Sleep In the Snow

Sleep in the Snow Silence. A big castle in a green valley with
monstrous trees of leaf and bark; portentous, threatening and silent.
Birth brought me to this place, a big castle made of stone and mortar
where a whimper is a scream and despite my screaming and crying it will
never release me from its unyielding grasp. I live there with my
mother, the Queen of our county and my new stepfather whom I despise
with a passion that burns deep red and black in my own warm heart. We
are surrounded by a deep, choking, impenetrable forest, like a medieval
castle surrounded by the moat with the sea serpent. I've been lost in
those woods a thousand times and I will lose myself in those woods a
thousand times again. I am losing myself now as I speak but I cannot
and have no hope of conveying how trapped I am in my own reality, own
despair, pain and disillusion. I press my nose against the cold glass
and watch as my breath steams up the window, clouding my pale blue eyed
gaze. I hear a creaking of wood and a door swings behind me, awakening
me from my world. My stepfather comes into the room and I feel his
displeasure of my being here with his mirror so I leave his room, my
dress sliding across the floor beneath my bare feet, its white sheen
glistening as a nightfall of snow would under the pure, crystalline
sunlight of a new day. "Mirror mirror on the wall, who shall be the
next to fall?" He leaned, grinning maliciously in a sneer that
stretched from one large ear to the other as he reached out and picked
up a red, shiny apple, rich with juices, life and a strange poetic
beauty that not even a talented poet could speak. "Snow," named the
mirror's toneless voice said, fatigued of the same questions, knowing
better than to displease the King. To upset would mean certain death
and it had seen death, plenty of it and it was afraid. Snow lingered
outside in the great hall, her mother had gone horse riding with the
gatekeeper, never here when she needed her; she both hated and loved
her mother, despising her and feeling trapped by her reputation, a
thorny vine twisting its way around Snow's life, choking the life and
blood from her. Cold seeped into her bones from the stones around her,
a sombre place of doom, darkness and despair. Melancholy paintings of
stories of gnomes and dwarfs, elves and trees lined the walls and
glared from their world; a dark world to live. Did I love him? This
Prince that had professed his love to a girl who felt nothing. No, I
did not love him. I fear too much. Fear of what you ask? Fear of my
stepfather, the look in his eyes, jealously, anger and something else,
something I had not seen before in anybody's eyes; lust. Even now, I
shudder, sicken and shiver with repulse. I heard whispers that night,
thinking nothing of it, I slept still and silently, breathing deeply
and slowly letting the night pass but I knew it wouldn't without taking
me into its black hell. A creak! Filtered lights and suddenly he was
upon me, tearing at my night gown, pulling at my dark raven hair,
clutching at my pale breasts and forming red rivulets in the gouged
fingernail tracks. No! Agony as he clutched again at my body, regions
no one, not even myself have been and he awakens an anger in me that
fills me and forces me to strike back, hard. Fool, he shouts and I push
at him, terror forcing my sleepy limbs to move without will. Go! Go!
Run! I have to go, leave this cruel place with her cruel heart and his
cruel touch. I flee his clutching arms and run to the door. Creeeaaak
says the door and I am running, fast, my sleeping gown in shreds as I
run. Faster and faster I go, pushing again at the door and?free, I stop
so suddenly it feels like I have run into a door and I cannot go any
further. But I can. I do. The forest beckons, a cry. Here. There. I'm
afraid but I move my feet. I move until I am deep in the heart of the
forest and I hear nothing but my own harsh breathing against the still
silence of the surroundings, disturbing it like a rip disturbs the veil
that hides the world. A voice calls my name and I turn. No! he can't be
here, I ran too far for that old man. He can't be here. A dark shape
moves and I turn again. My harsh breathing is matched by the harshness
of my heart. Thumpthump?thumpthump. My throat seizes up and I cough,
fear clouding my vision but then the haze clears and I see?I can't
describe what I see for no words were made for it. A rabbit, as tall as
me with eyes of black and red, its belly full with gluttony of which a
calibre I cannot guess. Come, I can help. It takes my hand in its giant
paw and leads me through the trees, his footsteps heavy as he thumps
through the foliage, past tree trunks that lead to an unknown sight.
Trees grin maliciously, leering towards me, their poisoned fruit
hanging over my head, beckoning and calling me. Your fate, your fate my
dear, to sleep but I shall not succumb and I continue, following the
rabbit. Twigs, in league with the trees, grasp at my hair, reaching to
take me down into their dark earth world where I should be Alice in a
kind of hell with rabbits, grinning cats and the Queen of Hearts.
Flowers hang their heavily scented heads, black veined flowers with
crimson blood seeping from their leaves. Their poisonous fumes fill the
air, sweet perfume of torment, infiltrating my mind and sending me to
sleep and I stumble once, twice before falling. Rabbit picks me up in
his grotesque arms, his body is warm and his fur is soft against my
skin and still we move. He leads and leads and leads to our
destination. And what is our destination? A cottage, small, dirty and
murky. And when I blink, my companion is gone. Alone. I run to the
house, help! But no help comes. The door swings inward and I enter.
Gloomy, dismal and dirty I see as I stare around, my eyes adjusting to
the darkness and I see shapes in the dark, peering out at me, like
headstones in a darkened grave where the moon has hidden its malevolent
face. I find a light switch and a bright light flickers on, the dirt
disappears, an illusion of some kind, to dissuade people entering the
house and taking it for their own. I move forward and enter a room,
seven beds line the walls and I choose the biggest for my own, so
tired, it came upon me like a virus, infecting every inch of my being
until I lay my weary head and join the fairies in the land of night and
good. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to bed we go. With a rumble and tumble
it's off to bed we go. Hi ho?fades into the past as the dwarfs round
the corner and enter the house. "I smell?woman," one dwarf grins
cruelly, rubbing his hands together, eager for her flesh, lust
corrupting his mind and sabotaging his heart in a cruel act of the sins
thrust upon them. "Now now, no woman shall be belong to you, will be
mine, everything is mine," another grinned, and an argument began
again, the twenty-second argument of that day as the dwarfs clashed.
"Wa?wa?wait," stuttered one, "sl?sle?sleeper!" he cried, forcing the
words through his closed throat, his bashful tongue refusing to process
them. "Silence," the most brilliant and proud one among them, they
moved as a unit towards her, silently, slowly and steadily. "Enough,"
said another, quick to anger as he reached her and shook her awake when
he released she lay on his bed, that she crumpled his covers and that
she creased his pillow. I wake to see the pigmy, dwarf men around me
and fear grips my heart in such a way I can't breathe, I feel my heart
has stopped. Who are you? they ask, where have you come from? What are
you doing here? How did you come to be here? So many questions I feel
my head will beat my heart to exploding into a thousand bloody pieces.
I shakily tell them my name and explain why I was here and all except
one, who rubs his hand in glee, shake their head, shamed by the act of
men that crazed my step-father into attempting his foul deed upon my
body. A knock at the door and I curl into a ball; like the hedgehog in
the road watching the lights that mean certain death, approaching,
unable to do anything but cower, helpless, because I knew that whomever
stands outside that door, knocking impatiently and sighing, wants me
for one reason or another. But it was not my stepfather I should fear,
for it was the prince, the prince with his watery blue eyes, shaky
hands and thin spindly legs that caused the whole world to wonder if
they would collapse under his bulk. Snow, your mother worries for you
and is curious of your absence. Here take this; you look famished, he
says as he hands me a plump red apple, shining with the light that
penetrated the green netting of leaves that covered my head in a high,
unreachable canopy. He looks hungry too but it is not until I am in his
arms that I realise the root of his hunger, as I kiss him both fearing
my reaction and electrified by the touch of him. Never been touched by
a man before my stepfather yet the experience seems not to have scarred
my mind too deeply until I feel a burning deep in my stomach; an agony
created by his poison as it works its way inside me. I clutch, cry and
clasp at my lower stomach and cry until the darkness is upon me,
darkness so full and black I feel that I am surely dying, soon to be
dead as the fight absconds me. Snow's stepfather stares as she falls
under the spell of deep, dreamless sleep that would surely encompass
all her body and keep her from ever rousing to the land that would now
become his. As he watches, a cerise kiss stained in blood vividly
appears on the waxen skin of Snow White, a kiss that taints her beauty
and seals her sleep for no man would ever kiss lips stained with fresh,
crimson blood. Smiling, his work done. Light filtered through the rich
jade green canopy on the girl with skin as white as snow, hair as black
as the raven and lips stained with blood through a kiss that cost her
eternity. She lay in a glass coffin that presented her beauty and her
flaws to the world, warning men before they awoke her. As the
stepfather had presumed, no man would kiss her, for fear of staining
himself with the same blood that stained her. When the mother had asked
for a child whose lips were the colour of blood, she had not had the
comprehension that the wish would become so true; that her daughters
lips would be the colour of the life fluid, flowing in the body; fresh,
vibrant and vivid. Still Snow sleeps.