Snow White had no idea that the Prince would make her get back inside that glass coffin.

"You look so pretty in there," he said. "Come on. It'll be fun."

The business with the coffin went on for years, the fights, the pleading: "Do it for me. Just for a little while. Lie there real still, with your eyes closed, and your hands crossed over your breast."

And so on.

Well, finally Snow White got sick of it, the whole situation. She decided to go back to the cottage in the forest. After all, she missed those dwarves.

But when she arrived at the old cottage, another family was living there: a vacuum cleaner salesman and his wife. They'd covered the lawn with ornaments: plastic deer, oversized cement squirrels, and miniature windmills.

"Dwarves," said the salesman, standing in the shadow of the door, a beer in one hand and vacuum in the other. "You'll find them Dwarves out back, buried under the lilac bushes. Poor guys died years ago. Doctors said it was broken hearts and loneliness that did those critters in."