Gretel's Witch
What happens after the fairy tale ends?
This was written for the 30 Days of Fright Writing Challenge, prompt 8: the mind plays tricks
A couple of years ago, we started teaching Hansel and Gretel as part of a fairy tales unit in first grade. It’s just so shocking to me that life seems to go on as normal after parents leave the children for dead in the woods, and a little girl commits murder. No lasting repercussions? No emotional damage? Really?
Gretel’s Witch
The stories say I killed a witch.
Pushed her into the oven, so clever.
Saved my brother. And myself.
A ten-year-old hero.
Don’t believe every story you’re told.
I had heard plenty of stories growing up. So when we were left alone in the woods, to fend for ourselves by our father and step-mother, I already knew the forest was rife with witches and trolls, wolves who lure you with fancy words, huntsmen who were prepared to rescue you at a moment’s notice, as if they’d nothing better to do.
Four days, legs scratched, faces flushed, bellies all but empty but for the last few bites of bread and some foraged dandelion. No huntsman to save us. So when we came upon the cottage, it was a glorious sight. It might as well have been made of candy, such was our joy.
“Be polite,” Hansel said, as he knocked on the door.
An old woman opened it. She was hunched a bit in the shoulders and her eyes had the milky softness of age behind her spectacles. “Oh my,” she exclaimed. “You children look a fright!”
+++
She comes to me now, at night.
These past eight years.
In the corner, in the dark, while I lie frozen and writhing at the same time. In bed. In terror.
Because of what I did.
I try to scream, but I can’t. Her final screams fill my ears instead.
In the morning, when I wake, the sheets are wet with sweat.
There is a dark stain, like something scorched, on the wall in the corner that only I can see.
Hansel gives me that look. It’s so palpable, I can taste his pity on my tongue.
“Forgive yourself,” he said once. “It was years ago. You were a child.”
But I can’t forgive myself. And neither can she.
+++
The old woman’s cottage was warm and smelled like fresh bread, with a long wooden table and a cozy sitting room and another room for sleeping. To us, a palace.
She fed us. Was kind. Too kind. I looked at her wrinkled face, laugh lines around her mouth, grey-silver hair pulled loosely into a bun, as she put a tray of oatcakes before us.
Wrinkled. Kind. Milky eyes. A cottage in the woods. Herbs hanging in bundles over the table. Food and warmth in a time of scarcity.
I thought of our heartless step-mother, our weak, foolish father. Of all the other adults I had met. Not kind like the old woman.
She must be a witch.
+++
She came to me two or three times in those first couple years, after we arrived back home. Nightmares, they said. I believed them. At first.
Then our father died abruptly, in his bed. Heart Attack.
“She killed him,” I said. “The witch.”
“Gretel.” Hansel took my arm and steered me from our father’s bedroom. “There is no witch. There never was.”
Hansel sat next to my bed in a chair, as I drifted to sleep. To prove to me that she was a dream. It was all in my mind.
I woke, clutching his arm. I pointed. She loomed out of the wall—an old- woman-shaped shadow. The crackle of fire and her dying shrieks filled the room like water that would drown me.
“Calm down, Gretel. There’s nothing there.” I rocked back and forth with my hands over my ears. Hansel heard nothing.
Sudden silence.
And then I heard it, leaping from her shadow like a flame to burn me. I heard her laugh.
I didn’t ask Hansel to sit up with me after that. I won’t risk it.
I take the herbs for sleep that the doctor gives me, but still she comes.
She stares at me, with her dead eyes, while I lie in my bed, staring back, paralysed. Not more than a dark silhouette, a woman-shaped shadow, across the room. Dark like cinders. Something burnt.
+++
The old woman applied salve to our bruises and scrapes. She told us she’d send us off with the traveling peddler, when he arrived on his rounds. He’d keep us safe. Take us to the nearest town. I didn’t believe a peddler was coming.
I ate dandelions and berries every day. I found them by the stream. I didn’t trust the woman’s food. The stories said to never take food from a witch. I worried about Hansel.
I grew thinner and thinner. Hansel gained weight.
One day I came in with the pail of water from the well, berry juice staining my fingers. “Oh!” the woman cried. “You mustn’t eat those, my dear!”
She took my hands in hers, creamy eyes filled with concern. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will not eat any more. They are bad.”
I believed many things—that witches ate children and trolls lived under bridges and, if you were very lucky, a goose might lay a golden egg. But I didn’t believe her about the berries.
“I promise,” I said with my fingers crossed behind my back.
Each day, I ate more.
+++
We arrived back at our father’s house in the wagon of the peddler, whom we’d met on the road after fleeing the old woman’s house on that last horrible day. We said nothing about where we’d been.
Our father greeted us with tearful joy. That part of the story you’ve heard is true. Our step-mother was dead from fever.
Hansel flew into our father’s arms, embraced him tightly. I stood back. He was a foolish, weak man, whose love for us couldn’t overpower his cowardice before his wife. I could see that now.
Father eyed me over my brother’s shoulder. He could see that I was changed. I saw a hint of fear in his eyes.
+++
“Those poison berries she ate as a child…” I overheard the doctor speaking to my brother once. “The hallucinations…. They may have caused permanent damage… nerves… delusional.” I pretended to be asleep in bed.
Hansel has called numerous doctors, healers, experts. They all go away again, with sad eyes.
I’ve never gained weight, never been healthy, after our ordeal.
Hansel says it’s because I ate those poison berries, because I starved myself, because of my anxious guilt.
Perhaps he’s right. But it changes nothing.
I move about our house like a crane, careful steps on spindle legs. I go through the motions of life, waiting. Waiting until the next time she appears. She waits, too. Just long enough to torture me, to make me feel like maybe she won’t come again. That I’ll be free of her at last.
I feed the chickens. I collect the eggs. I chop the vegetables. Hansel makes the stew. He does all the cooking. He bakes the bread.
I stay away from the oven. I can’t stand the sight of it.
+++
That last day is blurry in my mind. I recall feeling ill. Dizzy. Like one might feel, I imagined, if under a witch’s spell and about to fall into a death-like slumber for a hundred years.
“Hansel! Quickly, now! We must get some proper food into her at once.” I remember her voice—worried. “Get the milk, my boy. I’ll get the bread from the oven!”
Bustle around me as I stood, wobbly, in the kitchen. She intended to force me to eat her tainted food, I thought.
You know what happened then. That I shoved an unsuspecting old woman into an oven. Slammed the door. Heard her tortured screams. Believed I was saving our lives.
I heard my brother screaming, “Gretel! Why? What have you done?!”
As her shrieks died out and the acrid smell of roasted flesh filled the kitchen, I remember saying, “She was a witch. A witch. A witch. A witch.” Hansel was crying. The smell was cloying. He gathered our few things and some food in bundles, while I stood dark and brooding and full of anger—much like the shadow stands in my room at night—”A witch,” I murmured.
+++
Her nighttime visits are more frequent now. She comes closer. Her curse is already clasping me like a shroud. One day soon she will reach out with a bony, charred finger and set my bed alight.
I will scream silently and writhe as my bed is consumed in magickal flame. She will make me suffer as she suffered. I fear the sharp lick of flames. The melting of my skin. The agony.
Hansel will find me dead in my bed in the morning, as if I passed peacefully in my sleep, heart simply given up. But inside, my heart will be scorched to ash.
Or perhaps that night will never come. Perhaps she only taunts me. The fear, the expectation of torment—perhaps those are the true torture. Perhaps she will haunt and taunt me for the rest of my days, until I go mad.
So, you see, the stories you’ve heard are not entirely true.
We were left by our parents to die in the woods, yes.
We stumbled, lost and hungry, ‘tis true.
But we were taken in by a kindly old woman, who fed us and cared for us when all was nearly lost. A benevolent stranger in the woods.
I killed that woman.
A ten-year-old murderer.
Pushed her into the oven, in my delusions.
Believed I’d saved my brother. And myself.
And now… her vengeful shade lingers, cursing me, torturing me for what I’ve done.
No, I didn’t kill a witch. I made one.
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So good...
This is incredible! Absolutely brilliant. Well-written, it reaches right down to the nastiest parts of our racial psyche and asks if we should really believe everything we're told. Great stuff!