Mirror Mirror: A Novel by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire [Maguire, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, General, Fiction, Historical, Family Life, Italy, Adaptations, Snow White (Tale), Fairy Tales; Folk Tales; Legends & Mythology
ISBN: 9780061960567
Google: sL2zbUvskgMC
Amazon: 006196056X
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The dwarves

STIRRING, AWAREof small pains. The

chamber had a musty aspect, as of a catacomb or an ossuary. She couldn’t tell where the light originated.

There were no apparent windows, there was no suggestion of sunlight, even behind panels of wood or draping folds of carpet. Yet she could see—she blinked—and the room swam into a cooler, more decisive focus.

She sensed the arbitrary, the conditional. Only when she tried to tell herself what it was did it settle down, the way telling a dream makes a dream gain its legs and lose its mystery. The space was nothing like a room . . . and as the word room is spoken, even to deny a likeness, the nonroom-like space becomes more like a room, regardless.

There was a space that became more like a room as she considered it. The long stone on which she sat seemed, on reflection, to straighten its angles, as if tending to think itself a bed; and then, belatedly, it grew or acquired bedposts of a sort, which became more nicely carved the more Bianca thought about it.

Her clothes had fallen and rotted off her, nothing less than that—and she was naked beneath the slightly clammy sheet. Was it linen?—yes, a fine linen, and look at that embroidery stitching itself as she watched, making the complicated turn around the corner, and the small white rosettes blooming at intervals!

How peculiar to be naked, she with her lifelong shyness about her form. It was distracting. It therefore took her some time to register the conversation she seemed to be having with other matters of business in the room—bits of furniture, were they, or seven boulders arranged randomly?

No, boulders don’t speak, except in dreams.

The muscles of her neck ached and she urgently needed to urinate, not uncommon in a dream. So dreaming or not, she began to stretch and to draw the sheet around her, as modestly as she could. The sheet fed straps forward over her shoulders that bit where they ought, forming a yoke and bib and gown that allowed her to move with modesty. Then she stood and found a porcelain vessel for peeing into, and squatted above it.

One never pees in a dream, one only needs to. So what did it mean, that she could?

Only when she had finished and pushed her hair back from her forehead—the hair that fell now almost to her waist—did the opinionated rocks begin to shift. Had the rocks been speaking to her? She had a sense that they had: what an odd dream this was being. She couldn’t see them well at all. It was as if they drank the light in the room and emitted it as darkness, a kind of cloaking smudginess. She felt she was looking through a glass clouded with soot. She couldn’t make her eyes work correctly, rub them as she might. The creatures were neither naked nor clothed, so far as she could tell, only rather roughly cast.

They had a look of—how to put it—character.

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