A Mirror Mended

The second installment in Alix E. Harrow's Fractured Fables series, this novella follows Zinnia Gray, a twenty-six-year-old woman with a terminal genetic illness called Generalized Roseville Malady (GRM), who has spent the past five years traveling between alternate-universe versions of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. By pricking her finger on a shard of spindle, Zinnia exploits "narrative resonance," the multiverse's tendency to let repeated story motifs bleed between similar realities, to slip into parallel worlds and help cursed princesses escape their doomed narratives. She was once expected to die at twenty-one but was granted a reprieve during the events of the first book, when her best friend Charmaine "Charm" Baldwin and a former Sleeping Beauty named Primrose "Prim" saved her life. Charm and Prim are now married and living in Madison, Wisconsin, but Zinnia has grown distant, fleeing Charm's wedding reception to vanish into another dimension. Their happiness reminds her of her own bounded, terminal story, and she copes by running from world to world rather than confronting what she cannot change.

After completing her latest rescue in a telenovela-inflected Sleeping Beauty world, Zinnia prepares to leave. In the bathroom mirror, she sees not her own reflection but a striking older woman with coiled black hair and red-painted lips, who mouths the word "Please" (6). When Zinnia reaches toward her, the woman drags her through. The passage is agonizing. Zinnia lands in a room resembling a villain's apothecary, where the woman sits watching her with triumph. Zinnia notices a silver mirror in the woman's hand, a glossy red apple on the counter, and the complete absence of any spindle. Her mechanical mockingbird, a small device that sings when she is in mortal peril, begins its warning. In five years of dimension-hopping, Zinnia has never left the Sleeping Beauty narrative. She has landed, for the first time, in Snow White.

The queen locks the door and demands to know how Zinnia travels between worlds. When Zinnia tries to escape, the queen ties an enchanted bodice lace, one of the wicked stepmother's weapons from the Brothers Grimm tale "Little Snow-White," around her throat, strangling her nearly to unconsciousness before removing it and shackling her to the wall. The queen then produces Zinnia's own childhood copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, which appeared spontaneously on her shelf. Kneeling, she opens to "Little Snow-White" and whispers that she has no name: She is only ever called "the queen" or "the stepmother," a fact that causes her visible, furious grief.

Zinnia picks her shackles with hidden bobby pins and slips into the hall, only to be caught by the queen's huntsman, Berthold, who tosses her spindle shard into the fireplace, destroying her primary means of escape. The queen later returns with a softer approach, presenting herself as a vulnerable widow, and reveals she made the mirror herself. She reports anomalies bleeding into her world: a golden egg inside a goose, a talking wolf in the woods. Zinnia recognizes these as narrative slippage, stories merging across the multiverse on a troubling scale. When a messenger arrives announcing a royal wedding with an armed escort, making clear the invitation is a summons to the queen's execution, Zinnia and the queen are out of options. The queen seizes Zinnia's hand and presses both their palms to the mirror. They fall through together.

They cycle rapidly through several Snow White variants, never escaping the tale type. In a dark, twisted forest, a terrified young girl crashes into them, fleeing huntsmen. Using her compass, Zinnia leads them to a hut belonging to Zellandine, a fairy she met five years ago in Prim's world. Zellandine has been involuntarily slipping between stories herself, growing thinner with each displacement. She confirms what Zinnia suspects: Zinnia's refusal to complete her own story arc is compromising the structural integrity of the multiverse.

In the morning, Zinnia names the queen "Eva," short for Evil Queen. The young girl corrects Zinnia when called Snow White: Her name is Red, a shepherd's daughter from a village where the local queen sends huntsmen every winter to snatch children and eat their hearts. When huntsmen arrive at the hut, Zellandine tries to stop them but is too weak outside her own world. The huntsmen take Red. Zinnia offers Eva a deal: Help save Red, and Zinnia will reveal how to escape her story permanently. Eva agrees.

They follow the compass to a fortress of black glass and bones, enter through the sewers, and find Red's parents already leading a jailbreak from the dungeons. Together they reach the kitchens, where stolen children are caged. Red reunites with her parents. But the cannibal queen reveals herself: She is Snow White, an ancient, immortal version who consumes children's hearts to maintain eternal youth. In the seconds before capture, Zinnia texts Charm a nine-character SOS, "atu 709 sos" (76), the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore index number for the Snow White tale type.

Shackled in the dungeon, Eva reveals her full backstory. She was an ugly second daughter married off as a foreign bride. When she failed to produce heirs, the king was cruel. She killed him. With Snow White still a child, Eva held the throne alone, but as Snow White grew, princes arrived to court the girl and claim Eva's kingdom. Eva never intended to kill Snow White; she deliberately sent Berthold, the one man she knew would disobey a kill order, to chase the girl into the forest. Her villainy was not vanity but a desperate fight for agency.

Huntsmen march them to a courtyard where iron shoes glow in a bonfire. Eva quietly unlaces the bodice lace from her shift, kisses Zinnia in farewell, and launches herself at the immortal Snow White, shattering the mirror on the ground. In a shard near Zinnia's feet, Charm's face appears. Eva wraps the lace around Snow White's throat and nods to Zinnia, choosing to stay and fight. Charm's hand reaches through the glass and pulls Zinnia home.

Zinnia lands in Charm and Prim's backyard. Charm has burned flip-flops in the fire pit, a makeshift reenactment of the iron-shoes punishment to create narrative resonance from Zinnia's SOS. Charm delivers a furious tirade about six months of abandonment and reveals that fairy tale elements have been bleeding into Zinnia's home world: dead blackbirds in a frozen apple pie, Prim's shoes turning to glass and shattering, Zinnia's mother's roses blooming in December and dying to the roots. Zinnia calls Dr. Bastille, her former folklore professor, who confirms the mirror was the only object capable of bridging tale types and observes that "the existence of any story implies the existence of a storyteller" (105). Prim then reveals the news Charm had been trying to share: They want to adopt a child, and Prim asks Zinnia to be the baby's fairy godmother. Zinnia accepts. Prim produces a long shard of Eva's mirror, plucked from Zinnia's hair when she arrived.

Zinnia whispers "Mirror, mirror" (110) into the shard and falls between worlds. She finds Eva alive in a quiet cottage. Red's parents led an uprising, overthrowing the immortal Snow White, and Eva found a hut in the woods, but she remains unsatisfied, still nameless, still at the margins. Recalling Dr. Bastille's remark, Zinnia has an idea. In the blank pages of her childhood Grimm's, she writes "Once upon a time" and passes the book to Eva. Eva writes her own story, slowly and painstakingly. Zinnia feels a silent thrumming through the floor, the universe responding to a new story being told. When Zinnia says the Grimms named stories after their protagonists, Eva writes a single word as the title: the name Zinnia gave her.

The repaired mirror reflects a new landscape: an apple orchard and a modest stone castle on a distant hill, Eva's own kingdom made real. They fall through together into the dawn-lit orchard. Eva asks Zinnia to stay, but Zinnia refuses gently: Charm, Prim, and her family are her story. Eva shows Zinnia the last line she wrote: "She lived happily" (125), with a deliberate full stop, omitting "ever after." The revision moves Zinnia to tears, the idea that it could be enough to live happily, for as long as one has.

Eva gives Zinnia an apple and a cryptic promise: If Zinnia ever falls into an endless sleep, Eva knows someone who would kiss her back to life. Zinnia opens her eyes in Charm and Prim's bathroom, holding the apple. Carved into the red skin are the words "BITE ME" (128). She pieces together Eva's scheme: The fairy tale trope shared by Sleeping Beauty and Snow White is that a girl in an enchanted sleep is woken by true love. If Zinnia's illness claims her, Eva's apple could trigger that enchanted sleep, and Eva's kiss could wake her, a loophole in the narrative laws of the multiverse. She does not know if it would work. But it feels like hope, not the false promise of "happily ever after" but the real, modest possibility of more time. She sets the apple on the sink, calls out to Charm and Prim, and says, "I'm home" (128).