Beauty Never Dies (2 page)

I will tell you the things about her that no one has ever known. So dear Wilhelm, let me bleed on these pages with my quill pen, made of feathers as black as crows, as I am writing on paper as white as a dove, with ink that is as red as blood that belongs to your brother …

I want to tell you about the time I stopped breast-feeding her, the day when I realized what she really was in the winter of 1797.

I was sitting in my bed in my royal chamber, in the castle we call the Schloss, at the top of a hill overlooking the Kingdom of Sorrow, the kingdom of which I was its queen, and she was to become the most beautiful princess.

It was one of the coldest winters. The snow fell intensively, burying the lovely purple poppy fields and covering it with a shroud of a thick layer of dark white snow. Somehow, the white of the snow that year did not reflect sunlight or shadows. It lay grisly over the contour-lined land like a dead girl’s white coat made of the fur of dead polar bears, like a white wavy carpet that was in no way magical. The curves of the land made the snow look like there was a beautiful gigantic dead girl buried underneath it. Little did I know that the time would come that this buried girl could only be Snow White or me, that the world wouldn’t be spacious enough for both of us.

Peasants went broke because they couldn’t seed the earth, and animals were no longer to be found, all except the crows of course. Those damn crows pecked at each other out of hunger, fluttering high in the bruise-colored sky as their blood spattered all over the snow like red rain next to the black corpses of their own kind. It was a black, white and red winter, the wicked colors that doomed my life.

Looking through the huge rectangular window overlooking the dark Black Forest, I accidentally pricked my thumb while Snow White lay nestled in my arms. I don’t know how I hurt myself that day but I sure know that I was distracted by her beauty and innocent smile. Those lovely doe eyes of hers were gleaming above her chubby cheeks that curved like ocean waves whenever she smiled at me, like a rhythmic sonata so enchanting that the singer’s voice caused the instruments to bend, reform and curve with mirth and ecstasy, bringing dead wood
instruments to life.

I don’t know how she possessed such beautiful doe eyes. Neither the king nor I had them. Only one other man in my husband’s family did, my husband’s vicious father who hunted us for years after we’d escaped from him, crossing wide oceans. But his father’s doe eyes were far from beautiful – for they were blackened with sorrow –I’d rather not talk about that now
.

Snow White wrapped her small, almost boneless hands around my pricked thumb, finger by finger, so gently that her touch took my breath away. I almost cried hot tears of joy. As hard as she tried to press on my thumb, her skin still felt like silk around my flesh, and I wished that she’d never let go of me. It was true that I was her mother, and she needed me never to let go of her, but little did she know that I didn’t want her to let go of me either.

I laughed as her face knotted childishly, staring at that stubborn thumb of mine that she could not pull closer to her. In her childish frustration, she reminded me of cats chasing balls of thread. I knew my daughter would grow up to be a kick-ass girl one day, but right then, she was still a baby – and yes, the Queen of Sorrow says
kick ass
and stuff like that. Because guess what? I am an immortal, and I have seen everything from Brothers Grimm to Lady Gaga. You feelin’ me?

Since I would have granted her any wish in exchange for one look from her ocean-blue eyes staring back at me, I didn’t mind lending her my thumb, which suddenly seemed to attract her more than the milk in my breasts.

I noticed a drop of blood on top of my thumb where I had pricked it. My intention was to pull it away, clean it, and give it back to her, but when I tried pulling it away, her hands seemed stronger all of a sudden, not strong enough to pull my thumb though, but I noticed an unusual increase in her strength. I thought I’d seen a vein popping out momentarily from her gelatin-like and almost-boneless neck.

However, it wasn’t alarming enough then. Mothers are blinded by their love for their daughters in a way that if they died while nurturing them, they would barely notice their own death. Only after their responsibility toward their child is over, would they allow death to take hold of them – and if you really have to know, I wasn’t immortal yet then. I am the Evil Queen, remember? Always the last one to be considered.

So I loosened my thumb for Snow White to pull closer to her.

At first, she pulled it to her chest, not taking her eyes off it. Her eyes had a sudden golden tint to them which I thought I was imagining.

“Are you alright Shew?” I asked, as I preferred to call her. Her father had another nickname for her, a much sillier one.

Snow White didn’t answer me. She pulled my thumb up with both of her tiny hands and sucked on it, which I found mesmerizing and cute, like when she was sucking on her own thumb while asleep.

My husband, the king, had warned me many times that she should not start sucking on things, that it was a bad habit, inappropriate for princesses.

Her sucking was ticklish. After all, her teeth hadn’t grown yet so it was a funny feeling that I felt. As she continued with my thumb in her mouth, the golden tint loomed back into her eyes.

Suddenly, I remembered the drop of blood and tried to pull away. Again, it wasn’t that I couldn’t pull away. By any means, she wasn’t stronger than me. In fact, her weakness was her greatest power. It was that I found it strange that she insisted to put a pricked thumb with blood in her mouth.

Before I could let my mind wander suspiciously, the most beautiful smile landed on her face the way fluttering stars land onto a cloudy midnight sky.

Shew’s symphonic smile was accompanied by curling cheeks, dancing eyebrows, and a wiggly cute nose.

I patted her as she let go of my thumb and hugged her and told her a bedtime story. It was about a beautiful girl who had been cursed by a witch to stay asleep forever until a most charming prince came and kissed her awake, and they lived happily ever after. Snow White loved to fall asleep to this story. I was wondering if she dreamed about the prince, when sudden lightning struck outside.

As she went to sleep, I wiped a drop of blood off her red lips.

This incident never happened again. That was because I never pricked my thumb again in front of her. I did prick my thumb a lot in my years, but not for her – and that’s another story. I was alert enough to keep her at a distance from the sight of blood.

Sometimes, she still stared dreamingly at my thumb, like a girl standing next to her mother in the kitchen, tiptoeing to see if her mother finished baking her favorite apple pie, so she could start eating it.

Seven years later though, my concerns were confirmed, and I knew that there was no way back.

It was a festive day when my husband and I welcomed the king and queen of Red, a neighboring kingdom. Times were harsh as we fought the demons trying to breach our borders and threaten the safety of the kingdom that my husband and I had paid trails of blood to protect.

If only I had the time to tell you about the sacrifices I made for this kingdom, for my husband, and for bringing Snow White into the world.

But who am I to complain? In your eyes, I’m just an evil queen, who wanted to murder her daughter, jealous of her young beauty.

I have to admit that beauty does have a lot to do with this story, in an ugly way.

The majestic celebration with the king and queen of Red was mainly to assure everyone that the Sorrows and Reds would always protect each other in the ageless war against the demons outside the borders trying to spread their cursed disease to the locals.

However, that was not all.

After dinner, I couldn’t take my eyes off their nine-year-old prince. Such a beauty, the boy was. He was well-mannered and shook my hand with such delicacy like I’d never seen before, but he seemed bored in the presence of the elders like us. His beautiful eyes were scanning the castle for the princess.

I asked my husband to summon our daughter and introduce her to the prince, hoping that cupid would strike his arrow and bind their hearts with velvet threads of love forever. Who else could I think of being my daughter’s husband after many years to come?

As our loyal servant escorted my lovely Snow White down the stairs, her black hair waved down her back on the white dress she wore. She looked paler than usual that day – the sun had become her worst enemy lately; she wouldn’t go out in daylight, and her room was darkened with curtains rolled down over the windows. However, she stood looking fabulous like a princess, licking her blood-red lips the moment she laid eyes on the beautiful prince. It was appetite at first sight.

The prince seemed
taken by
her as well. When the prince’s and princess’s eyes met, the elders exchanged murmurs and started talking about how beautiful they were. The sun splayed through the curtains and suddenly, Snow White didn’t mind the sunlight in the prince’s presence. They played together and he chased her across the castle, but Shew was deceivingly smart in hiding and manipulating, always with that doe-eyed smile on her face.

My eyes followed them everywhere they went in the castle. I was worried, for the prince was one of those boys who had an infinite appetite for girls. However young the Reds were, their men had a reputation of growing up and becoming womanizers, but they also had a reputation of being irresistible to women. Shew had an uncanny appetite for beautiful boys at such a young age. I could see it in her eyes whenever she met one.

What I feared happened eventually. I caught the prince pushing Snow White gently into a corner, and God only knows what that beautiful mischievous nine-year-old had in mind.

As I parted them, my husband summoned for one of his favorite young huntsmen, about Snow White’s age. The king liked to train young boys he trusted to become huntsmen and later help him defend the kingdom against the demons lurking outside its borders. The young huntsman was to escort the prince and the princess so that nothing crazy would happen.

The crowd was waiting for us outside to celebrate the day the two kingdoms had become alliances – and maybe more than that in the future. We, the elders, approached the people, and headed out to the balcony when we heard a sudden scream behind us.

I tuned back, my heart racing, praying that it wasn’t what I feared. I was too late.

The young prince was lying on the floor, shuddering helplessly as if possessed by demonic spirits, like a fish throbbing for breath out of water. His eyes were all white as he screamed in pain. I could spot the two bite marks on his neck and blood trickling down onto the white and black marble floor.

I looked for the huntsman, but he was gone.

Tilting my head, I saw her, my daughter Snow White, standing in the middle of the castle hall with blood dripping from her lips, but still looking as innocent as a white dove, as if she only overdosed on red cherry-flavored ice cream – we didn’t have that in the 18
^th
century, but you get the picture.

As we ran toward the prince, she seemed astonished at the prince’s fainting, wondering why he didn’t like her biting him, why her bite had hurt him, as if she thought of it like a kiss or something, and I thought the prince was a danger to her. She looked at me with her fangs drawn out, but still with those doe eyes, pleading as if she were the victim, not the predator.

“What happened to him?” she wondered as my husband used his magical powers to erase the king and queen’s memory to make them forget what happened.  He was such a master at the dark arts, but he used them wisely.

“Take her away from here.” He growled as he held the boy and laid him on a table. “I know how to save him.” He locked himself alone with the boy in the room, for he didn’t want anyone, not even me, to see how he would resurrect the prince.

I pulled my daughter away, up the stairs, to wash her face and her blood-stained dress. She licked the prince’s blood from her hands like licking melted chocolate from the palm of your hands.

“You can’t do that.” I yelled.