“I had a Dreamhunter help me.”
“So why don’t you just do it now?” Jacob coughed, instead of yelling, at me.
“You know I am the last person in the world to stop someone from dying.” I raised an eyebrow. “But I am going to be kind. I am to flip one of my mirror coins for you.”
“What?”
“The coin’s head is a mirror that shows your beauty when you look at it. The coins tail only shows your ugliness. Beauty gets you killed – for you know I can’t stand someone beautiful – and ugliness spares your life. Should I flip, Jacob?”
“I’d rather day then live with your ugliness.”
“Wrong answer,” I shook my head. “How about if I tell you about her before I flip the coin?” I offered. “How about if I tell you about three incidents with her from my point of view. Maybe you’ll change your mind and understand.”
“I wouldn’t have you tell me a bedtime story before I sleep for my dreams will turn into apple-rotten nightmares,” He coughed. “And definitely I will not allow you to tell me a dead-time story by no—“
Jacob didn’t finish his last words as his breath abandoned him. He was dead, and I didn’t even get the chance to flip my coin. His eyes were still open and I should have shut them close, but I didn’t. I once heard that as long as you have not closed the eyes of the deceased, they still could hear you and pass your story to the afterlife. I was determined to tell him about her.
“Deadtime story? Hmm,” I sighed. “What an idea, Jacob. A storyteller who tells stories to the dying before they leave the world. That would make a great book, you know,” I was unapologetic about talking to a corpse. I was so used to corpses. Corpses of girls. Young, ripe, and beautiful girls. “Let me tell you a Deadtime story, Jacob. One that the world isn’t supposed to know about. Not even you. Although you think you’ve been told the right story, you were so wrong. What better timing to tell you than when you’re freshly dead.”
I put leg on leg and talked to the dead Jacob Grimm, or rather the empty walls of the cottage where Snow White, my daughter, once lived:
I want to tell you about the first time I stopped breast-feeding her. The first time I realized what she really was. 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. Somehow, the white of the snow that year would 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 giant dead girl buried underneath it. Little did I know that the time will come and this buried girl could only be Snow White or me, that the world will not be spacious enough for the both of us.
Peasants went broke for they could not seed the earth, and animals were no longer to be found. All except of the crows, of course, those damn crows pecking 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 kind. It was a black, white, and red winter. Those wicked colors that doomed my life.
Looking through the rectangular huge 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 surely 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 and reform and curve with mirth and ecstasy, bringing dead wood instruments into life.
I don’t know how she possessed such 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 had been hunting us for years after we’ve escaped from him, crossing oceans wide. Although his father’s doe eyes were far from beautiful – for they were blackened with sorrow –, I’d rather not talk about it now.