Content Note: All Possible Warnings Apply

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Warnings: violence, incest, cannibalism, fratricide, attempted infanticide just as in the original…

 

Children don’t generally assume their father will abandon them to die in the snow. But under certain circumstances, they might get an inkling.

If their mother had died the year before, and their father brought home a woman with a sweet voice and cruel eyes. If the children stayed awake at night listening to the harsh crackle of the bedstraw and the sounds, as though two vicious animals were trapped under the covers and it was only a matter of time until they turned on the children. If that animal lurked behind the cage of their father’s eyes, watching every morsel they ate with resentment grown hungry.

Then perhaps they might suspect something.

Children are like meals. We make them, and expect them to nourish us.

The trees were bare with winter, pale branches reaching up into the black sky in demanding incomprehension.

Gretel was so hungry her thoughts came slowly, welling in her mind like the blood from the throat of Hansel’s rat. He’d caught the rat earlier that day, and now her brother had cut its throat: just a little, with the edge of his blunt teeth, to lay a trail of blood drops they might follow home. Their father, in the lead and determined on his path, didn’t even glance over his shoulder to see what strange games his children were playing.

Hansel assured his sister they could always say they were breadcrumbs, when they told the story.

Small animals came creeping out of the shadows to lick up the blood soaking into the snow. Gretel, last in line, knew that there would be no way home.

Gretel had been raised in the dark village at the edge of the woods where horrors happen. She knew you did not leave the path through the woods if you wanted to live.

Their father led them off the path and in among the trees. He knew the way home because he was a woodcutter. He first met their mother in these woods, when she caught his eye with her blood-coloured hood.

Gretel followed her father because she had nothing left but trust she already knew would be betrayed.

She followed until she no longer knew whether the trail of blood being swallowed up behind them was the rat’s blood or blood from her bare feet, stung by snow until the soles blistered as if burned. She only knew that she had to keep walking into the darkness.

The darkness cleared. Gretel realised she was lying face down in the snow, and looked up. Their father had gone. The children were hungry, for love and comfort and reason and food.

Her gaze met Hansel’s, over the body of the rat. As Gretel rose it did not seem horrible to go to his side, and lean against him. His cheek pressed hers as they sank their teeth into the rat, gristle and small bones scraping Gretel’s throat as she swallowed a raw mass of flesh.

Once the rat was clean bones, Gretel whispered that there was no way home, and no welcome at home if they found a way. She hated the idea of howling around their home like starving wolves drawn by lit windows. Better to lie down here, she said, but when Hansel began to move she moved too.

Only a single time during the cold dark walk toward no destination did Hansel look back. When he did, his eyes were blank as if he didn’t recognise her. Gretel didn’t care who he was as long as he was there, and she was not the last living thing in a world of howling emptiness.

Her mind was as bare as the winter wood. When she saw the cottage, she only saw yellow like warm bread and butter, and white like milk. That meant food, and food meant life.

They rushed forward, colours blurring before Gretel’s eyes like a ruined painting, to gulp down food at last.

When the door opened and Gretel leaped back, hand to her mouth, she realised she’d cut her gums against the walls. In her delirium, she had mistaken stone for nourishment.

She swallowed her own blood, felt a tooth broken against her tongue, and got her first look at the old witch.

Stories are like meals. We expect to have them. We think we know what we’re getting.

Gretel knew what the crone in the woods had planned for children. Stories do not become stories by only happening once.

The woman spoke, and it was incomprehensible. Gretel knew she must be speaking a spell, but when she opened the door wide the warmth and smell of food drew Gretel in surer than enchantment.

Hansel and Gretel stumbled inside. Candles threw shadows against the wall, and the woman continued to murmur magic over their heads. She ushered them over to a table and set out plates of potatoes. Afterwards she took Gretel to one bed and paused, puzzled, over Hansel. She eventually made him a bed in an old chest.

Hansel and Gretel had shared a bed all the eleven years of Gretel’s life. They knew that separating them proved the witch’s sinister intentions. Gretel looked at Hansel in his cage, and saw that the woman waited in a chair and stared at them instead of sleeping.

This was the witch who lived alone in the woods. Gretel’s own father had left them, and now they were being fed. It could only mean one thing.

Gretel fell asleep and woke to the woman’s hands on her hair. She snarled, curled up tight as a clenched fist on the bed.

Hansel was allowed out of the cage next morning, but they knew he would be put back in that night. The old witch placed potatoes before them again, and Hansel and Gretel ate, watched the witch, and listened to her murmuring. The sound of magic rose to the low dark ceiling, and either magic or hunger sealed them into the house.

The oven was a brooding metallic monster. Whenever the old witch went to it, she opened its gaping red mouth wider.

The witch kept touching them. Nobody had touched them for months, and her closeness felt menacing. She touched Hansel’s thin arms and gave him more potatoes. Gretel swallowed, and she and the witch watched Hansel eat. The heat of the oven enveloped them along with the witch’s spells, and sweat rolled down the line of Hansel’s neck.

Hansel sweated. The monster waited. The witch pounced.

She swooped on Gretel, picked her up in her arms, carried her over to the oven. Gretel screamed at the touch of the witch’s hand on her hair. As she shoved the witch back, Hansel opened the oven door.

The push sent the witch tumbling into the fire, and it was too late. She was screaming, and there was only one way to make her be quiet, and no way to be innocent again. Hansel pushed her inside, still flailing and shrieking, and shut the door.

Gretel and Hansel remembered it as simple. They never thought about the nightmarish struggle, the wrenching of arms and legs out of sockets to fit them into the oven. They stood in front of the oven and held hands, burned palms smarting.

They had done the right thing. The witch was dead. The rich, sharp smell of cooking meat made their mouths water.

Gretel and Hansel performed practical tasks. They fetched knives and forks, and worked together to haul the roasted mess out of the oven. Clothes and hair were burned away. The face had been pushed into the hot coals. The old witch didn’t look human. She smelled like dinner.

They tore her into meat, long strips of skin and flesh, crackling sweet in their mouths. They sat on the floor and gorged, juice running down their chins, until there was nothing but bones and gristle on the floor.

That was all that was left of the wicked witch.

Hansel and Gretel slept in the bed together that night, not speaking at all but pressing their bodies against each other like hands clasped in prayer. They slept warm, bellies full, content.

The stock of potatoes lasted them until a thaw came. But they knew winter lay in wait for them, and they were not safe from hunger.

It was not a plan, because they never discussed it. They simply linked hands, burns from the oven door still branded on their palms, and went in search of their home. The way back, lost to them when they could have returned home and been the same children as before, was suddenly clear.

The evil stepmother died mysteriously that winter.

The next time they came home, their father welcomed them. Now he was not hungry or rutting like an animal, he was willing to be their father again. It had never happened, they were nothing but strayed lambs, a parent’s love was unconditional. His mouth shaped lies over their heads, as he had over their cradles when he said, Once upon a time.

Parents are like stories. We shouldn’t believe in them.

Gretel told him of the abandoned cottage, of the food and warmth it promised, and he went with them to see it. When he was sleeping Hansel cut his throat. Just like the rat, nothing more important than that. The blood made a final trail away from home toward the oven.

By the end of that night, Gretel had her father’s eyes, and Hansel his father’s nose. They cracked open the cage of his ribs and shared his heart between them, safe and warm and never able to betray them again.

Winter was coming to an end. They could sleep together more kindly, loose-linked rather than hurting each other with their sharp bones. Every night Gretel pressed a sisterly kiss onto Hansel’s cheek.

Spring came. With it came the ability to think beyond the next meal.

Hansel hunted animals in the woods, and Gretel knelt by the cultivated patch near their cottage. She found only potatoes, and remembered how old the witch had been, unable to hunt anything and growing the only food that was cheap and plentiful.

She might not have offered them potatoes to fatten them up. It might have been all she had.

Gretel bit her lip, and swallowed the blood to settle her stomach.

The old witch’s hands had been gentle in Gretel’s hair as she picked her up, gentleness incomprehensible then but now faintly recalled from a life in which Gretel had a mother. She might have been carrying Gretel to the chair near the warm oven, holding the child not as meal, but as a child.

If that was true, there would be no way to live. The story had to stay the same. The old witch had tried to eat the innocent children. It was horrible, horrible. No wonder Gretel could scarcely breathe when she thought about it.

She and Hansel seldom spoke to each other, and never about that. Now and then it came back to Gretel, cold and unexpected as spring wind. She refused to think that the old witch had watched them at night because she had given Gretel her bed and been unable to sleep in the chair.

She baked biscuits in their enormous oven. Hansel loved them.

Winters were mild from then on. Hansel grew stronger, more like a man, and the animals were easier to hunt. Every fowl or hare made the oven less like a waiting monster. It was just an oven, Gretel was just a girl, and Hansel just a boy.

They grew older. Hansel had been thought a bright boy by a village schoolmaster, in another life, the life with the other mother who would always be perfect in death. Their parents speculated that he would become a priest, a scribe, and escape from that village in the shadow of the woods where stories were born.

Horror was surer than magic, sure as hunger. It formed a binding circle around the cottage. They could never leave this place where the bones were buried.

Once upon a time Hansel could have been a scribe. He used to talk, and she used to laugh.

Twins conjoined by the conspiracy of silence, they turned their backs upon the world and turned simply to each other in the old witch’s bed. Gretel knew the rhythm of Hansel’s breath against her face already. It was not so different when it came faster.

None of it was so very different. They had tasted far more forbidden things than each others’ mouths. The first time hardly seemed like the first time.

Nevertheless, there was a first time. They were too young, but they had spent their whole lives being too young for what was happening to them. Gretel let Hansel take off her clothes, buttons tugging on and then slipping free of rough cloth. The large freckles on his collarbones looked like tiny hearts cooked brown. He slid large, boy-awkward hands up her naked waist to rest against her ribs, frail and breakable, no protection if he decided to crack them open and have her heart in his mouth.

The word love means so many things it almost means nothing at all. People take what becomes necessary to them, and call it love. Hansel and Gretel were the only boy and girl in a world fenced in by bones.

Gretel bared her throat to him, an offer of food. He opened his mouth against it, she felt the scrape of his teeth against her skin. She screamed and he did not bite down, and that meant love as surely as anything ever means love.

Nights continued like that. Horror became a commonplace about the house, like a tarnished kettle. Hansel and Gretel lived happily enough. Hansel hunted and built fences and chopped food, Gretel gardened and cooked, and they went to the table and ate before going to bed.

Gretel’s belly swelled once, a ridiculously large shape above her skinny legs and below her small, half-finished breasts. It was absurd and worrying that a fat stomach could mean they would be parents. It was simplest for Hansel, who only had one father to choose not to be.

It was different for Gretel. There was the envy and greed of the second mother to avoid, the necessity to never look at your mirror and your child and hold yourself dearest. Then there was the necessity not to be that perfect mother, who made you believe in all the lies, all the simple stories. Those mothers died, and left you to your fate. Better be the second mother, no matter how bad, than the first.

In the end, there was no child. Another hard winter came, and one day there was a trail of blood on the bedclothes with no way for the child to find its way back.

It was a little thing, scarcely noticeable when added to the burden of guilt. They popped it into the oven to keep it safe. Best to make it theirs, keep it with them, not utterly remove it from them like their mother, who had gone into a grave and been replaced.

They had the baby for dinner, and there was never any other. Perhaps when Gretel and Hansel pulled apart their baby’s little bones, smaller than wishbones, and made the same silent wish, it came true.

They feared to go to the village, and by the time fear was less acute they had forgotten how to behave among other people. It was safe in their yellow cottage, which promised food and never let them down.

They became stooped and twisted from the eternal toil to keep themselves from hunger. Neither knew quite how to make clothes, so they were small, silent beings wrapped in rough material, staring out at the world with frightened uncomprehending eyes.

Everyone knew humans did not live alone in the woods. What everyone knows is the story people agree to believe. If there were lonely houses built in the woods, they must be inhabited by talking animals.

As they grew old, Gretel would lie awake sometimes with Hansel wrapped around her and try to trace in silver moonlight events that had once been clean and sharp as snow in the woods.

Not being able to face something became not being able to remember it. Their life became a story to them, the only one they would ever have. Impossible that they had done those things, in the youthful passionate violence of wanting to live. The years took them further and further away from the children lost in the woods.

Hansel died. He had fought their father and their old witch and the winter, but he let age conquer him. Gretel’s mind was wiped clear of everything but hunger that would never be satisfied again. She struggled to think of something to do with the body, something different, but she didn’t know how to do anything else.

She bundled her brother into the oven and when she took him out she ate her first solitary meal.

She buried his bones deep in the cold earth around their cottage. When she dug down to bury him she uncovered bones and bones, lying in a chain around the cottage. There were far more bones than she and Hansel had stripped clean, but stories do not become stories by only happening once. Gretel put Hansel’s bones in with the rest, and was not able to tell who had been a stranger and who her baby, who her one true love, and who the evil stepmother.

It hardly seemed to matter. They were linked together in the cold earth, and because she had loved some of them she seemed to love them all.

It had all been so long ago. Gretel’s hair was white as the bones. The hunger that had been the one passion of her life was dying at last. She felt very peaceful, and simply old, simply lonely. Early childhood came back to her. She lived alone in the little house in the middle of the woods, thinking of her mother’s voice before stories ever came true.

Stories are like parents. They eat children.

Once upon a time, Gretel heard noises outside her door. She supposed it was scavenging animals, driven to desperation by the unusually harsh winter, and opened the door to shoo them away.

They were little more than scavenging animals, fingers clawed into the ivy. Gretel almost recoiled when she realised that they had been mouthing the jagged stone of her cottage walls, and saw their bloody mouths.

She opened her mouth, and felt her tongue flicker against the point of her own broken teeth. 

The bones around her house were cold company. These were only children. It would be sweet to become the mother who could get it right, to feed them and never leave them, to pick up that little girl and hold her by Gretel’s chair in front of the fire. If she let them in, she could let them know they were loved, and would never be hurt again.

They looked like animals, but they were dear lost children. Inside, the oven was warming the whole house, and Gretel had food for them all. They would live happily ever after.

Gretel held the door open wide, and the children stared up at her with what seemed to be fear. Never mind: they would understand once she gave them food.

Stories are like open doors. You can choose to step through.

Nobody ever gets more than one story, but sometimes they get to play more than one part.

“Come in,” said the old witch.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Happily Ever After Comes Round” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 58A.)

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