Snow White

This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Not a word is cut, and nothing asks you to sign up. The first three pages carry the paintings they were given; the rest of the plates are in the app, where the book is read one page to a screen.

Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. The queen is vain and the apple does its work, but the telling stays calm and the ending is happy.

The smoke came from a cottage with a small green door, set about with foxgloves, and the door was not locked. Inside stood a long scrubbed table with seven small stools drawn up to it, seven cups, and seven beds in a row under the sloping roof. Snow White called out twice. Nobody answered. She swept the cold hearth, and then lay down across three of the beds and slept.

It was dark when the seven came home from the hill with their lanterns swinging: small bearded men in earth-coloured working clothes, each with a hat of his own colour. They came in talking and stopped all at once. The one in the red hat held his lantern up. They stood round the beds whispering for a long time, and none of them wanted to be the one to wake her.

She woke by herself, sat up, and said she was sorry, all in one breath. The one in the blue hat said the hearth had not been swept in a fortnight and that she could stop as long as she liked. They lit the candles, put out the bread, and set an eighth stool at the end of the table, made that evening out of a milking stool.

After that the cottage was a house with somebody in it all day. She learned which of the beans wanted staking and which wanted leaving alone. She carved the handle of a wooden comb by the fire, made a poor job of it, and kept it anyway. In the evening she heard the seven coming down the hill, because they always came home arguing about something small.

At noon a pedlar woman came to the green door with a basket on her arm and a scarf pulled well forward. She was selling apples, she said, and one of them was worth the walk: red on one cheek and gold on the other. Snow White took it to be polite and bit it to be kind, and then sat down on the step and would not wake up.

The seven came home and could not rouse her at all. They talked all night and settled nothing. In the morning they carried her out to the garden, where the light was better, thinking she might like to be under the plum tree. On the step the smallest one caught his boot, the whole procession lurched, the bite of apple came loose in her throat, and she coughed and opened her eyes.

The pedlar woman had gone from the district by then and was not seen there again. Snow White stayed. That spring the plum tree came out all at once, and they carried the long table into the garden and ate under it, all eight of them, with blossom coming down into the milk. The one in the red hat said it was a nuisance, and did not move his cup.

The end.