Writers in the Attic: Apple

WHAT BECAME OF THE APPLE? John Barrie You already know the first part of the story. A jealous queen, a poisoned apple. A kiss that broke death’s spell. But magic doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are ripples. A mouse who becomes a carriage man doesn’t see the cat in the same way he used to. The merchant who trades away magic beans is forced to reexamine the way he does business.

And so, as Snow was taken from her home among the Dwarves to be encased in glass and gold until the fateful moment the prince would find her and free her from the evil queen’s spell—what became of the apple?

To know that, we must first look to Cole, the sleepy little village at the edge of the Seven Mountains. In this city, there lived a butcher, Per Alouette, and his wife, Mary, who was as timid as an unmagical mouse. She possessed no fairy-blessings, no sign in the stars, no hidden royal blood. The only thing she had in her life was a beast, and alas—he was but the ordinary kind. The kind who filled his gullet with drink and flew into a rage, the kind who could smile so sweetly to his customers but said such awful things with his fists.

Per Alouette worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week, and then fell into the bars along Main Street. He came home just before the witching hour, redolent of cheap ale and the stink of the butchery and crawled into bed to take what he took to be his, and that was if he was in a good mood. Some days he would drink so much he’d get into fights with the Dwarves from the mines— “Let them stay under mountain where they belong,” he’d say. More often than not, these were fights he’d lose, until he came home to his wife to reenact them.

Their marriage had gone on this way for years, and Mary anticipated that it would continue so until one of them was dead. It had been the same for her own mother, until the sickness had taken her. She had always counseled Mary to remain obedient to her husband, for, “What is a husband but a king unto the home?” On the worst days, Mary thought of her mother, and prayed to the creator for her wisdom and strength, though she felt certain those prayers were unheard.

She was thinking of her mother again on that fateful morning, as she made her way to the market, until her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the greengrocer, crying into his 60