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of Death
Well, there’s only two ways this can end. Snow White wakes up; Snow White sleeps forever. Maybe that’s her thing. She’s always waking up and always sleeping at the same time all the time, so fast you can’t see the blur.
Maybe she never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can’t kiss a girl into anything.
Snow White becomes an object. Barnum buys or steals her from Jakob’s show and she cools her heels with the Fiji Mermaid in perpetuity. A medical museum. A private collector with a scar on his chest. Maybe someday Snow White’s cells get scraped and stored for some researcher to kiss alive in a decade, a century, when they get around to it. When they have time.
She dreams of the mine. Of rubies hanging in the dark like antibodies. She dreams of her mother singing to her like a gun. She dreams of her mother when she was a girl, and didn’t know the future. If you want to know.
You know, there’s this old story. It says Coyote took his heart and cut it in half. He put one half right at the tip of his nose and the other half at the end of his tail. He did this so no one could catch him at his mischief. The two halves of his heart would fly off in separate directions, each doing whatever it pleased, and if anyone said to one half of his heart: you have done a wicked thing! the other half would say: what the hell you talking about, I was over here the whole time!
Alive and dead, alive and dead. Both happening so fast you can’t see the blur. It doesn’t matter which. The live girl carries around the deadness she worked on all those years. The dead girl holds on to that wick of
living that’s still green in there. It flips back and forth forever like a trick ace. Thump, thump, thump in the night as a girl sits up and lays down again.
Come on. Pick one. Pick a path and hit the briars.
Snow White
Holds Up the Sky
Thump, thump, thump.
One thing I have learned about running away is that once you start there is no end to it.
Open, shut. Alive, dead. Sooner or later you choose. This is what happens.
Snow White dreams about old red Thompson the fox and the spinning trees on her slots, red and gold and green and white. She dreams about the seagull with a bullet through its eye. If you want to know.
She dreams Mrs. H palms up that deck again. And this time she takes the cut. Aces high.
And all right, okay, one day she wakes up. It’s a hundred years, a hundred and ten, maybe some change. Stowed away in some attic in Iowa where Jakob’s Exhibition of Wildness and Wonder petered out. She wakes up because there was flooding all over town that spring and the current washed that house clean off its stones. Snow White wakes up when her glass box crunches against an elm tree and goes accordion shaped. Or maybe it was just time. Some clock ticked out inside her. Four old trees spinning up to spring.
There’s glass in her hair. In her palms.
Search and Rescue airlifts Snow White and half the town clear of the whitewater and nobody thinks much of it. A man with a crew cut treats her for shock. He asks how many fingers. Who’s President.
Snow White sees a taxidermied horse float down Beech Street and she knows it’s Charming. There’s a piece of glass in her nipple, poking out like a drop of milk that never fell. Right over her heart.
Snow White gets a social security card. She gets a job building houses out in California. Picks oranges. Doesn’t talk about herself. Never did. If you press her she’ll say she lost everything in the flood and she supposes that’s true. She goes to see the castle by the sea and it’s a museum now. Pictures on the wall: the Mr. Buttons. Miss Enger. Mr. H.
Mrs. H.
The pictures are black and white and Snow White finds no answers there or any comfort either. They just look like dead people and that’s what they are. Her room is labeled: guest quarters and she supposes that’s true, too. Up in the hills, the boardwalk is not open to visitors. Under construction. Renewal efforts funded by a grant from the state. Excellent example of turn-of-the-century follies.
In the forest Snow White sees a red fox. He looks at her for a long time. She tosses him an apple. Little fellow sniffs but he knows better. Good boy. Good boy.
Snow White likes the open sky. It’s the same as it ever was. Fire and cold. Long empty spaces between the stars, stars like towns getting their grips into a big black country. Oh-Be-Joyful. Haul-Off. Blue Coffin. There’s red up there like rubies in a mine.
Snow White gets a doctorate in physics though it takes her about fifteen years. She sleeps with a couple of lab partners but it’s pretty uninspiring stuff. She meets a history professor. He walks with an odd wobble. His students make fun of the way he talks—but they make fun of her drawl, too. Snow White does not think much of students. She waves at the professor when she passes by his classroom. Waves through the little glass window. He puts up his hand to hers. Snow White decides to take him to dinner. Find out his story. When she has time. There’s so much to do.
The telescopes open up to the sky like gardenias at a wedding.
Whoever’s left standing has won.
Snow White discovers a new pulsar out in the Horsehead Nebula. She listens to it through machines that reflect her face.
Thump, thump, thump.
