"Snow White & Rose Red" - Short Story

Image Description: An opening stock photo of a warmly illuminated forest trail.

Written Oct. 22, 2022

     Lita wandered off the park’s path for almost an hour to an undisclosed creek that few knew. Her shifty eyes softened when surrounded by the wholesome, leafy wild, and were flicked with ink behind a parted curtain of brown and crimson bangs. Her well-loved boots kissed the reddish dirt with every careful swagger, and the faces on her band t-shirt screamed with liberty. Indeed, she loved most how no voices could be heard out here; Not her Mamá’s, her Dad’s, her teachers’, nor the dead. Out here, the red girl could just barely sense the faint whisps of whimpers of animals recently sacrificed on the altar of nature’s cycles. There were no locks to check, no seatbelts to refasten, and no sinks reminding her to wash her hands seven times over. She had stolen away to this creek countless times when her anxious compulsions and the voices threatened her sanity. What the girl thought of as she hiked through the woods, not even she could tell. Now and again a scent would elicit a memory so vague it passed like a forgotten dream; The color blue, a feeling of happiness, holding someone’s hand – or a branch? She wondered if anything she remembered was real.

     She romped into the clearing of Myrtle Creek, where it leveled and burbled into dozens of tiny waterfalls over fuzzy, slimy rims. She looked across the flooded stones and froze. A bear with honey-brown fur lifted its heavy head and small eyes to her, maw dripping. The girl knew to raise her arms and yell, but the bear spoke first, calling her by name. Shock stole Lita’s voice, and an intangible familiarity caressed her mind again.

     “Do you remember me?” The bear asked with a gentle rumble, edged with excitement. “You probably don’t. I’m this way, after all.” He crossed the creek slowly, seemingly to assure her as much as to avoid slipping. “I’m Hesed,” he continued. “Do you remember? We were friends in middle school?”

     “Hesed?” Lita murmured in astonishment. The nerdy, charismatic boy in a wheelchair was this animal half the size of an elephant approaching her? Hesed lowered his head to her level and seemed to be smiling sheepishly, desperately. She had to admit, his hazel eyes looked unchanged, and his timbre rang familiarly, albeit constricted into a baritone.

     The shafts of sunlight pivoted and brushed the surface of the trees as they spent the afternoon hours recalling childish misadventures, their mutual friends, and their own recent lives. Hesed sat back on his haunches and shared about how his brother Justice had passed away before repaying a debt to a little wiccan. Hesed, ever a defender, had confronted the little man and offered to pay it off. The wiccan had taken one leering once-over of his wheelchair and accepted the deal with a twisted condition.

     “It comes and goes,” He told her in a cracking, low voice, “and I can’t always control when. I gained something. … But I had to lose someone.”

     Lita took one of his paws in her hands and contemplated if everything was a dream. If Hesed was apparently cursed, she thought, then her own curse was real! Relief and worry stole over her simultaneously. She wondered what she herself had lost to hear the whispers of the dead … and remembered – or rather, remembered remembering. A blurry panic shivered over her shoulders, and she knew who could confirm her dread.

     Hesed was kind enough to give Lita a ride through the skinny pines and gloaming to a neighborhood without fences. She thanked him with a scratch between his stubby ears – was that patronizing? – and steeled herself on the front porch. She glanced back across the way at Hesed among the bushes. He nodded, but Lita did not have enough time to nod back.

     The old woman, leather brown as a chestnut, opened the door and gasped. Even after all these years, she still recognized her own nieta. Lita’s steel face melted, and she choked on the dread of one finally realizing that she was awake and living a nightmare.

     “I remember!” Lita cried.

     A concise yet sorrowful talk passed between the two women over a pair of barely touched hot cocos. Abuela pushed herself up from her armchair, fatigued with age or guilt or both, and pulled down the ladder to the attic.

     “Encontrarás sus cosas allí,” she told Lita above a whisper.

    Lita counted the thirteen steps and passed the first to what felt like a pregnant tomb. Grey-blue light barely illuminated the vaulted room from a round window. She searched among the Christmas and Día de Muertos decorations until she found a photo album labeled with the name of the dead. She sank to the floor, her heart pounding, palms slickening, and her fingers quaking as she watched the book open by a remotely controlled hand.

     A baby marveled at the camera in the first several pages. A tiny girl smeared in blue frosting bared her teeth in the next. The little girl on the first day of school, the little girl kissing a pink bundle in her lap, two little girls lying in a pile of autumn leaves, two little girls in a Christmas card, two little girls posing in color-coordinated princess costumes. With each turn of the page, Lita made the little stranger grow up and race to the inevitable. A face only seen in her dreams looked back in startling vividness: Pale hair, blue sundress, and eyes that disappeared above a dimpled smile. Then, the pages suddenly stopped.

     Tears flooded Lita’s face and throat. She felt like she was drowning, just like her sister did when she had pushed her into Abuela’s pool. What she remembered remembering folded in on itself and the original memory surfaced, and the horror seized her. She had killed her sister, fighting over toys or pretend roles or something like that. She, who had unconsciously worn mourning clothes for seven years, choked out the name like it were an eldritch invocation.

     “Ivory.”

     Guilt squeezed her lungs empty, sorrow shook her shoulders, and horror forced her eyes from closing out the truth, yet love hugged the album to her chest. Her sobs strangled her screams into a slurred “I’m sorry!” It was real, she knew. She was real.

     She tore through every box bearing Ivory’s name, finding clothes, toys, artwork, books, décor, and crocheted items of beginner proficiency. She touched and held every item like they could dissolve like sand. Her tears streamed without beginning and end, mingling with laughter. The pressed flowers they collected from parks were still beautiful. The soles of Ivory’s galoshes were still caked with mud. She inhaled sharply, finding a princess doll with a blue dress that matched her own red one. Underneath sat an antique music box.

     She opened it gingerly and forcibly held her sobs to listen to the twinkling lullaby of “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Handmade jewelry rested inside; On top, a necklace of navy lace dangling with an unrecognizable jewel, small enough to be a choker on anyone not seven years old. The jewel was resplendently beautiful – opalescent and blue like the cleanest sapphire. They had both worn necklaces like it in the princess photo. Where was the other? She didn’t know why, but Lita’s hands moved on their own and hooked the necklace around her wet neck.

     She suddenly felt her momentum and soul being thrown backwards. Her head snapped back, and her body slowed and hovered almost parallel to the floor. Then, time seemed to crawl, and countless voices screamed, sang, cried, whispered from a vast, murky ether of maroon and smoke. Their silhouettes and hands reached out for her, and the girl realized that she was able to tune out all but one voice at a time, hearing individual regrets, curses, and bargains – offers of powers for favors. Her mind hung in that nether – that purgatory – in awe for a half minute that lasted eternally. Her body’s inertia reversed, and she caught herself as she returned to kneeling on the attic floor. Looking in an old mirror, she saw her bones glowing pink under her skin like una esquelita - or a reaper - terrible and beautiful and powerful.

   Lita had a wiccan to hunt.