There were fewer animals in the forest these days. Gretel heard no birds in song. She saw no small rodents darting in and out of the underbrush. No deer nosed the stands of fern.
And then, early one morning, a hunting party—a duke and his household—entered the wood. They blew their horns and their hounds bayed and barked. Gretel feared for herself. But more than that, she feared for Hansel. She crept into the hut and stayed there all day, hoping he would come to her.
The dogs and huntsmen scoured the forest for some sign of animal life. To their surprise, they found none. All day they searched, and all day they found nothing. The duke became angry and impatient. And then, at dusk, he saw a strange, hairy, hunched creature peering out from behind a large tree. “There!” he bellowed, and instantly the dogs were in pursuit.
Hansel fled through the wood, thrilling at the terror of the chase. The dogs bayed at his heels; the horns sounded all around him. He dodged this way and that, panting, growling, laughing, howling. What fun! he thought. What tremendous, terrifying fun!
At last, he came to the edge of a brook. Across the way, the duke sat astride his horse, his bowstring pulled tight, an arrow nocked and aimed at Hansel. The animal-boy stared curiously at the sweating, red-faced man holding the strange bent stick. Then there was a snap and a hiss like a snake. An arrow flew through the air—a straight, simple harbinger of death. Hansel watched it all the way to his chest, to exactly where his heart was. It buried itself there. He felt a searing bolt of pain and fell to the forest floor.
The huntsmen tied the strange, dead animal to a pole and carried him triumphantly back to the duke’s manor.
The next morning, Gretel ran through the wood looking for her brother. For a long time she found nothing but broken branches and paw prints. Then, at last, she came to the brook and saw the earth stained a copper red, and the rocks at the water’s edge spattered with blood.
She ran to the tree with the face in it. “My brother has been killed!” she cried. “He has been killed!” But the tree would not speak to her. Gretel fell to the ground and sobbed and sobbed. She was alone, in a great forest, in a dark tale. Her father had tried to kill her. She’d been nearly eaten by the baker woman, and had cut off her own finger. And now her brother, Hansel, was dead.
She would not stay in that forest, not now. “I need to go back to people,” she said, wiping tears from her face. “To grown-ups.”
As she left the Wood of Life, she saw a bird alighting in a tree nearby. Soon she could hear the sound of birdsong again. But it only made it hurt more. They only came back, she knew, because Hansel was dead.
We’re at one of those places in the story—and they happen in nearly all stories, of any kind—when things seem to be really, really bad. When it feels like, if things get much worse, you won’t be able to listen anymore.
When I was little, I used to call this part “the sad part.” I knew it would happen in every story, and I knew it always ended eventually, and I would repeat, “This is the sad part this is the sad part” over and over until it was done.
And so, as I was piecing these stories together, I came to this part. And I realized that this was “the sad part.” I repeated this to myself again and again, to try to make it not feel so terrible.
But it didn’t help. It never does. It still hurts when a character you love dies, and another is left all alone in the world.
Nevertheless, I will tell you, as I always tell myself, that things will get better. Much, much better. I promise.
Just not quite yet.
A Smile as Red as Blood
Once upon a time, a little girl named Gretel walked down a wide, lonely road all by herself. She was as sad as a little girl can be, for the person whom she loved most in all the world was gone.
After a time, she came to a small village that stood in the shadow of another great wood. This wood was as big as the last one, but no two woods could have been more different. Where the Wood of Life had been bright, inviting, and alive, this one was dark, forbidding, and dead. So forbidding that almost no one went in. And exactly no one came out.
It was called the Schwarzwald—the Wood of Darkness.
That’s SHVAHTS-vault. In case you were wondering.
But the little village that stood near the Schwarzwald was not dark at all. No, no: It was ringed by trees that, when Gretel arrived, had just slipped into their golden robes of autumn. Laughter was in the air, as was the smell of wood burning in fireplaces and apple cider frothing with cinnamon.
Gretel walked down the town’s single road, looking in the warm windows of the little houses, wishing that someone might invite her inside for some food, cider, and a little human comfort.
But all the doors remained closed to Gretel. She was very tired, and very, very lonely, and on the verge of giving up. She sat down and all her troubles overwhelmed her. She began to cry.
Presently, the door to one of the houses opened, and a silver-haired woman came out. She went up to the little girl crying by the side of the road and asked her her name, and why she was all alone. Gretel told her that she and her brother had long ago run away from home, but that recently her brother had been killed and she didn’t know where to go or what to do. The woman reached out to hold her, and Gretel fell into her arms and buried her face in the woman’s neck. She took Gretel into her home and washed her and picked the knots from her hair and gave her some old, but clean, clothes.
Some weeks went by. Gretel had no thought now of where else she should go, or what else she should do. For what sense did it make to do anything now that Hansel was gone?
And that is how Gretel came to live with the silver-haired widow in the little village.
Soon Gretel was just another child there, and, though she carried a great sorrow around with her, she put on a brave face. It was the time of the harvest, and everyone worked all day long, including Gretel. In the evenings, when the autumn air became cool, the villagers would gather in and in front of the town tavern and drink and laugh and converse, while the children ran about in their games. But Gretel had no heart to play. So instead she sat by the grown-ups and listened to their talk.
There was one grown-up in particular whom Gretel liked listening to. He was a young man, cheerful and kind. And he was very handsome. He had long black hair and green eyes flecked with gold that seemed to dance in the light. And it seemed to Gretel that the young man liked her, too, for whenever he saw her looking at him, he would smile with lips of deep red, before she, blushing, could turn away.
So she sat near him always and marveled at his easy jokes and his careless laughter and his wonderful eyes. Occasionally he would leave the grown-ups in the tavern and go out among the children. He would tease them gently, and lift them up, and all of them, particularly the girls, loved him.
Sometimes a child would bring to the handsome young man a toy that was broken. It would be a porcelain doll with a finger that had cracked off or a wooden king that had lost its head. The handsome young man would draw from his pocket a tattered piece of twine. He would hold the toy between his knees and tie the twine around the broken place. When he unwound the twine, the toy was as good as new. The children would cry aloud and clap their hands, and the handsome young man would smile. Then he would go back to the tavern with the grown-ups.