Gretel and Me
by Beth Sherman
On day one, I heard a noise. Louder than my mice, Esmerelda and Dorothy. A murmuring really, like a brook splashing over rocks on a cloudy day. Words floating on water. I hadn’t heard words in 55 years. Trail breadcrumbs witch candy. It comes back to you, the listening, if you concentrate hard enough. They were dismantling my house, piece by piece. Taking things. My home is all I have. Without it, my body shrivels and fades. I put the boy in a cage. Don’t judge. I have my reasons.
On day two, Gretel and I played catch the gumdrops. Boysenberry, blueberry, cherry, gooseberry. We threw them in the air and they dissolved on our tongues. A lovely child – flaxen braids, curious lips, trusting eyes. She reminded me of me before.
On day six, we baked a plum cake. Talked about our favorite things. Hers was dancing between raindrops, mine was baking coconut cream pie and stuffing the entire thing in my mouth.
On day twelve, we baked Red Velvet cake. While measuring sugar and flour we shared our biggest fears. Hers was going hungry, mine was stepping foot outside the house.
On day nine, we baked Black Forest cake. After whipping cream for the icing, we discussed our hopes for the future. She said she wanted to grow up, meet a man, get married, and have four children. I said I wanted to be left alone.
On day sixteen, we baked upside down cake and traded secrets. She said she never liked her stepmother. I said I never got undressed till after dark.
On day twenty-three, I told her how I used to be pretty as a princess, cherished by all who knew me until one day walking alone in the woods a woodcutter happened by and grabbed me by the chin. We baked a gingerbread man and ate him, starting with his raisin eyes, ending with his crumbly toes.
On day twenty-nine, I decided to let them go. Gretel missed the boy. She’d been feeding him secretly. She loved him. There was that. I wanted them to taste my Mandel bread before they left. I opened the oven door, peered inside to check whether the bread had risen. Felt someone shove me in. Dying didn’t hurt. Had happened to me once before in the woods. That familiar pain. Shame. Flesh turning to bone. Blood in the ashes.
Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her stories have been published in Portland Review, Blue Mountain Review, Tangled Locks Journal, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Sou’wester and elsewhere. Her work will be featured in The Best Microfictions 2024. She’s also a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and multiple Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached at @bsherm36 or https://www.bethsherman.site/
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Gretel and Me”? When I recently reread the story of “Hansel and Gretel” in An Illustrated Treasury of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I noticed a few unusual things that didn’t jibe with my memories of the fairy tale. One was that the children were deliberately eating the witch’s house. “Hansel so liked the taste of the roof, he broke off a big chunk, and Gretel took out a whole windowpane and sat down on the ground to enjoy it.” I’d always envisioned the kids as innocent victims, preyed upon by a malevolent crone. But now I was beginning to see her differently – someone whose home was of the utmost importance, whose house was under attack, and who never ever left it. I asked myself why that might be. The other thing that caught my eye was that after the Witch locked Hansel in a cage, Gretel kept her company for four weeks. That’s an awfully long time. I wondered what kinds of things the two of them did together during that month. What did they say to one another? Could a bond have formed that neither expected? The ease and nonchalance with which they killed her haunted me. “How horribly the witch screeched as she burned to death.” Neither of the children felt remorseful about the murder. Indeed, right they pushed her into the oven, they looted the witch’s house, stealing boxes of pearls and precious stones (another detail I hadn’t remembered). Then they went home to live happily ever after without giving the witch another thought. For me, the Grimm’s origin story raised more questions than it answered. Chief among them was how the witch became the woman the children encountered when they began dismantling her house and whether or not, after all those years, she was capable of connecting to another human being, whether she felt worthy of love. I was attracted to the idea of telling a compressed version of the story because it seems to echo the witch herself, whose world has shrunk to the corners of her candy dwelling.
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