(urth) Short Story 66: Three Fingers

[Robert Pirkola]

I looked around at some possible suspects for an evil queen with red gloves and three fingers but also came up empty.  I re-read Snow White and Brier Rose from Grimm's.  There is no mention of handwear for the Evil Queen in Snow White and Maleficent is nowhere to be found in Brier Rose.  The Disney cartoon versions of The Evil Queen, Maleficent, and The Queen of Hearts all have four fingers and a thumb and no red gloves.  I think your belief that the chomp occurred is well founded because of this and makes a lot of sense except for what you have already pointed out: the calm manner in which the woman who is supposed to have just lost a digit is reacting.  But if the syntactical sequence of the words in the final sentence is read as describing the temporal sequence of events, it could be that the chomp occurs after she casually touches his face and the gloved hand changes from white with four fingers to red with three within the space of the sentence.  Therefore, the reaction would occur beyond the final word of the story, in the head of the reader. "Youch!