The left half of my mother's face makes me think of pastries. Marzipan skin devoid of blood, puffed up by the medication, strawberry syrup lips drawing in breath after breath, soft brown locks caressing her cheeks like caramel. The right side of her head is maimed by the operation, a hairless graveyard of skin, mangled by black-stitched scars. Underneath, the tumors regroup.
Snow White bites into a red, red apple. Sour juice squirts down her throat. The apple's skin withstands her teeth longer than the pulp. She wipes her lips with her cotton sleeve, and pushes the apple taste around in her mouth. The poison travels into her stomach and dissolves in her cells. Her prince's servants carry her in a glass coffin — a shock frosted doll breathing once per minute.
I light an incense stick on her nightstand. Her mouth twitches when the smoke reaches her nostrils. For a moment it seems as if — but, no.
In the gleaming sunlight, the servants carry the glass casket over the lumpy ground. Snow White's fingers fold around a bouquet of roses. Her frozen smile refuses to melt. Inside her throat, the poisonous bite snuggles, shifting back and forth in time with the casket bearer's steps. It might come out. It might not. The prince, enthralled by the girl's dead perfection, wishes for both.
My days have become cogwheels, biting into each successor and predecessor in slow motion. I have moved into my mother's apartment. Someone has to take care of the plants and chase away the dust. After work, it's the hospital, the incense sticks, my mother's heartbeat pulsing as a thin green line on a black monitor, and take-out food at her bedside. Her clothes fit me. I empty her larder, lather myself with her potions, wake to the sound of her alarm.
I lean towards her and sniff at her the way I sniffed at my dead father. Her own scent has gone. She now smells of starched linen and unwashed hair. A tube with food paste disappears in her nose. Her glistening teeth sit in her gums. Her mouth stinks with silence. No one is watching us.
It wasn't a miracle. One of the prince's servants stumbled over a tree root that had been there all along, and the coffin crashed to the ground.
No miracle. Only a second of consciousness in which my mother opens her eyes, looks at me, and says, "Go."
The poisonous apple bite comes loose in Snow White's throat. The beautiful woman coughs. Her face reddens and contorts as she brings up spit and apple pulp. She rolls out of the coffin, shards of glass studding her black hair. Her wild eyes find the prince, who stares at the resurrected creature in fear, until she reaches for him with a still pale hand and smiles.
A single disturbance in my mother's breath, a gagging convulsion lasting long enough to free her. She is beautiful. The tan from her last vacation lingers on her cheekbones. Her wild eyes will never open, never find me, her hand will not reach, her lips never smile at me. I am left with that terrible fear and the images of apples, bright red and poisoned, and my mother's mouth, open and waiting.
Stefani Nellen is a psychologist-turned-writer living in Pittsburgh and Groningen (the Netherlands) with her husband. Her short fiction appears or is forthcoming in VerbSap, Bound Off, Hobart, Cezanne's Carrot, Smokelong Quarterly, FRiGG, and Apex Digest, among other places. She currently co-edits (with Julia LaSalle) the Steel City Review.