Excerpt
from
Snow White Blood Red
Dear Wilhelm Carl Grimm,
She is not that giddy, naïve, and helpless
princess she pretends to be. Please don’t let her fool you with her innocence
if you see her sing to the birds in the forest. Resist her charm from bringing
joyful tears to your eyes, and shield yourself from her devious beauty before
she deceives you into wanting to kiss her awake. It'll be a kiss of
death. Your death. That’s how she fooled the Huntsman, Prince Charming, and me,
her birth mother.
I still remember the original script of the fairy
tale, the one you wrote in 1812. It clearly stated that she was my own flesh
and blood daughter. I don’t have the slightest idea why you altered it fifty
years later.
What was the point of turning me into an evil,
narcissistic, and heartless stepmother, blinded by jealousy and envy of the
young princess?
For years, I have been looking forward to telling
you the truth about her, but you were impossible to reach.
I am glad I found your brother, Jacob. He told me
that you wanted to tone the stories down so children could sleep better at
night, instead of having nightmares about the Queen who sought to eat her
daughter’s heart and liver.
Shame on you, Wilhelm.
You, of all authors, knew why I wanted to kill
her. My actions were justified. I was trying to save my kingdom from her wrath,
before everything we loved was destined to an end. The same way you had to
rewrite the true fairytales after cursing us, so the War of Sorrows would end
forever after.
Night after night, and year after year, parents
fed their children false bedtime stories, until your lies grew into inescapable
memories. Your happily ever after lies, Wilhelm, shaped the so called
fairy tale world.
I wondered why you didn’t burn the original
scripts, instead of rewriting them. You must have figured out that sooner or later
someone would dig up the truth and expose you. Altering it was the smarter
solution. You let children believe that the bites were resurrecting kisses, and
that torturing glass coffins were made for sleeping beauties, waiting for a
prince to come and kiss them awake.
A wise man once said that the greatest trick the
devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was someone else. You did the
same with us, Wilhelm. You turned us into pastiches of the immortals that we
really are, and made it harder for us if wanted to persuade the world
otherwise.
I know that you did it to save us from her.
And I appreciate how you concealed our real names, or we would have ended up
like Rumpelstiltskin, tortured by those who knew of his real name.
But sometimes, I can’t help but wonder why no one
ever questioned why I was called the Evil Queen, and why I was never given a real
name in the books.
Was I so superficial to the world, so
stereotypical and mundane? Why was I treated as if I were the monster of the
week?
You know what I think? I think that the world
never got the time to hate me. It just wanted to hate me long before it
met me.
If I tell those who detest me about the true
nature of their little princess, would they ever care about me half as much as
they care about her?
I know that deep inside, they adore me. They like
the way I talk, walk, dress, and even the way I kill.
They are just afraid to admit how much they love
me. I am the Snow White Queen, strong enough that I don’t need anyone’s pity or
love, because I am loved by the greatest and most majestic heart in the
world:
Mine.
