Parable of Snow White and the Journalist

Parable of Snow White and the Journalist  

       In time prevailing de jure, a vain older woman, whose face was in a mirror, was jealous of a little girl whose face was not in the mirror, where hers was. Whenever the woman looked in the mirror, where her face was and the little girl’s was not, she was conscious that she did not have the face of the little girl. She wrote an article in her journal column, informing the men of the world that the little girl, whose face she did not possess in the mirror, ought to be executed. The men wrote a story about an older woman ordering a young girl to be executed, in which a man, benignly, merely banished the girl to the woods instead, so she would be free- to wait on seven men. The little girl was not paid, so today you would call this child slavery. Perhaps if the men’s story had been more elaborately detailed, trafficking.   

       When this did not work, the older woman wrote a journal article to the little girl, in order to reach out directly and persuade her to come and put her face in the mirror, where the older woman’s was. The men supported this. They awarded the older woman a five-star review, and her article was circulated to feature in the three most prestigious papers- the only papers in existence. They even considered awarding her the Pulitzer prize, but decided against it, because the older woman’s face was in the mirror and therefore wouldn’t be very conducive to the aesthetic headshot required for such a prize- the lighting would be all wrong, too many reflections.   

       The little girl also responded to the article. She, with axe borrowed from the saw cutter in the men’s story, decapitated herself, and placed her head in the mirror, fixing the frame securely. The mirror gave her eyes somewhat of a glazed, transparent look, but this was barely perceptible through a panel of obfuscating glass. The older woman, though supposed to be satisfied with this configuration, was even more incensed. Now, there was not one, but two faces in the mirror, side by side, and all day she was forced to compare her older face to the young, immobile face of the girl, whose face was now fixed in the mirror.   

       In a final act to at least salvage her independence and remove the spectre of the two headed monster impinging on her vision all day, as her head was, of course, inside the mirror, she banished the young girl somewhere far away from the mirror- outside. Outside was interesting, there was not a lot of it; much of the space was subsumed under newspaper articles. But there were, as in the men's parable, at least seven short men, and a tree with an apple on it. The tree was old and gnarled, its skin was creased like the wrinkles people lasered from their faces, by voluntarily undergoing paralysis, or grafting a new face out of their bottom. You had to cut it open to see how old it was, by counting the number of rings inside.   

       This is the part where the little girl dies. She sees the juicy apple, enchanting on the tree, hanging like a tumescent clot of blood. It is irresistible. She is short, being a young girl, but she reaches for the out of reach anyway. She bites. At least several men crowd around her to mourn her image. She is not dead, but her figure is gone. She is pressed inside, not a mirror, but the glass lid of a picture frame, to preserve her like a sweet jam- after exorcising her ripe stuffing, boiling it, and enhancing her with just a pinch of sugar, of course. She is buried many times behind the glass; photos scattered like ashes across the walls- young girls’ and boys', older women's and men's alike. Sometimes her face even ends up in a mirror, to provide a direct comparison for the older woman of what she has failed to preserve efficiently, in her domestic duties as chef. The little girl is mourned widely, but her funeral is a happy one, often a celebration. People wear their favourite colours- copying the girl’s favourites to reincarnate her, or dressing in their own tender celebrations of what they imagine she could have been. Her picture will be plastered everywhere, and she will not be forgotten, for there will always be a little girl tempted by an apple in some region of the world.  

       Now you may be confused by this ending, she did not die, she merely lost her figure- that's cause for a celebration! - but alas, that is not so. You see, each time a little girl has lost her figure to the world, the men, at least seven in number, demand a replacement. They simply must have a systematised, self-sufficient home, they are not capable of functioning without it.  

       The older woman, who has by some indirect miracle triumphed in her wish, not of putting the girl’s head in the mirror, but of removing it after she realised her foremost dream was impossible, will write a gleeful article denoting how, through no direct accomplishment of her own, her dreams- which really she knew were premonitions all along- have been fulfilled. The article is again accepted as a great piece of literary service, and commended by many notable men in many countries. However, she still is not in the running for a Pulitzer on account of the headshot dilemma.   

       Now foretold of their fate, young girls, unsurprisingly, develop a deep and rational fear of apples. Afterall, many have lost their figures to them, apparently one woman even got chucked out of her country because she ate one; fell the whole way down to wherever she's living now. This fate is irrepressible, so they try to compress it, by making themselves smaller. Concerned, prudently, that whatever poison is in the apple, may also be in some other things, given its very earthly ontology, they may be inclined to avoid food stuffs altogether. Perhaps they will even be so conscientious as to refuse the ingestion of air as that, too, has its earthly origins.   

       In this prudent attempt to avoid fate, many young girls inevitably end up sharing the fate of the other young girls they have read articles about, except this is a more final, much less lively way of losing their figures. People attending these funerals are more prone to wailing and dressing in black, and their pictures are not scattered across walls quite so often. Plastering them is often more painful than seeing the scabrous pallor of the wall in full view. The coffin is also different; it is not often glass, as in the men’s stories, but pyre. They are unlikely to be kissed, perhaps with the exception of some fragilely threaded relatives, but though their skin is depicted as snow in poetry, it is quite rancid to the touch, and they are not quite so composed in their coffins as those whose figures have been lost through natural causes.