Six-Gun Snow White - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,29

off his antlers. Rest of him’s man enough but Deer Boy knows he ain’t right. If he set foot in church the font would set to boiling.

Deer Boy knows he’s a disappointment to his mother. He don’t know how he was supposed to turn out but he knows he’s got wrongness all over him, knows when she looks at him she gets so angry the walls try to get clear of her. Deer Boy wishes he knew how he got the way he is but some things are just past him. He remembers the first time he saw Snow White and likes that memory so he figures he’ll live in it and that works for a little while: a sad girl on the other side of a mirror, standing next to someone so pretty it hurts to look at her, someone who looks like his mother but sharper, more real, like a lion to a housecat.

Deer Boy used to live in a perfect place. He drank silver milk from his mother and she sang nice backward nonsense songs and the sun was so soft and yellow you could spread it on toast. He didn’t have deer parts back then and he got big real fast. He even had hopes of being handsome, a real shot at it. Then when he was just about grown up, the painful pretty woman came to the mirror and held out her hands to Deer Boy. She was holding a big, dripping, bloody heart, a heart so red and dark it feared him terrible. The heart came through the mirror like a red dark train and his mother went up like gas and Deer Boy lost the perfect place so fast it was like dying cold.

When he squeezed through the mirror and into the world owned by the painful woman, he was Deer Boy and he had hooves and spotted red fur on his legs and what could you do. He also spoke backwards from other folk on this side of the mirror, which upset just about everyone. His new mother did not sing nonsense songs and she had no milk for him. She howled and ran her bloody fingers over his face, kissing him and being angry at the same time.

She’d been tricked. There’d been a methodology and some part had sproinged. Deer Boy understood that he was a cake that failed to rise. He thought that’d be all right. Mothers forgive, that’s what they do. She looked just like his mother. It’d be like that perfect place again once she cooled off. He could run so terrible fast, after all. It was a nice aspect in a son.

But she only said she’d fix him and over time Deer Boy came to an understanding that this meant finding Snow White. His mother owed somebody a heart. Snow White was the broken wheel in the works of his being born. Once he’d got fixed, he could see his father. Once he got fixed he could have that big house by the sea. Once he got fixed he’d get to crawl into his mother’s arms and her kisses would just be kisses and leave no blood behind. He couldn’t square the reason behind it all, exactly, but the painful pretty woman was his mother, somehow, the source of his mother, and no new one was going to show up and look kindly on his legs and his speaking and his singing.

If he ever meant to get back into that perfect place, Deer Boy was gonna have to run Snow White down.

Snow White

Dances with

Prairie Dog

Witch Hex draws the straw and goes knocking on Snow White’s hickory door. Snow White opens it quick and she’s hardly got anything on, it’s so damnably hot and she’s coating the floor with some nice whitewash Old Ephraim stewed up out of hill chalk. Snow White’s full splattered with it.

“See, that’s the trouble,” says Witch Hex Watson. “The trouble’s that door and you’re gonna meet it sooner or later. We all do.”

Snow White turns the floor into winter. Back and forth sweeps her brush.

“Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can’t. You’re in a story and the body writing it is an asshole. You had to know that, given the action. The story you’re in tells you like firing a gun. And because you’re in a story