They
dress her from the treasure box. They come forward all at once, and
work with the patient care of true craftsmen, neither getting in each
other's way nor fumbling, their dark hands delicate and sure on her
pale skin: a pair of elaborate earrings, filigree greaves that embrace
her shins and calves, wristlets that attach to finger-rings by a web of
golden links, spiralling
armlets. Then a collar of gold, and chains that hang down from it to
rings that go through her nipples, pulling them up. Rings through her
labia and her clitoris. She does not flinch; the invisible holes in her
flesh must be old, and she well used to the jewellery. Her whole body
is hung with arcs of delicate gold chain, pinned to her flanks by fine
wires. Filigree wings attach flat to her shoulder blades. A plug is
inserted deep between the snowy globes of her bottom and she bends and
takes it with equanimity: when it is in place a gold tail stands in a
curve like a cat's behind her, gleaming in the light of the fire.
Plot:
This is a straight (well ... twisted really) adaptation of the fairy
story Snow White. Told from the point of view of the wicked witch, who
is spying on her stepdaughter in the house of the dwarves. Sexual Themes: group sex: one woman, seven men.
Notes: This
was my first publication for Harlequin Spice. It's very dirty and I like it a lot!This story is my homage to the late great Angela Carter, and her truly inspiring fairy tale collection The Bloody Chamber, which I read in college. It was deeply influential on my decision to write erotica - indeed, to write at all. I love traditional fairy tales and find them very evocative.
Oh yeah, and I once saw an extremely offensive cartoon (in Viz magazine I believe) which showed Snow White in a gang-bang with the dwarves. Things that irritate my sensibilites often end up reworked in my fiction.
So this story was almost inevitable in being written, and when editor Alison Tyler contacted me about the anthology I sat down and wrote like it had been waiting intact and impatient in my brain. Of course there's not much terribly sexy about the dwarves as envisioned by Disney, say, so I went back to the Norse roots of the legend. In Viking mythology the dwarves are svartalfar: dark elves. They are the ones who made the magical necklace Brisingamen for the goddess Freyja, which she desired so much that she slept with four of them in order to obtain it. I made the queen and Snow White descendants of the ljosalfar - light elves - to account for the magic, and for the queen's murderous jealousy. After all, in the original version there are some very strange suppositions that beg to be addressed. Like, why should a grown woman feel the need to kill a pretty adolescent girl? Why doesn't her father interfere? Do we really believe that all the dwarves ask of the stunningly beautiful girl is that she do their housework for them?
I'd already written a rather more oblique take on Snow White, by the way: The Fairest of Them All appears in my first short story collection, Cruel Enchantment, where it's given a lesbian BDSM twist.
Snow White is another of my poisonous witchy princesses, like Jade in Captive Audience (also in Cruel Enchantment). Magic corrupts.
I wrote "dwarves," following Tolkein's example, simply because I think it looks better. Spice corrected it to "dwarfs."
Censorship: I got away with pushing the envelope once, but not twice. First of all there is a passage featuring a fairly violent interaction between Snow White and the huntsman who has been tasked with killing her. The editor thought that it might be too strong for Spice, but in fact they approved it cheerily.
She'd bitten off his ball-sac entire. I made him show me the ruination that she’d made of his manhood. And while he'd screamed and thrashed about on the ground she'd run off into the forest, naked and spitting out his blood and laughing.
Secondly, there is the passage where the queen recalls the moment she decides she can't tolerate her witchy step-daughter any longer. I wrote:
She had, perhaps without knowing it, worked an enchantment that ensured the king kept her close and safe. So I tolerated her behaviour for years, until the day I saw that she had turned her eyes upon her own father, my husband, and I saw the first glint of an answering fire in his.
That was when I determined to do away with the girl.In the published version, the phrase and I saw the first glint of an answering fire in his has been removed.
