Snow

My world was never meant to be real. It was carved out of the imagination of folks who lived in Once Upon A Time. I was around for thousands of years before the Brothers Grimm even attempted to legislate my existence, but somehow they did succeed in giving me an eternal life.

The world was a sheet of white before three perfect drops of red fluid fell from my mother’s womb. Imagine three perfect cherries sitting on top of an ice cream, well that was the aerial view before she let me go.

My plump red body wailed at the shock of the bitter cold blanket onto which it landed.  The man, who found me lying there, agitated, was a huntsman. He was out scouring the forest for wolves. He leaned over me:  tall, strong, boozy breath, sheepskin jacket. His left eyebrow lifted high on his forehead and his right eye winced through the peep hole of the rifle, he considered shooting his find, taking it back to his dusty cottage, and stringing it up by the ankles over an open fire.  

Something stopped him, I’m really not sure what it was, but something did. In a moment of clarity he threw the rifle to the ground and cupped me up into his nicotine stained palms. Of course, I now recognise the smell of stale tobacco as the smell of my father.  Sitting inside his rucksack, the air rattled around inside my tiny lungs and he marched me through the forest.

When we got inside, he wrapped me up in a blanket and plopped me into the washing tub. His moustached face peered down at me and I suckled on his knuckles for some time.

On my seventeenth birthday, my Grandmother presented me with a beautiful red cape.

 The thing about my world is that the snow never goes away, never turns to sludge or melts into oblivion. The thing about my red cape is that it shines as brightly against the white world, as the three drops of blood that came out of my mother’s womb . . .

(written by Rachel Dealtry)