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Take a fairytale and twist it. Something that has become/always been a fun task. Probably the best example of a twisted fairytale is of course Shrek.

What follows is my take on a part of the Snow-White story. Also. I hate Snow-White. The animation is awful! I mean it's old and dated and boring as hell. The original story I believe is about a virgin hanging out with the Seven deadly sins...which I don't know, is gross. Most fairytales are about keeping virgins virginal so nothing new there.

Anyway, I hated the story and so decided, why not use my dislike as fuel?

I picked part of the narrative which no one pays any attention to and a character that doesn't actually exist. That of Eddie, an otherwise harmless rabbit, who's been in the Disney 1920 version of Snow-White, helping the woman in question with her household chores.

What effect Snow-White's hypontic voice would have on an innocent animal? This led me to dream up Eddie, a rabbit who has an existential crisis when he is awakened by Snow-White's voice and realises that there is more to life than sex, food, and household chores.

I see Eddie as a jaded gumshoe detective character, stuck in a bunny form. I feel like he and the prince should run off together and solve crimes in the big city, while Snow-White finds herself a Netflix Cleaning and Organising Series.

...but that's just me.

Anyway, here's a clip from Eddies' life:

Eddie wasn’t brave by nature. Once upon a time, running through the forest looking for large meat-eating monsters would have been something other people did. But that had been before he’d heard The Voice.

‘You’re a male, right?’ he asked the towering creature before him. Grumpy had told Eddie implicitly that he must find a male human. Actually, he’d said ‘A Prince,’ but Eddie didn’t know what that meant. As a rule, rabbits weren’t that big on royalty and the idea of land rights, fealty, or succession had yet to enter the collective bunny mentality, being that food, sex, and not being eaten by gigantic monsters with sharp teeth, were still rocking the top of three of their life goals chart.

The omnivore shrieked in alarm. It lumbered away from Eddie and went crashing through the undergrowth on enormous feet.

Eddie kept pace easily, calling out to it as it galumphed deeper into the trees.

‘It’s just,’ he called. ‘I’m looking for a human, preferably male, to do a small job.’ The creature gave another strange wail. Its’ foot caught on a log big enough to house Eddie’s entire family and toppled slowly to the ground, where it hit with a boom that sent vibrations through Eddie’s paws.

He hopped over to its’ head, a boulder-sized object that made his nose twitch in disgust. Any sensible rabbit would have been haring off in the opposite direction, not eyeballing the gigantic mouth and trying to have a conversation.

But ever since he’d heard The Voice and taken up residence with a bunch of deer, squirrels, birds, and hedgehogs in the cabin down by the river, his common sense had puffed away like rose petals in a gale. Gone was the life of eating and bonking. These days, it was all about cleaning and baking. Baking! He hadn’t known what it was until The Voice.

Eddie’s back leg thudded against the turf in an ecstasy of involuntary bliss when he thought of the voice. It was so sweet. So kind. So enrapturing, so damn impossible to ignore. It burrowed down into the hot follicles of his fur and awoken impossible knowledge inside the quiet rabbit parts of his mind.

Great truths were now as clear to Eddie as the pimples on the giant nose in front of him.

Joy. True joy, was doing dishes, sweeping floors, and watching the big goddess dance around making shit clean for some smaller humans.

Which, admittedly, was a lot for a rabbit whose main ambition in life was to mount as many does as physically possible before his tiny heart gave out.

With an effort Eddie stilled his drumming back leg and dragged his attention back to the task at paw.

‘I just need a tiny favour,’ he told it. ‘Nothing really all that hard, not for a big…‘ Eddie sniffed, ‘adolescent male, like you.’

The human scrambled backwards—whimpering, so Eddie followed, explaining as he went.

‘My goddess,’ he said. ‘Big lady, sings nice. We help her with chores. Because we want too,’ he said hastily. ‘She’s a goddess and she makes us happy and we…you know what—doesn’t matter. Point it, she’s kind of dead…ish. But apparently if,’ his nose crinkled in the effort of recollection, ‘the right male arc-hey-trype kisses her, then poof!’ He stood on his back paws and demonstrated ‘poofing’ with his front ones. ‘She comes back to life.’

The creature’s horrible mouth hung ajar.

For a long moment, all Eddie could hear was the human’s incredibly loud and slow heart beat and the gale-force rush of their breath.

Finally it spoke.

‘A talking bunny wants me to kiss a dead goddess and bring her back to life?’

Eddie’s ear twitched.

‘That’s about the long and the short of it, yeah,’ he said.

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash