In Sleeping Beauty stories, I’ve come to recognize certain moments—tropes, you might call them, repeated plot points—that have an echo to them. Pieces of the story that have been told so many times they’ve worn the page thin: the christening curse, the pricked finger, the endless sleep, the kiss. You can almost feel reality softening around you, at those times.
I feel it now, as the wicked stepmother whispers to her mirror.
I don’t know what she sees in the glass, but the queen’s throat moves as she swallows. “It’s too late.”
“Yeah.” I make a face, hissing through my teeth. “I recommend you decline this invitation.” It never made much sense why the wicked queen showed up at Snow White’s wedding, anyway.
A scathing glance in my direction. “Do you really think I have a choice? Do you think she sent all those men as an honor guard?”
I shift in my seat, stomping the tiny worm of pity in my stomach. “So pull some witchy shit. Disguise yourself. Knot your sheets together and climb out the window. Run.”
“That would buy me days, maybe weeks. And even if I somehow escaped her reach, what would I do? Hide in a little house in the woods, rotting away?”
The pity vanishes. “Oh, you mean like Snow White did? To escape you?”
Her eyes narrow to vicious slits. She says, “I. Have. To. Get. Out,” with extra periods between each word.
“That’s what I just said.” But I know that’s not what she means. I reach, not very casually, for the straps of my backpack.
The queen stalks toward me, the mirror still clenched in one hand, the air thickening around her. Stray hairs lift in an invisible breeze, tangling like dark branches across the cold moon of her face. “You will tell me how it’s done.” This time it’s not a question or an order; it’s a promise.
So, okay, it was exciting to find myself in a different fairy tale, to feel for the first time the possibility of diverging from my own dreary road, but it’s time to go. I stumble out of my chair, backing away, running my free hand against the shelves in search of something, anything sharp. A knife, a splinter, a tooth, a shard of bone. There’s nothing.
The queen is close now. She reaches for my collar and twists it in one clawed fist, drawing us together. I can see the plain bones of her face beneath the creams and cosmetics, the hard line of her lips.
And I have no spindle and no tower, no roses or fairies or handsome princes, but I have a monarch close enough to kiss. It’ll have to be enough.
I straighten my spine and tilt my face recklessly upward—and, oh God, I have to stand on tiptoe to close the last inch between us, which is both embarrassing and embarrassingly hot—and kiss her.
It’s an undeniably weak kiss: a nonconsensual crush of lips and teeth that I would feel pretty bad about if she hadn’t been on the verge of nonconsensually torturing me. She breaks away, of course—but not instantly. There’s a tiny but critical delay, a moment that makes me wonder how long it’s been since the queen met someone outside of her control, and if she might harbor a low taste for sickly, sarcastic peasants.
Then she’s glaring and panting, reaching for her knife while her cheeks turn patchy pink. I shouldn’t care, because I should be disappearing right now.
Except I’m not.
Nothing is happening. The world is not thinning around me, the infinite pages of the universe are not rustling past. It didn’t work, and both of us are extremely screwed.
Something draws the queen’s eyes away from me. She looks more closely at the mirror in her hand, and her eyes go wide.
She drops my collar and catches my hand instead. Before I can pull away—before I can even begin to form the word hey!—she presses our hands to the glass surface of her mirror.
Except there is no glass. Just our hands, falling into nothing at all.
4
IT’S COLD, BETWEEN worlds. There’s no air, but it whips past me, smelling of frost and first snows. The only warm thing is the queen’s hand locked tight around mine, dragging us into a story that doesn’t belong to either of us.
My knees hit earth, moss-pillowed and green, and the queen falls beside me with a squashy thud. She makes a sound like air leaking out of a tire, and I’d make fun of her if I didn’t feel the same way. My cells are frazzled, as if my entire body was recently microwaved, and it takes me longer than it should to stand and look around.
Trees. Soft, springtime air. Extremely melodic birdsong. The whole scene has a strange haziness to it, like a pre-Raphaelite painting or an old VHS tape.