Snow White wrapped her small and 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 much as she tried to press on my thumb with all her might, her skin felt like silk around my flesh that I wished she’d never let go of me. It was true that I was her mother and she needed me to never let go of her, but little did she know that I didn’t want her to let go of me. In her childish anger, she reminded me of cats chasing balls of thread.
I laughed as her face knotted childishly, staring at the stubborn thumb of mine that she could not pull closer to her. I knew my daughter would grow up to be a kick-ass girl one day, but right now she was still a baby – and yes, the Queen of Sorrow says kick ass and stuff like that. Because guess what? I am immortal, and I have seen everything from Brothers Grimm to Lady Gaga. You feelin’ me?
As I would have granted her any wish in exchange for one look from her ocean-blue eyes 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, and my intention was to pull it away, clean it, and give it back to her. But when I tried to pull away, her hands seemed stronger out of a sudden, not strong enough to pull my thumb though but I could notice the unusual increase in her strength. I even thought I’ve seen a vein popping out momentarily from her gelatin-like and almost-boneless neck.
However, it wasn’t alarming enough by then. Mothers are blinded by love for their daughters in a way that if they die during nurturing them, they might barely notice their own death. Only after their responsibility toward their child is over, they would allow death to take hold of them – and if you really have to know, I wasn’t immortal by then. I am the Evil Queen, remember? Always the last to be considered.
So I loosened my thumb for Snow White to pull it 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. I thought I was imagining.
“Are you alright, Shew?” I asked her, 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 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 had not 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 again in her eyes.
Suddenly, I remembered the drop of blood and tried to pull away. Again, it wasn’t that I couldn’t pull away. She wasn’t stronger than me by any means. In fact, her weakness was her greatest power. It was that I estranged her insisting to hold onto a pricked thumb with blood in her mouth.
Before I could let my mind wander away suspiciously, a 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 wiggling 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 forever asleep 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. Always. I wondered if she dreamed about the prince as a sudden lightning stroke outside.
As she went to sleep, I wiped a trickle 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 her keep at 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 can start eating it.
Seven years later, my concerns were confirmed though, and I knew 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 our kingdom that my husband I paid trails of blood to protect.
If I only have the time to tell you about what I have sacrificed for this kingdom, for my husband, and for bringing Snow White into the world?
But who am I to complain? I am just an Evil Queen in your eyes, who wanted to murder her daughter, jealous of her young beauty.
I have to admit that beauty has a lot to do with this story, in an ugly way.
The majestic celebration with the king and queen of the Reds was mainly to assure that the Sorrows and Reds will always protect each other in the ageless war against the demons outside the borders, trying to spread the cursed disease to the locals.