Blood Apples by Cameron Jace Page A

at the flicker of ember, remembering when Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug used to ask me about why I loved Snow White.
    That damned question! Even when asked by your lover, you hardly knew the answer.
    ‘Why do you love me?’ What kind of question was that?
    I love you because… wait… I take a drag from my pipe… I really don’t know. I think that’s the beauty of love, wanting to be with someone, taste their sweetness and their fears, live their lives and be there in their death, share their ups and their downs, and most importantly, love them and grow old with them, even if they were some kind of monsters.
    Have you ever been unable to shake your soul free, wrapped with your lover’s velvet rope around your heart? Have you ever been enchanted with a nameless spell that made pain and pleasure synonymous?
    I never had a logical explanation for my love for Snow White, and yet Jeannette and Amalie kept insisting on one.
    But I knew why they thought I did.
    I learned one thing among the years. It was that stories are beautiful lies told from a person to another, across generations, where each storyteller added his own filler – aka lie – to the pile of previous ones. After many  years, you get a totally different story from what really happened, filled with people’s expectations and desires.
    Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug wanted to know the truth about fairy tales from me so they made sure the lies they told weren’t far fetched from the ones they made up in exchange for bread, fireflies, or a place to stay.
    But it didn’t matter. The Brothers Grimm forged it all in the end anyway, and the world loved it.
    So my ‘I don’t know’ answer never quenched Jeannette and Amalie’s thirst. They had to ask me a different question in today’s letter, one that sailed me back to a bittersweet memory of Snow White, the beautiful monster I fell in love with.
    The question was, ‘ Can you tell us why apples are red? ’
    A smile conjured itself on my face when I read the letter. It made me think of the endless people in this world who didn’t know why apples were red. To them, it was only a fact, and it probably had a scientific explanation. Hardly did anyone know (‘anyone knows’) that apples were once gold – especially in the Kingdom of Sorrow.
    Have you ever seen a golden apple? Unlucky you. Although the ancient Greeks and Romans had always mentioned them, the world still thought it was a myth. How many times did the ancients have to send us clues until we deciphered the messages they wanted us to understand? Or is it we’ll just believe what we want to believe?
    I found myself remembering the old days, walking through the Black Forest in the Kingdom of Sorrow in the darkest, moonless nights, guided by the light of flickering fireflies here and there.
    But it wasn’t only fireflies that were golden and illuminated the night. It was also apples, glowing on trees like candle balls shimmering in the night. Along with the golden fireflies, apples lit the path for the good-hearted when they walked through the forest, and dimmed it for the black-hearted, leaving them lost in the dark.
    It was a time when people still wondered why this was called the Kingdom of Sorrow when it was a peaceful and magical place with singing birds and gleaming fireflies. I guess the name preceded the truth that was about to be revealed.
    I was a lost and spoiled young prince, searching for the beautiful princess who bit me when I was younger, wandering in the Black Forest of Sorrow. That was when I was first introduced to the golden and glittering apples by a boy and his sister.
    They called themselves Hansel and Gretel, telling me that before the golden apples, they used breadcrumbs to find their way back home when they got lost in the forest. The apples glittered the most on Christmas night, and on Hallow’s Eve, which was the Day of Apple Harvest when everybody in the kingdom celebrated.
    “It’s not just apples that are