Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Italy, Historical - General, Fiction, Fairy Tales, Cesare, Lucrezia, Fantasy - General, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Renaissance, Legends & Mythology, Historical fiction, Sisters, Snow White (Tale), 1480-1519, Adaptations, Fiction - Fantasy, Folk Tales, Historical, 1476?-1507, Historical & Mythological Fiction, General, Borgia, Fantasy, General & Literary Fiction, American Historical Fiction, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780060988654
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

Mirror Mirror

How the edge of this boulder resembled the jutting brow of a scowling man.

A very small scowling man, but a man nonetheless, not a child. Nothing childlike at all.

And this one had a flared hump to one side that looked like a misshapen shoulder, drawn back; one could finish the thought of the boulder and imagine the swelling some inches down as a hand on a hip.

And this other, on her other side. A sense of its straining.

It was uncomfortable; she was surrounded by granite forms imitating creatures. It made her feel preyed upon.

She stood again, height being all she had against them. A painful tenderness in her groin, from where she had urinated. She groaned without caution.

She wanted to leave them, to train her eyes more carefully upon the walls of this chamber, and notice them into clarity: a wall of polished planks, of ruddy brick, of rusticated stones?—something to identify. Anything. Nothing would clarify unless she worked at it. She moved forward again, to leave the standing circle around her, and noticed—how had she missed it before?—that her fingernails had gone long and witchlike, ivory scythes splintered at the ends, capable of ripping skin. Her toenails curled like tusks, and nestled into one another like the overlapping segments of a flattish, chambered shell.

She felt she’d died and been buried, and was being restored to life, to a new life, as an animal. She was one step shy of being human now. Her breasts, though modestly sheathed in her gown of bedding, moved of their own new weight, and brushed against the cloth bib. The tender tips of her breasts blistered with a curious sort of pain, and she shook, from her elbows to her spine. The convulsion drew the cloth against her breasts again. She exhaled with a spasm of her cheeks and tongue, releasing a wordless sound of surprise.

Braised, tormented—the whole world leaning upon her in the form of a bedsheet fingering her skin—she stepped back, as if her sleep were still waiting for her on the bed, like body warmth left in the mattress for a few moments after you arise. As if she could subside back into sleep safely, and wake up some other time, some other way.

Then the convulsion, which had had a teasing aspect as well as a frightening one, took a deeper bite of her body, lower down, and the soft pain of her groin sharpened. As if in her sleep she’d been impregnated by a wolf, and a young wolf cub was scrabbling at her interior to bite its own exit passage. She sank to her knees, her arms crooked behind and her elbows pressing down into the mattress. She flung her head backward and clenched her fists. Her knees hit the floor and lifted and hit the floor again. Like a bellows her thighs worked back and forth.

Mamma,she said,Mamma.Gesù Cristo.Mamma, Mamma. Then her words gave way to mere syllables, lengthening inchoate sounds.

She voided her interior. The blood rolled and splashed, and bits of matter tore embery fingers against her insides.

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