Gretel

A haggard old woman stood atop her roof, carefully drizzling maple syrup over pancake shingles. Calculating. Ghosts of children past hung like clouds in the gray sky. The wind clawed at the woman, fraying her gray hair; her gray eyes—devoid of all emotion—sat, disenchantedly, in her skull. She licked her fingers and hobbled back down the ladder, back into the clutches of her home.

The birch trees surrounding the hut with the pancake roof and candy-pane windows were in an eternal state of death. Or late fall, as it were: almost death. There were always a few brown leaves left behind to rustle in the wind—either clinging for dear life, or writhing for freedom from their own branch; I’m never sure which. As with any birch forest, there were eyes everywhere. Eyes of the trunks, left behind by fallen branches; eyes of the crows, perched and waiting. Waiting.

* * *

A mother sat in her corner: rocking, rocking, rocking. Her trance deepened with every creak of the rocker. Her heart was heavy and struggled to beat.

“Husband,” she said, continuing to rock, as if to a metronome, “you must take them away.” The absence of inflection in her voice betrayed her state of mind.

“I can’t,” Husband said, “and I won’t. You are their Mother, and you must care for them.”

“I can’t,” Mother said, “I’m no good for them. Can you not see? They would be better off in the woods. Nature would care for them better than I. You would care for them better than I. Just until the moon begins to wane.”

“You are fine,” Husband said. “Everything is fine. You must stop this foolishness.”

“Until the moon turns,” Mother said, and Husband thought he could hear a low growl in her throat. She had stopped rocking abruptly, and the words spewed out of her mouth. “Stay with them, I beg of you.”

She said no more, and the creak of the rocker fell into beat.

* * *

You’ve all told your children that I lived happily ever after, and it’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit. I know it’s bullshit. Maybe they don’t know yet, but they will. Not to play the victim card, but I’ve built, brick by brick, a life around the psychological effects of having, at the age of 8, shoved a murdering, child-eating witch into an oven, baking her alive—instead of, you know, watching my elder brother be slaughtered and eaten.

I’ve relived that walk in the woods every single day. It plays on a loop in my mind: Hansel’s futile efforts dropping those pebbles that shined in the moonlight; the breadcrumb path eaten by birds. As if either pebbles or breadcrumbs or our pockets full of a dead hag’s jewels could have made our mother love us.

A house of pancakes with sugar-crystal windows would be a welcome sight for any children, but most especially for those sitting with the realization that their parents had abandoned them: left them to the mercy of the wolves, left them for dead. Hansel and I didn’t speak of it, but we knew. Both of us did.

Burned into my memory is the moment I first laid eyes on the hag—her wild gray hair, her gray skin hanging like a tapestry off her bones, and, dear god, her vacant gray eyes that looked like death incarnate—but nothing is so seared into my conscious as her voice. The voice of an estranged grandmother who’d miraculously skirted the detection of the nursing home for the insane…for at least the last decade. A voice that made our very bones quake:

“Nibble, nibble, nubble, who gnaws my house to rubble?”

“Hansel…?” was the only word I could get out.

“Gretel,” was his only response.

The days following our entrance into that candy cabin were a blur, and they still are, to be honest. The old witch locked Hansel in a cage, as though he were a dog or some other feral creature. She fed him cakes and cookies—anything to fatten him up—while I was fed on bread crusts: made her accomplice.

When that fateful morning came, she had the oven fired up by the time the sun had risen. She asked me to see for myself if it was hot. Well, I was young, but my mama—whether she loved me or not—didn’t raise no fool.

Forgive me, but I can’t bear to recount what happened next. I will say, though, that I’d never heard a noise like that. Putrid, haggard, terrible screams. It was the sound of the old witch dying. I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my hands over my ears, but I could still hear her screaming inside my head. I turned and ran, ran away from the screams, still not opening my eyes or moving my hands from my ears. I ran smack into a wall made of gingerbread and threw up. My dress and my apron and my chin were covered with vomit, but I didn’t wipe them off. Not even my chin.

I ran to where Hansel was cowering in the cage. He had heard the screams too. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach the bone-white key hanging a few feet from the cage. I fumbled to get it into the lock, but I got it. I got the door open. Hansel ran out and hugged me and kissed me and then he was covered in my vomit too. He said some things—I could see his mouth moving and his eyes looking at mine—but I don’t know what he said. All I could hear was the screams bouncing all around in my head, even though I knew she wasn’t screaming no more. Dear god, she wasn’t screaming anymore.

Hansel grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the sugar cookie door. “Wait,” I said, still trying to hear my own voice over the screaming that wasn’t there. Something was chewing at my memory. I turned and walked sorta crooked like to the back of the cabin. I’d seen the witch pulling up the floor boards back there, so I looked around and tugged at a few until one came loose. There, underneath the floor, was a pile of bones, and I threw up again. All over them. But there was something shiny underneath the bones. A lot of things shining. I just sat there, staring—at the bones, at the shiny things, all covered in my vomit. Then Hansel leaned passed me to see what I was seein’.

“Ew, Gretel,” he said, seeing what I’d done. Then he brushed away the top layer of bones and jewels to get the ones underneath that weren’t covered in vomit. “Gretel,” he said, holding a handful of diamonds and rubies and pearls and emeralds, and looking at me sorta funny like, “we’re rich.” With a new lump of vomit stuck in my throat, I began scooping the jewels into my apron pockets. It didn’t feel right. Maybe it was, but it didn’t feel like it.

We left the hut then and headed back through the woods. A dozen crows cawed at us, and a thousand eyes watched us, but the thrill of new money led us back home.

That day, in that hut, in those woods, I was acquainted with shame: til death do us part.

I am Gretel. You might say I’m the OG authority on hApPiLy eVeR aFtEr. Me and Hansel, both. But don’t take just our word for it—ask Little Red and her Granny. (Or Goldilocks, if you want, but we don’t like her much.) If you haven’t arrived at “happily ever after” yet, you’re in good company. All it really means is that you’re just sane enough to somewhat effectively pretend you’re not losing your goddamn mind.

And for the record, that roof of pancakes was stale as fuck.