Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente

Author:Catherynne M. Valente
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: wild west, gunslinger, myth, Snow White, old west, Fantasy, fairy tales
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2013-02-28T06:00:00+00:00

Snow White

In the Underworld

Round about Nevada the grass gets scarce and the critters get shy. All those apples are long gone and the bullet situation is not promising. Snow White hitches up her need and goes looking for work. She suffers some worry over whether her femaleness will trouble her, but the truth is after riding those back countries down, most everyone looks the same.

She finds what she’s looking for in a gemstone mine south of Blue Coffin. You could ride right over it and never know it’s there: the men live below snakes in the hollows left after the axes and drills have stripped the shine out of the rock. Coupla the boys even throw down rugs, perch a picture of the missus back home up on a spit of stone. One hollow’s set up for a saloon, a tilted splintery bar, whiskey so cheap and stiff the boys call it Who-Shot-John, a card table and seven stools nobody stops fighting over. Snow White stows Charming with the camp horses in a corral run by a woman just about as old as the wheel and heads underground. It don’t escape her this is her father’s mine. Nevada is his mother’s teat; where he made his fortune. Well, why shouldn’t Snow White have a fortune, too? Not that she expects one. She’s no fool and a night in a gold camp will straighten you right out on the odds of making your dimes on the lode. If you want to get straight, which most nobody does once they’ve seen the good blue and the hard yellow.

It’s neither of the two down here. It’s the true red: rubies. Bloody knuckles; apple rinds. Snow White gets a skinnier cut on account of her being a girl and a half-breed heathen if ever the foreman did see one, but it’s something. It keeps Charming in hay and her in beans-on-griddlebread and on Sunday they get tinned peaches if the take’s been good. Way Snow White figures it, in a month she’ll have enough socked away to head back north, up to Montana which she has not forgotten, into the Territory. In a month she’ll have enough to quit worrying if she hasn’t seen so much as a badger stumble past her sights. The company man smiles and rolls his cigarette. It’s what they all say. Just a month and I’ll bring my people out. Just a month and I’ll move up top to Blue Coffin where they got proper houses. Just a month and I’ll be shitting rubies, that’s how rich I’ll strike. Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today.

Snow White does not complain. She swings her ax and learns to see in the dark. She forgets what it’s like to smell nice. She gets so that her heart beats faster whenever she sees a glitter of red in the gloom. Just about every week some idiot tries to get her to wash their clothes or scrub them down or show that cook how to make a proper tuck-in.

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