Written by: Grace Carver
First Place Winner of The Jennie Hackman Memorial Prize for Short Fiction
The land was starved. And so, its people starved with it.
The winter had been harsh, the fields suffocatingly white and uninhabitable, the hulking evergreens that surrounded the village heavy with ice. Gretel swore there wasn’t a sound for months, other than the weak crackle of the hearth and the quiet breaths from her little brother. There was no game to speak of for miles. No one had caught more than a squirrel since autumn. New snowfall lay clean and untouched, not so much as a footprint. First, they’d eaten through the dried venison. Gretel hated the taste, like earth and blood to her tongue.
By late winter they had nothing to eat but rotting potatoes, roots from the bottom of their stores, and stale bread scraps. Gretel had watched her stepmother throw the carcass of a frost-killed mouse onto the fire. She had watched her eat it in one bite. Gretel’s brother had to hold her back from snatching the thing out of the awful woman’s mouth for herself. He’d hardly been strong enough to hold her back. Gretel had nearly bitten her brother in her fit of rage. He was stupid to put his hands on her, she thought. But he had always been afraid of their stepmother.
Spring brought a breath of reprieve for the woodcutter’s family, but quickly they realized the land was still unhappy. The hills surrounding their home lay thick with dead grass and mud. The rain came hard and often, washing out crops and eroding soil. At night wolves howled, sounding impossibly close from the window that Gretel and her brother slept beneath. Her brother cowered at the sound, whimpering to sleep. Gretel would roll onto her back and stare at the ceiling, wishing for quiet. Her father spent endless hours swinging his axe, but it didn’t matter. All the wood grew damp and rotted, warped by the storms.
When Gretel’s father lay on the straw mattress he shared with his wife at night, her whispers hung heavy in the stale air. Her sharp voice would entreat him to do what it took for them to survive. “They are not strong enough,” she told him. “Look at your girl with her ribs poking out and your son’s sunken eyes. They will not live. It is a waste of food. Starvation demands sacrifice.” The woman didn’t realize, of course, that even in the dead of night in their one-room cottage, her stepdaughter could hear her every word. Gretel wanted to bare her teeth and growl at the woman. Her father may have been meek and pliable, easily manipulated to have married that awful woman in the first place, but he was not capable of hurting them, abandoning his children.
Until one day he was. Gretel had followed behind her father, her brother’s little hand in hers. It was when her father had handed her brother and her each a chunk of bread, stale and molded and wrapped in cloth, and looked at them with great pity in his eyes that she knew. She was sure her stepmother would notice the last of the bread missing, but she had gotten what she wanted, hadn’t she? “Come, children,” He told them, his voice wavering, “We will collect kindling from the forest.”
Gretel looked back with disdain at her stepmother as she watched from the doorway of their little shack with her chin set and her arms crossed, awaiting her husband’s compliance. She hated her. She hated her more than she’d ever hated anyone. Before she disappeared from her view, Gretel turned back to look at the woman. Their gazes met. Her stepmother grinned, toothy and satisfied. Gretel narrowed her eyes before she felt her brother’s hand pulling her along.
Her brother dutifully followed their father into the forest. Gretel wrenched her arm from his grasp roughly but followed still. As the trees grew thicker around them and the terrain grew more unfamiliar, Gretel reached into her pocket and pulled out her hard puck of bread. As her father trudged along, heavy axe in hand, she broke off breadcrumbs and left them in her and her brother’s wake. She stared at the back of his head as they walked. Her father was weak and empty-headed she thought. Weaker and crueler than she had ever imagined. When they came deep enough that her father didn’t think they’d be able to return on their own, he stopped.
He knelt before his children. He pressed a hunting knife into his daughter’s hand. He looked into his children’s faces. Their cheeks were tear-stained and hollow with hunger. Gretel wished to know what her father was thinking of just then. Was he thinking how he hated the sight of them? With their straw-colored hair and pale eyes, they were the picture of their mother. Gretel thought it hurt him too much to look at them, to be reminded of his wife, dead and buried out by the forest’s edge. She remembered the first months after her mother’s death. Her brother’s screeching, hungry wail. There was only Gretel to hold him in her scrawny arms. Her father never said a word, hardly lifted a finger. Gretel remembered the way his eyes glazed over, the way he didn’t seem to hear her brother’s ear-piercing scream at all. The way he looked through her like she wasn’t there. It made Gretel angry to think of. It was hardly her fault she looked like her mother. It was her brother’s birth that had torn her from this world, not her.
When he couldn’t bear to look upon their faces any longer, her father turned away. I’m sorry, he told them before he disappeared, swallowed by the forest.
Alone the children cowered. The knife felt heavy and rough in Gretel’s hand. She tucked it into her belt and wiped away her tears. She grabbed her brother by the arm, pulling him roughly along as he sniffled and whined. Her father had already gone from their sight. She moved quickly, right in the direction they’d come. If they made it back to their cottage, even just to the village, they would survive the night. Maybe when her father saw them alive, he would feel guilty. Maybe he’d spare them. She knew that tonight though, alone in the forest, she and her brother were as good as dead. She spotted one bread crumb then another, but soon they came sparser.
Then she saw them; coal black birds lining the branches that arched above them. She watched as crows dove from the tree branches above, snapping up her trail as a snack.
They had lost their way. Gretel wasn’t sure which direction the village was in anymore. Her brother cried harder. Be quiet! she yelled at him; she could hardly think with all his whining. She wanted to scream. It was then she heard it, something like music coming from one direction. It sounded like bells almost, melodic and light and luring. The sound tugged at her. The forest was growing darker around them as the sun fell. Soon they’d hardly be able to see the ground before them. Around them the trees seemed to close in. They flinched at every rustle of leaves or crack of a twig. Gretel dragged her brother along in the direction of the sound.
She swore then she saw a light. Suddenly, Gretel was running, until she came upon a clearing in the woods. There was a cottage there, small and yet lit up from within. Odd wind-chimes hung all along the front, strung with old metal forks and spoons, and little white stones. Smoke billowed from the chimney. The air smelled warm and familiar. The earth around the cottage was rich and lively. Gardens ripe with carrots and onions and cabbage were lined with odd white footpaths, like birch branches in the grove by the village where Gretel used to play. Vines dripping with berries red as rubies covered the stone walls of the house.
The door opened with a creak and in the light stood an old woman, her hair silver and cheeks wrinkled and smile inviting.
“It seems two little guests have come for dinner. Come my sweets, I have just the thing to warm you up.”
Gretel’s fingers twitched in temptation. Her legs shook, as she imagined the warmth of a fire, a steaming oven. Her belly growled at the thought of a warm meal. She felt her brother step forward but held him still, grip tight on his wrist. They didn’t know this woman, didn’t even know where in the forest they stood. He looked back at her with aching, begging eyes. Somewhere beyond the shadowed tree line, Gretel heard a howl. She let her brother tug her weakly through the doorway, into the waiting arms of the old woman.
She sat them by a great hearth, the largest oven Gretel had ever seen. Furs were laid out before the fire, the softest thing Gretel’s skin had ever touched. She had the urge to press her cheek to the floor, to fall asleep surrounded with the scent of wood and fresh bread. Her brother slumped beside her, leaning into his sister and watching the room with wide, amazed eyes. Gretel had to resist the urge to pinch him.
Gretel’s eyes never left the old woman. She watched her unwavering smile, her round figure, full face, eyes dark as the shell of a beetle and framed with wrinkles. The crone stooped before the children. She pressed her palm to the boy’s cheek. He smiled up at her. Her long, bony finger tilted Gretel’s chin up, and Gretel frowned. Their eyes met. The old woman blinked at what she saw there. “What scrawny things you are. Whyever were you so far in my woods?”
Gretel’s voice came out like gravel, “Our father left us. We could not find our way back. We did not know they were your woods.”
The old woman tsked. “Oh yes, my woods indeed. But do not fret, there is time for all of that. You are lost and alone at my doorstep. Tell me, what can I do? What do you want most?”
“To eat,” her brother spoke.
The old woman gave a sharp cackle. She brought the children to a table and placed before them a feast: steaming hot cakes slathered in honey, roast chicken and boiled potatoes, bright red berries powdered with sugar, and cold milk to drink. The children’s eyes were wide in wonderment. It had been a long time since they had seen so much food with their own eyes. “Eat!” The woman told them, “Eat! I insist you fill your bellies.”
Gretel watched her brother as he, without hesitation, dug into the meal. He filled his mouth so quickly she wondered if he chewed. Grease clung to his lips and cheeks as he bit into a chicken leg, sugar stuck to his fingers as he shoveled berries into his mouth. Gretel didn’t move, didn’t take a bite. Her brother was too trusting, simple-minded, she thought. Who was this woman that fed them so well? What if the food was poisoned? In her gut, beneath the hunger and all the aching, she felt that something was wrong.
Gretel spoke, “How does your garden grow so well during a season as wet and hard as this one?”
The woman raised her brows, “Do not worry of such things, girl. Eat.”
Gretel didn’t move. Her brother continued to eat, more and more, until his small body couldn’t handle another ounce and his eyes were heavy with sleep. The woman laid out a pillow and blanket beside the hearth, and he sank into a deep, comfortable sleep. Gretel watched his young, peaceful face, so trusting even in slumber.
“How is your cottage so warm and your firewood so dry, when the forest outside is so cold and damp?”
The woman looked at Gretel. “You are a nosy thing. Eat, girl. Your belly rumbles.”
Gretel looked back, shook her head slowly.
It was then that the old woman frowned. Her eyes narrowed. “You refuse my gifts? Spoiled child!”
Gretel heard the change in the old woman’s voice. She watched her spindly fingers clench in anger. She had seen anger like this so many times before. Gretel remembered the sharp pinch of her stepmother’s fingers and her rageful voice whenever Gretel disobeyed. This woman though, she was different. She had survived, no, thrived completely alone in the shadows of the forest. Gretel knew it was no strike of luck that these gardens grew so easily, that this woman’s belly was round and her cheeks full. She did not understand it, magic or sacrifice, whatever it was. But she saw it in the woman’s eyes that night.
She clutched at the knife her father had left her, held it tightly behind her back.
“You are a witch. Like the Baba Yaga in my mother’s bedtime stories.”
The witch moved then, reaching for the girl. What would she do, once she had the girl in her grasp? Gretel did not want to know. She swiped the knife clumsily in front of her, slicing the palm of the crone’s withered hand.
The old witch hissed in pain, crimson blood flooding from the wound. She reared her arm back, slapping Gretel hard across the face. Gretel felt the witch’s blood, slick on her cheek. Gretel lost her grasp on her blade and it fumbled to the ground. Before she could duck, reach for it, the old woman had Gretel’s chin hard in her grasp. Blood seeped from the wound in her palm, coating Gretel’s skin and dripping down the crone’s arm.
The witch looked Gretel in the eye and laughed.
“What do you want, you feral little beast?” She had asked the same question before.
“To live.” Gretel insisted.
“Do you? To live as you have? Your belly will never stop rumbling.” The witch loosened her grip. She was looking at Gretel as though she recognized something.
“I have never known anything other than an empty belly. What is another day of hunger? I am alive. I am hungry.” Gretel believed it. She wanted to live. She wanted to climb trees and mend the holes in her socks and light a fire in her hearth at night and smell the forest on her palms. She wanted to make a garden grow and get strong enough to swing an axe. She wanted to look her family in the eye again and laugh that she, the scrawniest of them all, lived despite.
“Life takes sacrifice! It thrives off flesh and blood and dirt and pain. You children have entered my forest. Your small brother lay by my fire, ate at my table. I am hungry, too. I demand what I am owed.”
Gretel looked at her brother, where he lay, his soft features relaxed as his chest rose and fell. She thought of the year her mother had died. She thought of burying her body deep in the earth and the way the snowdrops had blanketed the forest’s edge. The way the hens had laid so well all season, the fire burned so warm. She thought of the way her brother cried and cried all season, a colicky baby. She was so young, only eight years old. What did he have to cry about, she thought as she cared for him all that time? He was the one that stole her from them in the first place.
“Take him then.” He was too weak to survive, Gretel had no doubt. He would not scrounge and bleed and fight to live. Gretel would. Let him sleep at the witch’s hearth. A fate at her hands was no worse than that he’d face elsewhere. That is what Gretel told herself, let herself believe as she looked into the witch’s eyes. “I want to live.”
“You’d leave your own kin to the wolves?” The witch seemed amused.
“Yes.”
Perhaps she wasn’t so hungry, perhaps she was feeling merciful, perhaps she saw herself in the girl. Gretel wasn’t sure. But the witch released her, stepping away and raising her chin, “Well, then.”
As she walked away, alone, from the bright cottage in the middle of the woods, Gretel looked again at the flourishing garden, brimming with life. She looked closer at the windchimes, strung not with forks and spoons and white stones, but with teeth. The garden path was not made up of birch branches, but bone. Gretel’s looked back at the house one last time. She knew now, really knew, how the witch’s land was so fertile. Perhaps she should have felt more regret. She pitied her brother, soon to lie in the garden himself, she was sure. But she turned her back anyway and into the dark of the forest she stepped once again.
Gretel walked. She walked until her feet ached and she worried she might drop to the ground in exhaustion. She did not dare stop, however. She walked until the sun began to rise, until the birds began to sing. Until finally, she spotted a footprint. Then another. She looked up. Crows, dozens of them.
Gretel followed her trail, half running and half tripping all the way to the edge of the forest. The birds’ angry caws rang in her ears the whole way until finally, she broke through into the sun. Gretel took a breath.
She walked across the fields she knew so well, through her village, just as people were beginning to open their windows, beginning their days. Her neighbors stopped in their tracks at the sight of her- face smeared in dried blood and shoes and skirts stained and torn. She kept walking, until the village thinned out to nothing, until she saw the worn dirt path that led to the small valley at the base of a hill. Her father’s hut stood alone. Smoke poured from the chimney. She reached the front door. She banged on the door, until finally her father answered.
His eyes went wide at the sight of her. Gretel wondered what he must think of the monstrous girl standing in front of him now. Did he think her an angry spirit come back to haunt him? Would he sink to his knees and beg forgiveness? No, he only stood there, motionless.
His wife emerged behind him. Shock overtook her before a spewing, shaking rage overtook her. She shoved her husband aside, hard. “It seems I must handle everything myself, you useless man!”
Her stepmother grabbed Gretel roughly, hand clamping down on the scruff of Gretel’s neck. She felt her hair rip from her scalp, and Gretel could not help but yelp out in pain. She tried to look back at her father, still standing there wide-eyed in the doorway. He did nothing. Her stepmother was right: he was weak, a coward. He had no idea what it took to live.
Her stepmother’s voice screeched viciously in Gretel’s ear. “Damn the wolves, I will handle you myself.”
Gretel thought of her stepmother all those nights, whispering in her father’s ear, of the look on her father’s face as he abandoned them in the depth of the forest. She thought of the snowdrops that grew wild the spring they buried her mother and the cottage deep in the woods with its thriving gardens and bone pathways. She thought of her little trusting brother, who she’d abandoned in the maw of the witch. Gretel knew what it took to survive.
She fumbled at her waistband, hands clumsy, as her stepmother dragged her by her hair. She wrapped her hand around the smooth hilt of her hunting knife, the blade crusted with dried blood. Gretel remembered what it felt like to strike out with it, and this time she did not hesitate.
With a brutal cry, she sunk the knife down to the hilt into her stepmother’s gut. She stabbed violently, blindly at the woman. She pulled the knife out and struck again. Gretel’s hands were warm and slick with blood. Even as her stepmother’s voice left her throat and her eyes grew hazy, Gretel did not cease.
When her stepmother went finally still, Gretel dropped away from the woman. Her father cowered in the doorway. The little girl stood on shaking legs. She wiped her blade on her already ruined skirts and turned to her father. He watched her with fear in his eyes.
“Starvation demands sacrifice,” she mimicked his second dead wife’s words back to him. “I plan to survive, father.” She stepped past him then, into their tiny home, sat herself before their old hearth. Gretel looked then into the fire before her. She thought of the season ahead and couldn’t help but smile.
