Unspun

by Ruth Nickle

  Whatever the reason, Gretel lay awake in bed late one night, staring at the rafters, realizing she could not stay in this place another day. She’d been waiting for something to magically change, as it always did in the fairy tales from her childhood. She could barely remember those tales from when her real mother was still alive, filling her head with stories of wonder and filling her heart with love. Planting dreams of happy endings.

  But real life wasn’t that way. Yes, there were the villains—she’d met them, after all—but no fairy godmother was ever going to appear just because Gretel was good and kind and hardworking. No djinn would emerge from a bottle and offer her heart’s desire. And maybe that was because she too was a villain, because she had blood and ashes on her hands, but she didn’t care anymore. If change wouldn’t come by itself, she would bring the change.

  She woke the next morning to a scream in her mind. She curled in on herself, for a moment sucked into the darkness of reliving that sound. It’s over now, she remembered, and she opened her eyes to look around her bedroom and smooth her hands across her worn coverlet, reminding herself where she was. And where she would never be again. She brushed away hot tears. She would not let those memories conquer her any longer. She rose from bed and went through the usual morning routines, but her heart pounded with a new sensation, a precarious sort of excitement.

  After the men had left for the day, she picked up the knapsack she’d already packed, placed a dagger in its sheath around her waist, left a note of farewell for Hansel and her father, and headed for the door.

  She pushed it open and gazed out into the woods.

  Don’t think, just go.

  But where? She rarely traveled and never alone. She didn’t know where to go, though a tiny, insistent voice inside told her that no matter where she went, there was one place she must return to before she could start anew.

  If she followed the path from her home, she would arrive in town and eventually at the carpenter’s shop where her father worked. She could tell him goodbye. She doubted he would stop her, but if she went that way, she feared she might stop herself. If instead she turned left, stepping off the path, she would head in the direction of the gingerbread house. If she turned right, every step would take her farther away from it.

  Fear told her to take any path but toward that little house, but the voice inside spoke louder. What good was it to leave behind one nightmare only to take another with you? She took a deep breath and turned left. She did not look back. She would not be dropping breadcrumbs this time.

  Gretel walked a steady pace now across the soft sponge of the mossy forest floor. She breathed in the crisp air of the forest. The sun was high overhead, but the ground was still cool in the dappled shadows of the leaves. The woods did not frighten in reality as they had in her memory; the trees were still large, but they didn’t loom.

  Even knowing where she was headed did not fill her with the terror she’d expected. It was as if, with every step away from her old life, something new rose within her, something green and growing and fragile, easily crushed but straining into life.

  An hour passed, then two and three, and Gretel began to finally feel an uneasy sense of familiarity. It came with the breeze, and at first she didn’t recognize its scent. But then it wafted past again, and she knew it: the tang of molasses and ginger. Her steps slowed as the tension she’d been releasing returned in full, filling her stomach with nausea. For the first time she looked back, away. It wasn’t too late to turn another direction.

  She stopped and took a deeper breath, letting the scent fill her nose and her lungs, clinging to a nearby tree trunk to keep herself from running. She closed her eyes, waiting for the terror to lull, then pushed forward. Only another minute passed before she saw her living nightmare at a distance through the trees.

  In a small clearing stood the little brown house. White icing in cheerful scallops ran around the windows, under the eaves, across every shingle of the pitched roof. Around the foot of the walls brightly colored gumdrops, red, yellow, green, blue, sat in neat rows like a sweet, sticky garden. The windows were delicately tinted poured sugar, sheets so thin she knew they let light into the house yet still strong enough to keep out the wind. The walls, of course, were gingerbread. The whole cottage seemed perfectly preserved, exactly as she had last seen it those years ago.

  Gretel’s stomach clenched, and the blood pounded strangely through her veins. Her head was light, but her feet felt glued to the ground. Surely time should have decayed such a confection. Surely it should have been a ruin by now.

  Surely, Gretel tried to tell herself, the witch was not still alive and tending to her home.

  Gretel’s stomach squeezed again, and this time she dropped to her knees to retch up the remains of her breakfast into the leaves and dirt. When she was through, she wiped her mouth and forced herself to look again. She noticed other details this time. The striped candy shutters, the poofs of divinity lining the walkway, everything exactly as she had tried to forget.

  In the middle of the cottage stood the only element that could not be consumed: a tall stone chimney, rising up like a monument. Though it was indoors, Gretel could see its base clearly in memory—an oven door, wide enough to admit the entire body of a child. Or a witch.

  She watched that chimney, holding her breath, waiting to see the telltale smoke of a burning fire, but the air was still. Nothing stirred in or around the house, but Gretel didn’t trust its appearance. Truth be told, she hadn’t trusted that house the first time she saw it either, but hunger and fear had driven her to ignore her instincts.

  She would not make the same mistake this time.

  So she stood longer, watching the house from a distance, waiting for signs of activity. Minutes passed, then hours. In the stillness of watching, every sound became amplified. A leaf falling to the ground crackled as it landed. The rustle of the breeze through the tree branches thundered. She noticed, however, that no animals chittered nearby, no birds called in this area. She shivered with more than the chill of the wind.

  Maybe the cottage truly had been abandoned, and only its lingering magic preserved it. Nothing had changed in hours. Nothing had changed in five years. Maybe nothing would ever change here. Maybe it was time to move on. She tried to convince herself that she was being practical, not cowardly, as she turned her back to the house, studiously ignoring it as she picked up her knapsack and fetched a snack to settle her uneasy stomach.

  In the stillness, she heard a distinct snap.

  She twisted back to face the house and saw, with horror, that a man had walked out of the forest and was standing there. The snapping sound came from a hand-sized chunk of gingerbread that he’d broken from the eaves.

  “Don’t eat that!” she shouted, rushing from her hiding place toward him. She reached the man and swatted his gingerbread to the ground, stomping it to pieces.

  He stared at her, eyes wide, then glanced at the crumbled remains at his feet. “Why not?” he asked.

  Gretel panted from the exertion of the dash and the sudden terror that had flooded her. “Believe me . . . you don’t want it. You shouldn’t come here!” She grabbed his hand and tried to pull him back into the safety of the trees.

  The man resisted. Gretel hesitated, torn between saving herself from the witch and trying to save the foolish man as well.

  “I’ve come here before,” he said, and his voice had gone soft, the way you talk to a wild creature. “It’s safe. It’s . . . peaceful, even. Not even the animals come near.”

  Peaceful. Gretel’s stare darted to the house. She could not think of this place as peaceful. She looked at the man again. He was younger than she’d first thought, perhaps only a few years her elder. Handsome, in a gentle way, with dark hair and the muscles of a woodsman. But the expression in his brown eyes suggested sorrow and pain that was fresh. “You find peace here?”

  “I know the
house is a little strange. It’s in perfect condition, and the gingerbread grows back.” He shrugged and gazed out into the distance, seeing things she couldn’t. “But there are worse things than strange.”

  Gretel’s hands were still shaking with the remains of terror, but she realized how foolish she seemed. Of course the witch was gone. Of course nothing bad would happen from eating the gingerbread now, but she hadn’t been able to think logically when she saw that piece of gingerbread in his hand. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I just . . . ”

  “What did you think would happen?” he asked, returning his gaze to her.

  She shook her head. “Nothing, nothing. I apologize. I overreacted.” Now that the moment had passed, she felt a new fear. She wasn’t sure about trusting a stranger in the woods. She carefully reached for her dagger and drew it from its sheath.

  “I’ve never seen anyone else here before,” he said, watching her cautiously. “I didn’t think anyone else even knew it existed.”

  “I haven’t been here for five years.”

  “And why are you here now?” He kept his eyes on her, hardly blinking.

  Gretel’s inner voice, the one she could sometimes hear when the pain was quiet, suggested that at this moment he was not the dangerous one. She lowered her dagger but did not put it away. “That is my business.”

  “Fair enough.” He gestured toward the knife. “I’m not going to harm you. I only came here to think.” Then he pointed to a long log bench near the edge of the clearing. “Do you mind if I sit?”

  Gretel shook her head and gestured an invitation.

  “I made that bench. Decided if I was going to keep coming here, I needed a spot to sit.” Sorrow appeared in his eyes again, but he said nothing more.

  In spite of herself, Gretel was curious. She followed him and sat on the bench too, but as far from him as she could. She leaned back. “It’s comfortable.”

  “Yes. A must for thinking.” He stared out into the woods while his hand moved to touch a bag at his side. Gretel tightened her grip on her dagger, but he didn’t seem to notice. He drew a wooden box from the bag, about the size of a round of bread. His finger traced a pattern painted on it, a strange shape like a red waterskin with several drinking spouts. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t place it. “She wanted me to be a murderer,” he said, almost to himself.

  “I am already a murderer,” she responded, surprised into honesty as she stared at the chimney that held both an oven and a grave.

  He looked at her, snapped briefly out of his thoughts. He didn’t seem afraid. “Really?”

  She nodded once. “Here, in this place. I killed to save my life and the life of my brother.”

  A moment of silence, then, “Tell me,” he said.

  Only once had she ever told even part of this tale, to her father, the night that she and Hansel had returned from the forest. Since then she’d held it close and guarded it in her heart, afraid of what the telling would do to her, of how the hearer would react. Yet here, in the shadow of the gingerbread house, with a stranger her heart told her she could trust—here it flowed from her lips.

  The young man listened as the words poured from her, revealing each little morsel of the world she had lived in every day of her life since they’d come home—the pain at her father’s betrayal and cowardice, the fierce but terrifying relief of the witch’s death, and the news of her stepmother’s death as well. The unbearable guilt of killing, no matter how justified.

  She cast out the words, the feelings, with an energy that at first made her burn with their power. She had never said these words this way before, with the freedom to tell the truth. Who cared what this stranger thought, this stranger whose story held darkness too? If once she could say it all, without care to soften the words, to hide the scars, who knew what might happen?

  She told him of the unchanging years of forcing herself into numbness, of hiding from everyone—her family, the townspeople, and especially herself. The more she told, the more the rage quieted, the more she found relief in the words. They slowed, they soothed her. They reformed themselves almost with a will of their own. They began to feel like a different story altogether. A story where she wasn’t the villain any longer. She wasn’t the victim. She was just Gretel, someone new, someone transformed, someone—maybe—free.

  She knew, instinctively, that it was a story she would have to tell herself again and again. But for the first time it existed, and that felt like the budding of hope.

  Finally she fell silent, and the two of them stared ahead into the beginnings of dusk falling over the house.

  “You are not a murderer,” he said firmly. When she didn’t respond, he continued. “You did it to save yourself and your brother. No one can call that murder.” He pointed to the house. “Think of all the other children you may have saved too. Who knows how many she would have killed.”

  She bit her lip in thought. “I hadn’t thought of them. Maybe I did save them.” She smiled, and the idea of those children, safe now, took root in her soul. She breathed deeply—her first unfettered breath in five years—and though the scent of spices on the air called to her fears, she didn’t let them overwhelm her.

  “I had never told anyone all of this.” She tilted her head to the side. “I owe you much. I think maybe more than I can repay.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but she waved her hand to stop him.

  “No, I know you weren’t looking for payment, but I owe you nonetheless. I can’t do much, but I can do one thing, the same thing you did for me.” She turned to face him fully. “Tell me your story.”

  He still held the box in his hands, and now he opened it. Within it lay a darkened, bloody object that matched the picture on the box—a heart; that was why she recognized it. She looked into his eyes, hers widening again. Had she been wrong, after all, to trust him? “I thought you said you were only meant to be a murderer.”

  Quickly he shook his head. “No, no, it’s not human. It’s a pig’s heart. But I must take it to my queen and pretend it is human, or she will hunt the owner of the heart she really wants.”

  The young man’s tale was nearly as mad as her own. He told of a coldhearted queen in the neighboring kingdom who wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the land. He told of a girl who threatened that beauty and of the queen’s command to take the young woman into the forest and kill her. Gretel shuddered. She wondered, would it be better to be killed outright in the forest or, as Gretel had been, merely left to die?

  Either way, the man couldn’t do it. He’d let the girl go, showing her a way to safety. He’d slaughtered a pig and taken its heart. He was on his way back to deceive the queen.

  “I loved her,” he said softly, closing the lid on the heart.

  “The girl?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No. The queen.”

  The words rang for a moment in silence.

  “I loved her from afar of course. For too long I loved her. I tried to pretend she wasn’t as she seemed. I came out here to pretend, to forget, so I could go back and be her servant again.” He laughed without mirth. “But I can’t pretend anymore.”

  She knew too well that pain.

  He shrugged, trying to lighten the mood. “My mother was right when she told me I should acquire better taste in women.”

  Gretel smiled. “Next time pick someone who doesn’t like to kill.” She blushed and looked away.

  “I’ll do that.” He chuckled ruefully.

  “You saved a child without having to kill anyone. I envy you that.”

  He reached his hand out to comfort her but pulled back.

  “If your queen finds out you tricked her, she’ll kill you.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Run away.”

  He hesitated a moment, staring into the distance. “Maybe.”

  “Leave. Start so
mewhere else,” Gretel urged, uncertain why her throat tightened at the thought of his danger. “You owe her nothing.”

  “No, but I owe the girl. I have to at least deliver the heart. Then? Then we’ll see.”

  The noisy rustle of a sudden gust of wind through the trees broke the spell woven by the mutual telling of tales. They both looked around for what seemed like the first time in hours. Darkness was falling quickly now.

  “I must be on my way back,” the man said, reluctantly.

  She rose. “I’ll be going too.”

  He looked straight into her eyes. “Maybe we’ll meet in the woods again someday.”

  “Maybe. On a better day for us both.”

  “This day has turned out far better than I expected when it began.” He stretched out his hand to take hers in a gentle grip. “Thank you, Gretel.”

  What could she say to this man to whom she had broken her silence? She had said so much already. In the end she could only nod, her throat clogged with emotion. He turned away, and she watched him go, following his shape through the forest until he was beyond her sight.

  A moment later, she looked toward the house. She had lied; she wasn’t going anywhere yet. There was one thing left to do here.

  She steeled herself and walked to the door.

  Her fingers trembled as she reached toward the door latch. She sucked in a breath, and the scent of sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg overpowered her senses and dragged her away again, back to that time in the gingerbread house, when she wondered every day if she would once again be able to convince the witch that Hansel was too thin to eat for supper.

  She shuddered, then shook her head to dislodge the memory. That’s all it was, a memory. The house held no power any longer, no witch to harm her. Still she hesitated, her fingers a breath away from the latch. She swallowed and tried to breathe through her mouth, but even then the scent, so strong this close to the house, threatened to pull her under again.