Hansel and Gretel Find a Snack

For L.C. Schafer's Fucked Up Fairytales unofficial challenge. 366 words before I added this bit!

Hansel vomited into the bucket again. No one looked very sympathetic.

"So you pushed her into the Aga?" Hansel thought he might be sick again.

"I think so. Yes. I pushed her." He could see himself doing it, but then he'd seen a lot of things.

"Hansel, Mrs Mastaroudes is in a very serious condition. Yet you don't seem sure."

"It was all... I don't...." Hansel started to cry.

He'd been the one in charge, he should never have let it happen, but when Gretel ran off, he had to go after her, didn't he? Then they'd both been lost. Dad would have known how to stave off hunger in the woods. He'd just been showing off, trying to look knowledgeable when she'd held out a handful of slim, grey-brown mushrooms. Now they were telling him he wasn't going to die, but he felt like he might.

"Where's Gretel?"

"I ATE her! Or... I don't know. She was with me at the house, and then, I think I ate her!"

The house had been something else. After the mushrooms, Hansel had started to wonder if all this had happened on purpose. Linda, their step-mum, was trying to get rid of him, he'd told Gretel, she wanted him out. Gretel had not argued. And then they had stumbled into the clearing and he'd seen the house. Yellow cake walls and striped candy woodwork, a gleaming boiled sugar roof, Hansel had been agape, and Gretel had laughed raucously. Until the woman came out.

Inside, the paranoia only built, and he recalled with another lurch of his stomach his terror as he had been offered dish after dish, certain the old witch was trying to kill him.

Now he remembered. Gretel had pushed her. Head first into the oven. "Linda sends her love!" she'd shouted.

"Gretel, you killed her!" he'd gasped.

"No one will believe you" she'd told him. "She wouldn't let me in on my own. Grandma can't stand girls. Don't know why." He'd watched as she gathered gold and jewellery from nooks and crannies around the house. "Anyway. I didn't. You did. Don't you remember? After she made you eat me all up."

Then, she was gone.