Her eyes fall to my throat and my brain leaps unhelpfully to that fucked-up Gaiman short story where Snow White is a vampire, and then, even more unhelpfully, to an undergraduate lecture about the inherent homoeroticism of Western vampire literature.
The queen lifts the green ribbon between us. I have time for two very brief and stupid thoughts （Where’s the key? and God, that mockingbird is loud） before her other hand snakes past me and the ribbon is wrapped around my neck.
* * *
IT DOESN’T SEEM that bad, as garrotings go. The queen barely knots the ribbon before stepping away. But in the startled second it takes my hands to reach my throat, the ribbon has wound itself so tightly that I can’t fit my fingers beneath it. It pinches harder, crushing veins, clenching around my windpipe. I try to scream, but nothing emerges except a wet wheeze.
Dark spots bloom across my vision. The back of my head cracks against the door. One of my fingernails snags and rips as I try and fail to tear the ribbon away, and then I’m falling and thinking, with extreme irritation: I’ve been here before. I have been on my knees in some distant Disney-knockoff castle, fighting for air and not finding it. That time there was a princess to kiss me back to life; this time there is a queen to watch me die.
Which is bullshit, because I’m not supposed to die yet. I’m supposed to have years, maybe even decades, and I’ll be damned if somebody else’s evil stepmother is going to steal them. On this bracing thought, I lunge for the queen’s legs. Except it turns out your muscles need oxygen to function, so what I actually do is flop face-first at her feet.
I hear a distant sigh. Hands under my arms, dragging me across the floor. The cold click of metal around my wrists. Just when my vision has contracted to a single point of light and my limbs have gone so numb they feel like bags of wet sand, the ribbon disappears.
There’s an ugly little stretch of time here that mostly consists of drooling and choking and the sickly sound of vomit hitting the floor. Let’s skip over it.
When I can see again, I find my arms manacled awkwardly above my head, with just enough loose chain to rattle but not enough to either stand or lie down. The queen is carefully emptying my backpack onto the counter, examining each item with mild interest and sorting it according to some ineffable system of her own devising. The socks and underwear are piled together; my phone is held briefly at arm’s length, as if she is considering her own reflection in the dark glass of the screen, before being placed carefully beside the knife.
“What,” I begin, but I have to stop to wheeze hoarsely between each word. “The fuck. Is wrong. With you.”
The queen doesn’t answer immediately. She’s holding my little mechanical mockingbird up to the light; the bird is now producing a pitch only dolphins can hear. “Oh, you’re perfectly fine,” she assures me without a single atom of remorse. “It would only have sent you into an enchanted slumber.”
“Only? Jesus Christ, lady, don’t they have human rights here? I didn’t do anything to you and you just—you—” This time it’s a sudden, helpless rage that chokes me. I still dream of my own death sometimes, except now it’s a memory instead of a prophecy. I feel my lungs massing with misbegotten proteins, my pulse weakening, my mouth full of air I can no longer breathe. I don’t even like holding my breath in the pool anymore or putting my face under the blankets; it turns out I really, really dislike being strangled.
I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, just like my stupid therapist taught me, until I can snarl, “Just whack me in the head next time, you fucking psychopath.”
“Noted,” she replies coolly, still studying the mockingbird. Eventually she sweeps it to the floor and crushes it quite casually beneath her heel. There’s a small, pathetic crunch, like several finger bones snapping at once, and the mockingbird is quiet. The silence leaves me chilled, dry-mouthed, unable to believe I permitted myself even a single homoerotic impulse about this woman.
She turns a level, businesslike gaze on me. “Now, let us talk. I require your assistance.”
It’s hard to pull off a mocking laugh when you’re shackled to someone’s wall and they’re looking at you like you’re a lock they will either pick or break, but I give it a good effort. “Really? Because I could swear you just choked me with a magic murder ribbon.”
“It’s a bodice lace, actually.”
“I figured.” I may not know this story as well as Sleeping Beauty, but I’m still a folklore major with a significant Grimm obsession. In their version, called either Schneewittchen or Schneewei?chen depending on the edition, the wicked stepmother tries to kill Snow White with a poison comb and a bodice lace before she goes for the apple, which are sufficiently weird murder weapons that my favorite professor even wrote an article about them （“Mirror, Mirror: Vanity as Villainy in the Western Imagination”）。 If Dr. Bastille were here, she’d probably be asking the queen whether her choice of tools represented a sublimated reclamation of the male monopoly on violence, whereas all I can think about is how badly I want to punch her in the throat. And how I’m going to escape, and whether I have a chance in hell of taking that mirror with me.