I am a woman.  I am seven times a woman, and my stepmother knows it.  This morning, I stood before her in the stinking dungeons and told her that I’d smashed her mirrors.  She spat in my face.  It was a lie, and she knows that as well.  All those years of drudgery, looking at shadows of my face in dishwater and forgotten puddles, taught me to cherish my reflection and to hunger for my own eyes.  They thought it would lead her to us, my stepmother’s power over mirrors, and so they smashed every one.  She found us anyway.  She found me.

They asked me why I let her in, yelled and cursed and beat me for it.  How could I be so stupid, they demanded, not to know my own stepmother?  How effective can the disguises of a witch be, when youth and purity look upon them?  Of course they were right.  Did I recognize her?  I agonized over each mistake.  Was the thrill I felt at my visitors the hunger for companionship or the tremor of instinctual fear?  Both?  The women who wore her face bore painful gifts for me, but gifts I never had otherwise.  I could have kissed her for the pain.

Now, she rots in the dungeon, the mirror I longed for.  Her hatred balances the beauty I was not allowed to understand; a beauty they never wanted me to become aware of.  They were terrified of losing me, my seven husbands.  And they hated me, oh yes, for reflecting their ugliness; when my hand lingered too long next to one of theirs, and their gnarled limbs left bruises on my pale skin.

To stay with such men was a madness I suppose.  As I grew, my limbs lengthened, and I worked as hard as my husbands.  I could have run back into the forest, faster than any of them.  I could have taken the heavy fire-tongs and made them hurt the way they hurt me, but I did not.  Even when I grew taller than all of them, when they pinched me until I hunched over, I did not run.  Once I was the perfect size.  A beautiful child, they whispered, touching my hair.  They made me cut it short and uneven.  It only grew long when I lay in my coffin, along with my bitten, split nails.  I could have run, I know.  But I had nowhere to run except back into the arms of my stepmother’s lover.  For many years I cursed his pity, cursed that my life was the only thing my beauty could buy.  I knew it would never buy my freedom. 

I have my own huntsman now, careful and conscious of my fragility.    He takes such care with me that I could weep.  Those are the times I slap him, but I fancy that he understands.  His hands are gentle, soft when they help me from my carriage, when they brush my fingertips.  Sometimes I imagine how harsh they must have been, when I ordered him to go into the woods, and leave behind him seven small graves. 

My stepmother is myself, chained in the dark.  I know this, because I have seen it in my mirrors.  And tomorrow, my wedding bells will ring, and I will sacrifice my other self that my husband and I may rule a kingdom in peace and prosperity.  He does not know what I was in the forest.  When he looked into my coffin he too thought of me as a beautiful child.  He saw my men only as seven protectors, seven guards.   My husband is a fool, and someday I will slip seven drops of poison into his wine.  His limbs will shiver and grey froth will bubble in the corners of his mouth.  His bowels will betray him, and all the while I will hold his hand and tell him that he will be well soon.  I will have to do it - you cannot trust a man who falls in love with a frozen corpse. 

I suppose that in my own way, I love him.  He opened the roof of my glass coffin, and reached in, and his warm lips burned mine when his tongue dislodged the apple.  In the moment of confusion I did not move or breathe, and I could feel him rise against my thigh where my limp body pressed to his.  His hands are soft, his knuckles smooth and un-knobbed from work and pain.  When he touches my lips with his thumb, there is a sharp pain under my breastbone, and perhaps that is love.  I have loved very little in my life, though, so I cannot be certain.  I remember a cat they allowed me to keep, once.  She took care of the rats and the mice, and when my husbands left me alone and weeping she would climb into my lap and purr.  Her velvet nose pressed to my throat at night, and her neck snapped in my hands like kindling.

I will never let him look into my mirrors.

And I will never give him a daughter, never.  I have seen that, too, in the fire of my stepmother’s eyes.  I cannot bear another reflection, I cannot bear to be what I never had. 

She will dance for me at my wedding, dance until the it kills her.  I chose her fate yesterday, at dinner.  My prince looked up at me, his eyes glassy as a coffin, while a piece of bloody roast lamb slipped from the point of his knife.  The iron slippers have blossomed in the fire already, more red than blood, dusted with ash white as snow.  I sprinkle wine over them and it crackles out of existence.  They will burn her feet away.  My Prince watches me from our bed, his face shadowed.  He sees something inside of me that he didn’t, before - the first step on the path over three hills and through three valleys to seven drops of black poison.  Perhaps I will cry when we place him in the ground, though I have learned a body belongs in the earth.  Tomorrow I will wear a circle of gold on my finger, and marry my eighth husband.

She will celebrate this.  She will bless our nuptials, as she never blessed a moment in my life.  My stepmother will dance at my wedding until her heart gives out.  And I will laugh because I do not know what else to do, and because I am as trapped in the castle of my childhood as I ever was in the forest.  I cannot breathe here either, though no ribbons bind my chest.  I try to imagine freedom, but my knuckles bruise themselves on the walls of my adamant tomb.

I knew the apple was poisoned, but I took it anyway.  I am my stepmother, you see, and in its polished ruby surface I could see my reflection.

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