases her own tail.

On good nights, when Bang-Up falls asleep holding her hand, Snow White dreams she’s a dog. She gets to sleep by the fire and eat bones and instead of talking she just howls until the moon breaks. It’s a good dream.

Red Deer

Sneaks Up on

Snow White

Someone else has Snow White’s trail. He moves by night so no one can clap eye on him, sound alarm and call a preacher out of bed. He don’t rightly know why it is he wants to find her so damn bad, but he does. It’s like he’s magnetized to her. But fact is he’s never met the girl.

He has a name but he can’t keep it in his head. People say it and it rolls off. He thinks of himself as Deer Boy and that’s on account of his being half deer—he runs after the girl with black hair on long, backbent brown legs with white stripes down to the hoof. In spring he’ll knock fuzz