(essay)

This tale begins like many others. But contrary to them, it will not be about princes and princesses, not about dragons and brave knights, not at all. The events that I want to tell you about in this story happened in the modern world, in our 21st century. Well, let’s start…

There was a girl, and her name was Snow White. The name, as you can understand, was unusual. Whether it was the trend of those times to call children difficult to pronounce abstruse names or the girl’s mother simply loved extravagant things is not known for sure, but the essence remains the same — Snow White has always stood out among her peers.

Years passed, tablet models changed and cameras multiplied on iPhones. Snow White managed to finish a kindergarten, a school and went to university. Mother died in a plane crash in the Bahamas, and father found himself a new wife, who soon became the stepmother of our Snow White.

She was a prominent woman, followed all fashion trends, wore only Prada, and made herself new nails every week. Her husband adored her with all his heart and soul, and he would have carried her in his arms (if sciatica did not torment him). The woman responded kindly and, being a chef by profession, indulged him every evening with gourmet dinners. Peace and quiet reigned in the family, if not for one “but.”

“But” was big and fat and consisted in the fact that the man’s new wife disliked his daughter. And all because by the time she was nineteen, Snow White managed to become irrevocably obsessed with diets and did not put any fatty or, God forbid, high-calorie food in her mouth. That infuriated her stepmother, to such an extent that she could not draw a single eye arrow exactly.

What tricks stepmother did not do! She offered pizza “Louis XIII”, and frittata with lobster and marbled caviar, and even an English pie with marbled beef…Despite all this, Snow White was adamant and never touched any of these dishes.

The stepmother was furious: how can an impudent girl be so dismissive of her many hours of work?! And anyway, how can a child walk in her house without normal food? Оutrageous!

With each passing day, stepmother’s anger grew with the same tenacity as the price of Apple stocks. Snow White was still sticking to her diet and did not want to listen to anything against it. Their family’s home became like the set for the new season of “Hell’s Kitchen” with Snow White instead of Gordon Ramsay.

It came to a boiling point when the stepmother threw every new dish, which Snow White criticized, to smithereens, into the trash can, immediately taking on a new one, completely forgetting about her husband. The hapless man had been on a hunger strike for the seventh day, eating sandwiches with black caviar and drinking wine from the 1800s. He was so tired of the constant noise and dishes cooking down the drain that he somehow grabbed his wife in the middle of the corridor and told her about the main weakness of his daughter.

It turned out that Snow White’s mother instilled in her daughter a strong love for apples, and she could not resist any food in the form of this fruit.

Armed with the new information, her husband’s credit card, and the remaining stock of nerves, the number of which has significantly diminished in recent days, the woman went to the shops to buy groceries. After returning from shopping with hands full of bags, she locked herself in the kitchen for two days.

Two whole days of tranquility were so unusual and long-awaited that her husband at first thought that he finally had died of hunger and ended up in Paradise.

On the third day, the kitchen door slammed, light tulles flew up in the corridor, the husband took out his earplugs again — Snow White’s stepmother finished her creation. The creation turned out to be a huge (the size of a washing machine) cake in the shape of a ripe, juicy red poured apple. Not knowing that this is cake, it could be mistaken for what he saw as a genuine fruit of abnormal size.

That same night, strange chomping sounds came from the kitchen, which frightened almost all the servants in the house, including his master himself, to a pulp. One stepmother slept peacefully — the child was finally fed!