the pilgrim come to mecca
once upon a time. the evil queen/regina. snow white, rose red. snow white has always left a bitter taste in her mouth. ~2300 | r
There is a cottage, sprung up in the woods, and you will think this is familiar. Because there are two girls there, and once there was an old woman who cared for them but died and her relevance leaves the house quickly, turned over in the earth and etched out on her gravestone and forgotten. What is important is the cottage, and the two girls.
The story, for those who care to tell it later, goes that they are twins. Sisters. But that is not so. Perhaps the old woman who died stole them from their homes, lonely and selfish. Perhaps they were fondlings, and she was kind. But truly they are nothing more than tableaus, always existing, a circular motion of time, wrapping around back to the beginning.
Perhaps they didn’t start until the day they buried the old woman, and one girl reached for the other. It’s impossible to say who reached for who as they patted the ground and shed a few confused tears-you see, they did not truly comprehend death. Not yet.
Before that moment they are as the same, two bodies but one person. They moved in tandem, finishing where the other started, starting where the other finished. One girl would slip and scrap her knee. But she would not cry. The other girl was doing that for her, absorbing her pain into herself.
But then one reached for the other, and everything changed. And around that cottage the woods seemed to remember how to breathe.
They did not have names. Not in the way others had names. Names were unnecessary when they knew each other better than they knew themselves.
But the smallest girl, her pale hair loose and woven with flowers, wrote her name on the table, carving it in with a knife. “Snow White,” she says. “I don’t want to be forgotten, when I go to the earth.”
And the other girl looked at her trembling fingers and wondered why. “Rose Red,” she says.
Life goes on as it always does, the girls gathering firewood and feasting on the fruits from the trees and their gardens. Sometimes, they would lure rabbits into snares, but Snow White would cry at the sounds of their mewling, and Rose Red would end up tending to their wounds if she could and releasing them back into wild.
Snow White has the soft hands. Before they did not realize it, but in the wake of death they grow apart and together, like waves rising and receding and they learn that they are not a singular person, but two entities. And Snow White is the soft hands.
They lay in the meadow, and Snow White weaves daisies into Rose Red’s dark hair. “What do you think goes on, outside the woods?” she asks.
“Nothing,” Rose Red says, but what she means is nothing important. The fragments that weld together to make the whole of her is Snow White and the cottage and outside is blank and inconsequence to her. She shrugs the world off as if it’s little more than a flower to be shaken out from her hair.
Snow White smiles.
This time Rose Red reaches for her first, slides her hands into Snow White’s sun-kissed hair and Snow White sighs. And then their lips fumble together, banging, because a kiss is a foreign idea to them, but still an inbred knowledge, and eventually Snow White settles on top of her and strokes her sides as they find the angles that please them.
Rose Red breaks away, and feels an alien heat in her cheeks. Snow White kisses the fire.
“I like that,” she says. “What do you think it is?”
“What we were made to do,” Rose Red answers.
And this goes on, and in the meadows there are more kisses, tentative and then bold and then there are straying hands, learning the ins and the outs of each other in ways they never considered before. But most of all, there is them and the cottage and their world is largely unchanged. It feels as if they have merely found the key to a locked room, and now they have more space to stretch out their legs and they laughingly tilt their heads up to the sky.
And then the bear arrives, and their world is filled to the bursting.
They find him together, the great, black beast, keening a dying cry out into the trees. The bear stumbles about, as if unsure of his own footing and Rose Red takes Snow White’s hand and says, “Run. We must run.”
But Snow White is soft and she sees the blood glistening on the mossy ground and her heart, so firmly attached to Rose Red’s twists and seems to strain out of her chest. She takes a cautious step forward.
The bear lays on his stomach, bleeding out onto the ground, and merely lifts one sorrowful black eye to her and whimpers. Her fingers shift through his fur, feels the uneven rise of his chest, and Rose Red wonders why she feels like screaming in terror, why she wants to snatch Snow White hands away.
“He’s hurt,” Snow White says, kneeling beside the bear. She finds the sword wound on the underside of his stomach. The bear whimpers. “We have to help him.”
It takes all of Rose Red’s will not to flee, to help Snow White gather the herbs to make into the bear’s poultice. She cannot explain why, but there is a deep-sated knowledge inside her, of terror. The edges of her world seem overly bright, like a bag filled with too much water.
As the bear rests, Snow White and Rose Red go down to the stream to bathe. They strip in the moonlight, and the water is cold, and for the first time Rose Red notices the bell-shape of Snow White’s breasts, the slight puckering of her skin from where she shivers, the peddling nipples.
She touches them without thinking. They’re always touching, she and Snow White, and it never occurs to her that this might not be a thing she is allowed. She touches Snow White’s breasts, and then cups them, inspecting their texture and their soft fullness. They’re bigger than Rose Red’s. Everything about Snow White seems softer. Her hips are wider, and her stomach is slightly rounded, her arms pale and smooth.
“Oh,” Snow White says and then her hands on Rose Red’s stomach, and then farther down, to the shadow patch between Rose Red’s thighs.
They haven’t a word for what they do, but they down in the grass, touching. Water tickles at their toes, and they laugh occasionally when they fumble, but the laughter fades and Rose Red thinks the stars spread out before her eyes like a feast-and then they burst and she cries out against Snow White’s mouth, who pats her hair soothingly and strokes her trembling thighs.
Rose Red wants to share this discovery with her, the magic that had infused her limbs, but something holds her back.
It’s the first thing she does not share with Snow White.
The bear awakens the next morning, and Snow White guides him home, and they settle him in front of the air, where he moans and sighs with pain. Snow White hums and strokes his maw soothingly, while Rose Red cooks their leftover rabbit meat for him. He eats greedily, and Rose Red scowls at him.
“You may stay,” Snow White says, “until you are healed.”
The bear looks up at Snow White with something close to adoration, but Rose Red does not recognize that acid taste on her tongue. The meat must be bad, she thinks.
Their world changes. Not at first; so slowly that Rose Red does not recognize it until she is left bereft of protection from that change. She and Snow White sleep in the same bed, continuing what they had discovered by the stream. Rose Red comes to know what Snow White’s sweat tastes like, what she sounds like when she puts her hand between her thighs. Once, by accident, a finger had slipped into the hidden entrance there and Rose Red had fumbled and pulled away, apologetic, but Snow White had arched against her, taking her deeper-and that had been a discovery too.
But then.
Snow White starts to sleep beside the bear as he recovers. Rose Red will awake in their bed, reaching for that familiar soft warmth, and find her arms empty. She’ll peer over the side of the loft where they sleep and find Snow White curled beside the bear, stroking his paw. Rose Red will crawl back under the covers-almost ashamed.
In the morning, Rose Red awakes to an empty house. The bear and Snow White are gone. They return hours later, the bear trailing Snow White like a loyal dog, Snow White’s white-blonde hair still damp from her bath in the spring. She’ll smile, and kiss Rose Red on her mouth, but then will sit beside the bear to dry.
Snow White makes no mention but she must know, Rose Red thinks, she must know. She must know that it’s the first time either of them have gone anywhere without the other.
Perhaps to get even, perhaps for no other reason than to escape the cottage and the bear and the way Snow White’s hair looks upon his black fur, Rose Red flees into the forest. Only until nightfall, she promised a worried Snow White.
She takes a path she unused to. A path that had been tread by hunters and carriages on their way through the woods. The old woman, before her death, would sit on the side occasionally to trade, but Rose Red has no desire in that outside world.
It’s kismet. She finds him as she steps one unsure foot onto the gravely ground.
His hair is peppering. He’s old, like the old woman, but not like the old woman because he is tall and broad and different. She has not understood gender until that moment, had not understand that a person may not have breasts.
The other world slams into her without mercy and she stands shivering before him, staring at him like he is more dangerous to her than the bear. Perhaps he is.
“You,” he breathes, stepping toward her, hand reaching out as if to clutch at her. “It’s you.” And his eyes water with an emotion that Rose Red is not used to-except she is; sometimes she stares at Snow White like that but to see it lingering in the dark eyes of someone else frightens her, and she flees. Flees back into the embrace of the forest, back to the safety of the cottage.
She finds Snow White and the bear asleep on the rug, the bear’s head resting in Snow White’s lap, her fingers entwined in his dark fur.
And then one day, he isn’t a bear at all.
He’s a man. But not like the old man Rose Red found on the path. He is young and tall and dark-haired and swarthy.
He is a threat.
“It was a wizard cast the spell,” he explains. “He had been terrorizing a village, and I lead my men to rout him. I was a bear before I understood what happened, and then I was bleeding. It was animal instincts that drove me to the forest. I was lucky to have found you, otherwise I would have died.”
He is holding Snow White’s hand. He is looking into her eyes. And, most importantly, Snow White is looking back, holding his hand back, and Rose Red stands by the fire-an interloper.
“Will you leave then?” Rose Red hears herself asks.
He lifts his eyes to her. “Yes. You see, I am prince and heir-and my people need me.” He is looking back at Snow White.
Snow White lifts her head and in that instant she is a woman. She has crossed a threshold Rose Red has not, she has left her behind, and Rose Red stares down her fingers, the under beds of her nails caked with dirt, and bites her lip so hard she almost could taste blood.
“You’re going with him,” Rose Red says.
Snow White blushes. “Yes. I-he asked me to go with him. To be his queen. He loves me.”
“Do you-” Rose Red cannot understand this concept, this love. It has always just been Snow White, and the whole of her, and the way her world had existed dependent upon her breathing.
Snow White smiles and reaches for her hand. The bear-man-prince sleeps above them, tucked into the bed. “You should come with us. He has a younger brother, he says.”
But even as she says this, they both knew she will not go.
She meets with the old man on the road again, somehow not surprised he is waiting for her. She had known he would.
“I have been searching for you for many, many years,” the old man says, and water from his eyes flows down his papery cheeks. “I thought you were gone, lost forever, but I never gave up hope that I’d find you again.”
“Who-” She stops herself. Because this is what she already knows. “My father.”
“Regina,” he says, and crashes to his knees, weeping into her well-worn dress.
When they part, it is almost as if they are strangers. She tells Snow White her name is Regina, but on the table Rose Red is still carved, and she wonders which one is the real girl-or if any of them are real, or if both of them are real, facets that make up the whole of her.
Snow White walks away with her hand trapped in the massive grip of her prince. Regina follows her father, shaking daisies out of her hair.
Regina’s father is a count of some means.
It isn’t long before she marries. “You seem so sad,” her father muses. “Perhaps King Leopold will make you happy?”
She thinks of Snow White and her soft, pale hands and the moonlight on the slopes of her breasts. “Perhaps,” she allows and stands. She crosses to him and kisses his snowy hair gently. “I love you.”
Words she has never uttered to Snow White, because Regina has come to understand what she feels for Snow White is beyond that-beyond the confines of the traps that are placed on this concept. Snow White is a second organ, another heart, that beats against her ribs.
She marries.
“This is my daughter, Snow White,” King Leopold says, motioning to the shy, dark-haired creature that smiles from underneath the sweep of her long, long lashes.
Her hair is not pale, her face is not heart-shaped, and her eyes are dark.
Regina wonders at the bile that collects in the back of her throat.
It’s a year later, when Regina meets with her Snow White again during a tour to neighboring allies. She stands smiling besides her bear-king-husband and greets each of them with a soft brush of her lips across their cheeks.
As if she does not know them.
They meet in the garden, with moonlight shining on the flowers, like that first night at the stream. “I wasn’t sure it was you, at first,” Snow White says, with a sad, downturned smile. “You look well.”
Regina laughs, and Snow White must realize for the first time how different she has become from Rose Red. Her laugh is hollowed out, like the water reeds she would pluck from the bank of the stream to give her music.
“Don’t lie.”
“I’ve missed you,” Snow White says, honest.
They kiss underneath the shadows, and Regina thinks this is like coming home. She wishes they had left the not-bear to rot by the stream, she wishes they were still in the cottage, tucked away in the bed, she wishes she could lay Snow White down on the moss and put her hand between her legs, and have her hand do the same.
Snow White breaks away with a sad sigh.
“Run away with me,” Regina says, Rose Red filtering back into her voice. “Run away with me. We’ll go back, to the cottage. Things will be like they used to.”
“I can’t,” Snow White says softly. “I couldn’t leave my husband.”
Regina says, “You don’t love me.”
“I do. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything else in my whole life,” Snow White answers. “I didn’t understand, then, how much I loved you. It wasn’t love, then. It was just-it was breathing. That’s how I loved you. Like breathing.”
“But then-”
“But I love him, too. Don’t you understand?”
“No,” Regina hisses and stomps away, leaving Snow White in to stand alone in the gardens, among the scents and flowers of the world they should have never stepped into.
Snow White climbs into the bed with her husband. Instantly, he curls a hand around her waist and draws her closer. He nuzzles her neck and gives a bearlike rumble of pleasure.
Her fingers move through his dark hair, remembering when it was fur, remembering when he had looked up at her through animal eyes like she was his salvation. She remembers that she was.
She loves him. It a simpler way, perhaps, than how she loves Rose Red-Regina-but in a way that still defines her, still makes her. This is her choice, and she is happy.
“I love you,” she says quietly.
He opens one eye and gives her a sleepy smile. “I love you.”
His hand rests on the slight swell of her belly.
“Will we come back for when the baby is born?” the other Snow White demands.
King Leopold smiles indulgently at his daughter. “Perhaps. Provided the princess can find a suitable christening gift.”
“Oh I shall!”
Neither mention Regina, whose fingers lock and curl inward, close to snapping.
Snow White dies in childbirth.
This was never a popular fairytale.
Regina arrives decked out in black, but misses the funeral.
She finds the bear-man-king pacing his throne room with a baby squalling in his arms. He looks lost, confused, and Regina takes a selfish pleasure in it. She has walked around with a similar disposition since he walked from the cottage hand in hand with Snow White.
“I’m sorry,” he says dully. “I’m afraid you’ve come too late.”
She looks at him, this man who holds the instrument of Snow White’s death and feels herself blacken, twist. Hate comes like a poison, turning her veins red.
“Not too late to pay my respects,” she says, almost with a sneer.
Mourning sits heavily on his shoulders as he sinks back into the chair, the babe cradled to his chest. Regina almost wants to snarl how dare you mourn her, that is my right alone.
“I’ll summon a servant to show you the way.”
Regina buries her heart beside Snow White, takes it out of her chest and presents it to the altar of her grave.
“It’s useless,” she accuses. “It’s useless, because you’ve sapped all that matters from it. But I’ll find more. I’ll take others. If I cannot have my own, then let me have theirs. And where ever you are, look down on me and see what you have made.”
The remaining fragments of Rose Red splinters, and she strews them at the base of the grave, as if they are the daisies Snow White had once woven into her dark hair.
The cottage in the woods burns to the ground, wood giving way to ash.
The queen watches, indifferent.