***
' You and him. You and him.'
"Please stop."
'Pretty dress. He seen you without it yet?'
My feet, bare, like the rest of me, carried me through mountains of snow. I was running from the sound of voices. . .torment. Naked. Freezing. I was blue. There was a small shelter in a forest: the door wide. I heard wolves, angry, God himself roared at me to go into that house.
'Snow white,' they said. The seven little men. 'Eat with us.'
The small round table. My paints were in a row.
The seven little men had adult faces, of which I did not recognize, but my body knew them. They all wanted me to chair next to them. My heart turned to ice, I was hurting.
"No."
I sat next to the one that hurt the least. A man with a face like snow, lips like rose petals, eyes like wolves'. I breathed easily. He was a friend.
I watched a hand out of mid air paint food onto plates. The food turning real. It was my hand.
Next to me, the man did not eat. I decided not to either. The other six filled their mouthes and drank to content. Out of boredom, I plucked up the only apple on the table. A glowing red delight. I held it to my lips. Pausing. My friend next to me had tears sliding off his nose. His eyes did not meet mine, he looked onto his plate. Empty."Yours." I said, holding it out for him. My voice was not mine. It was Snow White's.
In exchange, he put a black dress on my body. He bit into the apple.
I looked up, whatever feeling of contentedness for warm clothing on me or feeding a friend to make peace suddenly, rippingly, vanished. The six little men with adult faces were eating bloody human body parts. They picked their teeth with my paint brushes. I raised to fight them but stopped, realizing that it was my body that lay in pieces upon the table.
The realization turned to black mist. The dress I wore tightened around me, pulling me back, floating, toward a window to the backyard. I couldn't take it off, it was too late, it dragged me somewhere.
I was lowered into the groud. I rectangular shaft deep in the blackness of earth. My dress velcrowed itself onto the heather of the casket. I writhed to no avail.
Trapped.
The men above me. Breaths of falling snow spun into my sepulchure from above the men that began to bury me. They hummed in a foreign language. A song I knew. I gave in, my eyelashes resting on my cheeks, I was giving in. My head turned to the left slowly,
I was not alone.
It was my friend. The man who's face I knew, yet not the name. I gave him the apple. He gave me the dress. He put it on me because he knew I was going to die. It was my funeral dress. My coming funeral had upset him.
He lie next to me.
My gift had him killed.
Our bodies turned to ice, as we were lowered sullenly into water . . . lying as still as we under the earth. . . .Drowned in death.
