Suddenly, a crash rang out above. The woman’s eyes went wide, and, without another word, she pushed Gretel behind an enormous stack of dirty pots and scampered back to her cauldron. At that very moment, the handsome young man with the green eyes and smile as red as blood appeared at the foot of the steps.
He had a girl by the hair.
Dear Readers:
I’m sorry for what follows.
He threw the girl on the oaken table, and from a nearby cupboard produced a filthy iron cage. Then he reached his hand into the girl’s mouth until his arm was buried deep in her throat. Slowly, painfully, and with great struggle from the girl, he pulled forth a beautiful white dove. The dove fought the young man as he shoved it in the filthy cage and slammed the door shut.
The girl’s body was still.
Now you might want to close your eyes.
He lifted an ax that hung on the wall, and Gretel, peering through a gap between a filthy pot and a filthier pan, watched her handsome, wonderful, funny friend hack the girl’s body into bits and toss each piece into the boiling cauldron. His blunt butcher’s knife rose and fell, rose and fell. He licked the blood from his hands and sent piece after piece sailing into the pot.
Each piece, that is, save one.
On the girl’s left hand there was a lovely golden ring, inlaid with rubies, red as rubies can be. He tried to remove the ring so that it would not ruin the stew, but it wouldn’t come off. Finally, in a rage, he hacked the finger clean off her hand and hurled it across the room. Gretel watched, dumbstruck, as it tumbled through the air, over the enormous pile of pots and pans that she was hiding behind, and landed squarely in her lap, ring and all.
Somehow, she did not scream.
The young man picked up the cage and started for the stairs. “I’ll be back in a moment, Mother,” he said. “See that my stew is ready!”
As soon as he’d gone, the old woman ducked behind the pile of pots and pans. “Go, my dear!” she hissed at Gretel. “Run away and never come back!” The little girl needed no further encouragement. She fled up the stairs and out the door. But she came to a stop on the steps of the house. The rain was falling fat and wet and hard now, and the ashen path was utterly washed away. Even the lentils would be buried in the muck that was made by the heavy rain. Gretel had no way to get home.
But then she noticed something incredible. The lentils had sprouted. In the little time she’d been in the house, green shoots had come up from the wet soil, and now a pale green path marked her way back through the wood. She followed it as fast as her feet would carry her.
When Gretel arrived at the widow’s house, she went straight to her room and locked herself in.
The widow came to the door, leaned her head against the door frame, and asked Gretel if she was all right. Gretel didn’t answer.
She had her face buried deep in her pillow. As if it were still before her eyes, she could see the young man’s bright blade, slicing through the air toward the innocent girl on the table. And yet it wasn’t the young man’s blade at all. It was the blade of her father’s sword, and the innocent girl was Gretel, her white neck exposed to the cold, flashing steel. She saw the young man’s face and her father’s face, as if they were one.
“Are there no good grown-ups anywhere?” she cried.
She wished she had her brother beside her. But he was gone. Dead.
And it’s my fault, she thought, and suddenly she realized that she had thought this all along. It’s my fault. We shouldn’t have run away from home. We shouldn’t have eaten the walls of that house. And I shouldn’t have let Hansel go into the woods alone—not once, not twice, and certainly not three times! Her whole body throbbed. All the grown-ups want to kill me! I don’t blame them! What is wrong with me? Her little body shook. Why am I so bad?
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” said a voice.
Gretel looked up with a start.
She was alone in the room. So who had said that? She looked under the door. The widow had gone away. She turned and faced the window.
There, sitting on the window frame, was a black raven. She gazed at it curiously.
He tapped his black beak against the glass. And then he said, “Do you mind if we come in?”
Gretel wiped her face and advanced to the window. “We?”
“Yes, my brothers and I.”
Gretel opened the window and in fluttered three ravens, as black as could be.
“You shouldn’t tell her she’s stupid,” said the second raven to the first. “It isn’t polite.”
“Even if it is true,” said the third.
The first raven cleared his throat. “We happened to be flying by, dear girl, when we noticed that you were upset. We felt bad.”
“Personally responsible,” added the second.
“Accidentally complicit,” said the third.
Gretel, who had had a very long day already, plopped down on her bed and stared.
“You see,” the first raven continued, “all the misfortune that you and your poor brother have experienced is really the result of a ... well, I guess you’d say, an indiscreet conversation that the three of us had.” He cocked his head apologetically.
Gretel continued to stare.
“Indiscreet,” the second whispered.
“What about it?” the first replied.
The third rolled his eyes. “Indiscreet, dear girl, means we shouldn’t have been talking about what we were talking about where we were talking about it.”
“Oh, that was helpful,” said the second. And then, “Why don’t we just explain it to her?”
And so, once the three ravens had settled their feathers and found comfortable perches on the windowsill, they told Gretel the whole story, from the very beginning. They told her about her grandfather’s dying wish, and how her father had found the portrait anyway, and then how he had stolen her mother ...
“He did what?” Gretel interrupted.
“Moving right along,” said the second raven.
Then they told her about their indiscreet conversation, and how her father’s servant, Faithful Johannes, had heard it and used it to save her parents’ lives.
“You see,” the first raven continued, “any wedding between your parents was destined to be cursed.”
“The three of us know all about destiny,” interrupted the second raven.
“It’s sort of what we do,” said the third.
“They were destined to be cursed,” the first began, “though what they did to you children ...”
“That goes a little beyond the scope of the curse, I’d say,” finished the second.
The third raven added quickly, “But it certainly isn’t your fault.”
“It’s probably ours,” said the first magnanimously. “Had we kept our black beaks shut, none of this would have happened.”
Gretel scrunched up her face. “Because my parents would have died before Hansel and I were born?”
“Exactly!”
“That doesn’t seem much better,” Gretel pointed out.
“Hmm,” said the first. “I guess that’s right.”
“No,” Gretel said. “It’s my fault. If Hansel and I hadn’t run away from home, he wouldn’t be dead. And we never would have killed the baker woman, and the father never would have wished his sons into swallows, and—”