Where She Went

The room was mostly beige and out of this world. Not out-of-this-world spectacular, but objectively set apart from wherever she came from.

Snow White began to sit up, feeling the kink in her neck on which she’d apparently slept. It took all of three seconds to notice the dozens of beds, equal and adjacent to hers, holding children and babies and doctors and dogs, and duck her disturbed head of black hair under the covers again. It was not before a sonorous voice called her.

“Excuse me?” The voice spoke. “Madam?” As Snow’s fear dissolved, she acknowledged the voice’s honeyed tone. Strong, but sweet. Snow opened one eye, feigning sleepiness.

“Hello.” It was a woman talking, with warm skin and hair a million shades of dark gold. Snow wondered where someone could change their hair like that. The woman must be wealthy. “My name is Valencia,” she said. What’s yours?”

Snow blinked, and said, “White.”

“White; that is a beautiful name,” Valencia sighed. “I am the leader of this land you’re now in. People have been waking here for quite some time. N I was the first one to.” She curved her hair behind her ears. “If you ever need anything, please ask me.”

“Am I—Are we dead?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Valencia answered blankly. “I will show you around.”

Allegedly, this “land” was made of “infinite acres.” But on the first day of Snow’s visit, Valencia guided her through a bartering town just beside the hut in which she woke up. There must have been thousands of people lining aisles of dirt, behind monstrous carts of fabric and vegetables and paperweights. This is where the people of the “land” lived most of the time, Valencia told Snow. At work.

Allotted 400 coins, Snow was slightly bold the first day. Unaware of the customs of everyday commodities, and captured by the noise and color of the market, Snow purchased a myriad of products. Spun wool, dough, tiny glass mirrors, gooseberries, brown paper, pins, sponges, pork loin, St. John’s wort.

At her own hut (also personally assigned), Snow allowed herself to think for the first time since she woke up. She didn’t remember a single thing besides her name. But she remembered waking up in the beige room, so she didn’t have amnesia now.

She looked at her simple dress, and tried to remember anything else. She danced, sang, napped, cooked, crafted; anything to remember.

In the morning, Snow White was surrounded by small, distinctive monsters. They were slightly alarming, but she tried to be the eye in the middle of their storm. Yarn wrapped around pork loin. Envelopes of tiny mirrors. Sponges with eight legs of metal pins. Herbs and gooseberries mashed in a cup of dough, toasted.

Only one of these monsters smelled wonderful.

When the sun reached the center of the sky, Snow was out with the mob of market-goers. Behind her own wooden cart, vacant at least when she arrived, she presented the only artifact she knew how to create. Among the thousands of other monsters sitting on carts, maybe someone would take interest in hers.

Despite its exceptional aroma, her cart did not attract many visitors in the mass of others. One boy did visit though; he looked young and squirrelly. “What’s this,” he asked, pointing, mouth already full.

“Pie,” Snow enunciated. The name came to her in a dream.

After a pensive moment, the boy spoke clearly. “These smell great,” he said, taking it upon himself to hold a pie flush to his gaze. Snow thanked him. “They’re amazing.”

Half deep in thought, and half giddy out of his mind, the boy started stacking them like hotcakes on his forearm. “How much do you want?” he beamed, a hand digging in his satchel.

Snow scanned the other carts with her eyes. She hadn’t thought too thoroughly about a price, but she tried to discern the mean between the cart-owners holding sacks of heavy metal and those counting half-coins on their tables. There was too much happening at once, and she said, “Sixty.” It seemed a reasonable number for six pies.

The boy broke into a wide, stifled grin. “Okay,” he said, shelling out the value in coins. “I’m Sully, by the way.”

No other customers came before sunset, when apparently many artisans began to pack up their things. The cold was a surprising blanket over the bustle of the market, even paling the crust of her pies. Snow spun her labeled signs around, began stacking her unsold merchandise, and her eyes caught this “Sully” again, bounding about in worn loafers. She would see him soon enough.

Sully came back the second day. Talked her ear off about the wonderment of her pies, “inconceivably delectable, like the nectar of the Greeks.” She noticed him resting his gaze on her cheek while he talked; readjust so he looked her in the eye, readjust so he looked in the other eye a couple seconds later.

“They’re wonderful. They’re wonderful,” he smiled. He shook like a labrador. The weather was irritatingly warm, but they played tennis with courteous gestures anyway.

“See,” Sully spoke again. He looked her square in the face, knowingly this time. “No one makes… pies over here. It’s not typical. You remember more of the Real World than the rest of these folk.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “I know you do.”

“I don’t remember anything. I just,” Snow mumbled, “discovered them.”

“How do you create the idea of cooked fruit in such a tart, in such a shape?” Emphasis dragged that last part. “Cinched crust,” and he followed the pie’s circumference with his hand, “symmetry; lattice weaving; a hand-shaped basin of dough strong enough to simply hold fruit. All of this goes in an oven at once.” He shook his head, as if disbelieving of his own words. “You arrived, say, three days ago? No one discovers pie in three days. This is culture.”

Snow had to pause. “Culture?”

“Yes, culture.” Sully made a lavish eye roll. “You remember your culture.”

Sully’s words swam around Snow’s head that night, as she lay on her mattress of feathers. She couldn’t remember anything before waking up in the beige room, but Sully had said that she could recall her culture. Unlike the other “folk.” Apparently, she wasn’t supposed to.

She only partly believed that she had been alive before waking up that day. But on the same philosophical note, if she had found the beige room to be unfamiliar, then would it be necessary to have memories of familiar things? Of familiar places, and people? Sully had gone on to praise her, as if he had found a gemstone; she could find the meaning of the Land of Infinite Acres, and she could show their people what existed beyond it. Maybe she could find a way back, to her homeland. Or forward.

Lastly, he said he would be back again. But what would he say then?

Sully did come back. It had been a week of slow pie sales—a gooseberry here, a blueberry there—and she was alarmingly eager to see him again. He sauntered up to the cart, a larger, burlap satchel falling out of his hands. It was stuffed with scrolls, clocks, and newspaper clippings. Snow pretended to be intrigued by a loud negotiation next to her.

Sully laid his satchel tenderly between two pies on her cart. He was more serious today. “I have… I have an offer for you,” he started carefully, working through the trifles of his bag. He eventually extracted a journal, seemingly dense with the most important of his clues.

“I’m trying to find how we got here. What we’re doing here, in the Land of Infinite Acres. I’ve been working alone for quite some time, but I feel as though I can trust you with this undertaking.” He was vague, but Snow knew exactly the value of each word. There was another place, another world, and she used to waking up in a different bed before she woke in the beige room for the first time.

Snow was silent. She might have been fated to be in this moment. A pioneer of the Land of Infinite Acres, because she remembered her culture, and she remembered how to make pies.

…..

Suddenly, she had made it back. Or forward. All of a sudden, she was all of a woken woman, the air chilled, smelling of rose buds and flowing water. Her eyes fluttered open.

A prince knelt before a coffin, one on which she lay.