CW: Death, abuse, suicide, rape, homophobia, misogyny, and bodily harm.
This is one of those stories that just about wrote itself. Each princess had something to say, grief and rage straining through the veneer painted over their original tales. The end result is part obituary, part manifesto—a desperate cry for all the ugly to be seen alongside imperfectly beautiful decay.
1.
Apple in the throat, cyanide seeds on blood-flecked lips, core pinched in locked-up teeth.
The coroner said Snow tried to save herself, alone in her apartment in March. Her autopsy revealed three cracked ribs from where she tried to Heimlich herself against the kitchen sink. Her teeth were bleached white, rotten at the roots.1
1 She is buried in the bottom left corner of an orchard.
2.
Tetanus came first, from a rusted needle in her sewing machine. Rose slipped into a coma and died three months later in her hospital bed, surrounded by sleeping patients. Her body then lay in the morgue, unclaimed for a week before she was finally removed and laid on a brush pile behind the hospital.2
2 They burned her with clippings from the garden, her bones mixing with thorns in the ash.
3.
The press refused to print the names of the wolves who followed Ruby home and tore her apart under the naked trees. Their families insisted they were nice boys, good at cross country and headed for bright futures. Unlike Ruby.3
3 Her remains, what the grandmothers could find scattered in the dead leaves after the hungry woodsmen had taken their own fleshy trophies, are locked in a mirrored jewelry box on her mother’s nightstand.4
4 The queen declared war on the woods, but no blood after Ruby’s has been spilled. Many soldiers are also wolves.
4.
Isabelle had twelve hunting dogs. Evidence from the scene suggested they turned on her, reasons unknown. Locked in her mansion, alone among lavish furnishings acquired over a lifetime of trading in French antiques, no one heard her screams.5
5 A week passed before she was discovered. Her bones gnawed white, her dogs wandering the empty halls. Hungry.
5.
Undine drowned when she was seven. She drowned again at seventeen. Again, at twenty-eight. Always, there was someone on the beach to find her and conjure her back to air and land, her chest bruised from CPR. Still she sought the waves, loving the tang of a sea that hated her. When she drowned at fifty-six, there was no one near to suck the water from her lungs.6
6 She floated out with the tide and did not return.
6.
Baba spent a lifetime escaping death. First, it was rape that chased her through the streets. Then, when she was too old to be loved, lust turned to disgust. They chased her out of hatred for what she used to be, and was no longer. She drove across the country, her camper van scarred by bullets and fingernails.7
7 In an empty campground, she put the van in gear and lay down in the grass.8
8 She died on her own terms, in her own way.
7.
Surviving a tornado and conversion therapy, Dorothy died at last in a barn fire, her dress stuffed with straw and her arms wrapped around a woman her family didn’t recognize.9
9 Her dog was not seen again.
8.
Alice slit her wrists in a bathtub filled with her tears. The note she left could only be read with the aid of a mirror:
Late, late. Too late.
9.
On November 8th, the village hanged their last murderer. Gretel was sentenced to death for causing a fire in which her nanny was burned to cinders. The charges were brought by her brother.10
10 On her death, Hansel inherited their late father’s substantial estate.
10.
Jill was only eleven when she sprawled in the grass at the bottom of the hill, back broken. After the accident, she turned to art, as everyone expected her to. She used watercolors to illustrate her feelings. At age thirty-five, her brother found her in bed, blue paint on her lips.11
11 The court suspected suicide and disposed of her body in the old well.
11.
Mountains had called to Ella for as long as she could remember. She yearned for the silence and independence they gave her, hiking much faster than her stepsisters. A broken ankle left her stranded, drinking snow in the dark.12
12 She fell asleep at midnight, and never awoke.
12.
In a seventeenth century grave we bury our toes and join hands, remembering our final fallen girl. Her bones have turned amber with age. Cordelia’s crime was simple, her end as predictable as a fairy tale.13, 14, 15, 16, 17
13 She
14 died
15 for
16 saying
17 No.
