Run, Run, As Fast As You Can...

Please bear with me, dear reader. I am going to back up a ways, and try to find, in some meandering way, the point where everything began. A tricky thing, at the best of times, I'm sure you can agree.

One thing is sure: this all happened a very long time ago, when the world looked very different. There was no concrete or metal or bright coloured lights. There was light, of course, but it was organic - honey-yellow sunshine, or rich orange flames - and the nights were desperately dark.

Even the weather was different. Springtime landed lightly, and Autumn crunched and whipped in exactly the right measures. Summers were just pleasantly hot - the world didn't boil and people didn't fry and die. By contrast, the dead of winter was deeply, desperately cold. People got snowed in to their little homes, like animals trapped in burrows... Snow? Ah, we used to have snow then. Like rain, but white and thick. After a deep snowfall, cottages would look like iced gingerbread - like your children might make from a box on Christmas Eve. It's true I'm telling you!

Back then, the country was still thickly forested. People actually lived in the woods, flexing and bending with the tides of Nature, and making a living from the abundance all around them. She was one of those people. Greta. Our heroine. Maybe. I don't know. You decide.

Greta lived in the forest with her mama and papa. Papa was a woodcutter and Mama kept house, of course. This was in the days before women got paid and wore trousers.

One day, the woodcutter was killed in a freak incident involving a lone wolf. Some say he'd gone insane and tried to sew rocks into the wolf's belly. Any animal would object to such treatment.

After this, Greta and her mother scraped by in the little house. A quiet child, even before the sudden death of her father, afterwards she said not a word. More: she moved softly and could sit still and quiet for hours. Not moving even an eyelash when a deer sniffed at her head or tried to browse on her patched clothes. When a sparrow hopped closer and closer, you would expect a normal half-grown feral child to be strung like a bow. Not this one - stillness radiated out from her like ripples from a pebble in a pond. Even when the little bird hopped onto her foot, she could have been a tree.

Time marched on, diluting their grief for the woodcutter, dragging the little girl into womanhood whether she liked it or not, and gnarling her mother into a crone. Eventually, it claimed the life of the old woman, who perhaps wasn't so very old by today's standards, but this was before the age of dentistry and capitalism. Greta still scratched a living in the forest, utterly alone.

So you see - by this time, Greta had already experienced a fair share of hardship, trauma, loneliness and grief. Then, one day, her belly started to swell.

Who knows how it happened? Well, of course, most of us know how, as in what goes in where - but what nobody knows is who. Did a charming prince ride through the forest one day? Was it a whirlwind romance? Was it an act of violence? Was she just lonesome, and invited a tall, strapping boy with good cheekbones to spend a night?

The moon waxed and waned, and waxed again, and eventually she gave birth to a son. A bonny little chap, healthy and fat and strong, with such a pair of lungs. Howsoever that little boy felt, he was determined to share it with the whole forest.

And do you know? She still didn't say a word. When he squalled, she shushed him - shhhh shhhh shhhhh - with endless patience. Rocking him and patting him, and gently spinning her web of solace around him, like a spider swaddling a fly. When he cooed and giggled, she bathed him in her radiant smile. If she wanted his attention, she clapped her hands or clicked her tongue. But words? No. Pet names, sweet words of love and encouragement or harsh ones and impatient scolding - none of it. A "normal" mother ensures her beloved offspring are imbued with cheery nursery rhymes about death and injury from an early age. Not Greta.

When he started to walk on his chubby little legs, she took him to the nearby village. He needed more than he could get from her, and the tiny cottage, and the solemn, waiting trees. He needed children his own age to play with and emulate. Not to put too fine a point on it - he needed other people who could talk to him.

When his legs tired, she carried him in her shawl until he squirmed to get down again. Everything fascinated him, but nothing more than the other children he saw when they got to the village. He watched them, round-eyed, soaking everything in. His usual boldness deserted him. The game they were playing looked loud and rough. It was some kind of chasing game, and there seemed to be no clemency for tender age or small size. You ran, and if you got caught you went down hard in the dirt. There were shrieks of laughter, and wails of pain and indignation. Every face pink, hair curling damply away from necks and temples, eyes gleaming. Knees scraped, clothes smudged and cheeks tear-streaked. And woven through it all, chants of, Run, run, as fast as you can!

The villagers were suspicious of her. She's odd, they said. Dumb, no better than a beast, said others. He looks sickly (he didn't). What can she be feeding him? Poor little mite. Maybe she's a witch. Maybe she was, for all that.

Eventually they took the little boy away. He squalled for his mama, and she looked halfway to a wild animal with her teeth showing and her eyes blazing. Ahhh, they said , nodding sagely, We were right. She's crazy. Dangerous. The little lad will be better off with a proper family.

She returned to rattle around the old cottage, aching and empty. Every so often, she would reappear in the village, hollow-eyed, haunting the streets. When she saw a little boy about the right age, hope would light on her face and she'd hover closer to get a good look at him until the child's parents pushed her roughly away.

Each time she emerged from the forest she looked paler, and harder. Hope bled away, replaced by a yawning chasm of terrible not-knowing. If he was OK, or where he was. What name they had given him, or who "they" were, or whether they were kind.

Just as we don't know how the little life sparked, we don't know how it huffed out either. Drowning, some said - his little body puffed up and floating face down in a pond or a well. The villagers told her what had happened - some kindly, some not - but they didn't know whether she could understand them.

She was seen on market day, spending what must have been (for her) a small fortune on spices, sugar, candied fruit and gumdrops. And then - never again. That was the last time they saw her. They forgot about her, of course. For a while, anyway.

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I don't know if she meant to do it. I don't know if she hoped, in her despair, to bring him back to her. I don't know if she had always had a spark of magic, where it came from, or how she accessed it. There can be great power in abstinence, though - like damming a river and letting the pressure build. Her voice, croaky and unused though it was, would have thrummed with magic all its own.

Run, run, as fast as you can...

She made the dough the way her mother had shown her so many years ago, spiced it, sweetened it and kneaded it. Poured herself into it. Have you ever kneaded dough? Not with a metal arm, or a machine with a hook. No, I mean yourself. There is magic in that, too. You have to treat it with a special kind of care if you want it to rise. It needs patience, and rest, and touch. The amounts of gentleness, firmness and vigour are just as important as the ratio of butter to flour.

The air seemed to crystallise with intention. If you'd been there, you might have sworn that someone was humming contentedly, but Greta was a silent as a grave. Sunbeams shone too brightly in the tiny kitchen, something fizzed on the edge of vision. Something was happening.

Greta shaped the dough, bathed it in smiles, and at last crooned over it, like you might over a brand new soul. Her voice cracked the atmosphere in the little kitchen - which was diamond-bright and too thick, somehow - and something got through.

Greta dusted off her hands, for all the world as if she'd just made an ordinary cookie. She admired it - him - and then, with great care, laid it to rest on the windowsill.

A boy, of course. She had made a boy. She'd taken her longing and her loneliness, her silence, her grief... she'd beaten it together and stirred in the love that had nowhere to go. Mixed it all 'til her arm and heart both ached with it. Added a pinch of frustration, the tears she couldn't shed, and the fear reflected in the fractals of ignorance and suspicion all around her. She spiced it with anger, guilt, and hate, and just a hint of shame. She'd brought it together and folded it, pressed it, and folded it back on itself again. And again. And again.

She baked him with absolute care and attention to detail, not leaving the oven unattended for even a moment. He came out crisp and perfect. A beautiful golden boy. She decorated him with icing and sweets, and poured nursery rhymes on his head. Such was the path she was on, and so far down it, it must have seemed quite normal when he sat up and spoke to her.

Run, run as fast as you can!

He jumped off the baking sheet and took off. He led her a merry dance around the forest, and then he headed to the village where she wouldn't follow, and made mischief there. He'd show himself, and lure his victim away to where some accident would befall them. It was easy enough at first - people were fascinated by a talking biscuit and would readily give chase. Run! he'd squeal, laughing, Run as fast as you can! When they fell into a river and were swept away, or tumbled under the wheels of a cart... he'd shriek with delight and caper away.

The villagers stopped following him, and instead of being curious and excited by this show of raw magic, they learned to fear it. They dreaded hearing his singsong chant, and refused to pursue him. It didn't stop him though. He could still make accidents happen - and he did. A blade would fall, or a fire would start, or a child would trip into rushing water. Everyone learned to flee when they heard his grating little song.

Run, run...

The story goes he was eaten alive by a fox, right on the edge of the village. His high-pitched chuckling at the absurdity of being eaten was bone-chilling. I'm half-gone he-he-he! I'm three-quarters gone! I'm-

SNAP!

The fox could only eat the biscuity body his grief-stricken mother had made for him. He couldn't eat whatever it was she'd let into her kitchen that day.

With no one living in it, sustaining it, and breathing life into it... the cottage where Greta had lived gave way to ruin. Time claimed it, like it claimed Greta, and her parents. But not this little boy. He'd already had his return ticket punched, you might say, and now he's stuck here. No one went to that part of the forest anymore, because the people that did just... disappeared. The woodland creatures gave the place a wide berth.

The villagers could hear him sometimes, from a little way down the path. It sounded like he was enjoying a wild game of Tag with the leaves, or the wind, his voice darting about between the trees. Run, run, as fast as you can... The fool who got too close would hear it as if a little child was sat on their shoulder and speaking in a high, clear voice right into his ear. How can something so innocent send a chill right down a man's spine and turn his bowels to water?

Run. As fast as you can.

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[Edit: very brief story behind the story! I intended this to be a horror, or a comedy-horror. But it went down a different route. It was only after I finished it that I realised there is some personal Stuff in here that I never intended to put there. I chose the image last. At first I was looking at pictures of gingerbread men, but then I stumbled on this gorgeous shot of a fox, with all that mist - it looked haunting and sad and gloomy, which felt just right.]

Thank you for reading! Please do leave a comment so it's easy for me to reciprocate. I am a little behind on that at the moment, but I WILL get to everyone!

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