White As Snow

Table of Contents

Snow White wasn’t her real name. Her classmates gave her that nickname in high school half-joking, half-afraid because she was unnervingly pale, the kind of pale no amount of summer could burn. Her hair was ink-black, her lips a natural red that needed no makeup. People noticed her, but not the way you’d want to be noticed. She looked less alive, more like porcelain someone had left in a coffin too long.

Her stepmother hated it. Not because Snow was prettier though she was, in that unsettling dead-girl way, but because of the attention. Every photo, every whispered comparison, every glance that skipped the older woman and lingered on the girl. The stepmother was obsessed with her own beauty; her Instagram was full of filters, her bathroom full of mirrors. But mirrors had a way of telling truths. One night, drunk on wine and envy, she whispered to her bathroom mirror.

“Who’s the most beautiful? Me, right?”

And maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was something older in the glass, but the reflection didn’t echo her smile. It whispered back,

“Not you. Snow White.”

That was the start of it. First came the hitman. Well, not exactly. Just a guy she paid off Tinder, the kind who’d do anything for cash. He was supposed to take Snow White out behind the school, make it look like an accident. But when he cornered her, she just stared at him, unblinking, until he swore her eyes looked empty, like doll eyes. He left running. He never even asked for his money.

Snow didn’t go home after that. She disappeared into the city. Ended up in a squat with seven men who worked night shifts down in the subway tunnels. They weren’t saints. They were addicts, burnouts, men who lived off the grid. But Snow? She fit right in. They joked that she hardly ate, hardly slept, hardly spoke like she wasn’t really one of them, just a ghost haunting the room.

But her stepmother wasn’t finished. She showed up again and again. A corset laced so tight it bruised Snow’s ribs. A hairbrush soaked in chemicals that burned her scalp raw. And finally an apple. Glossy red, genetically engineered, laced with poison. Snow bit it. She collapsed.

The men didn’t bury her. They couldn’t. She was too… striking. They built her a glass box from scrap, laid her inside, and kept her there. She didn’t decay. She didn’t change. She just rested, like she was waiting. And one day, someone will open the lid. And she will breathe again. But not the way you remember.