Hansel Without Gretel

A European fairy tale, as retold by French colonialists around a campfire in East Africa. This story was captured by tape recorder and transcribed.

Now believing that whatever was happening inside of him was necessary to his transformation, further convinced that those sensations concentrating within the core of him were for his benefit, he shut his eyes and let his mind wander through the jungle tracks of a fairy-tale Gomorrah, trudging through moon-lit vales in sweltering heat, slogging through swamps of blue-damped fog, and, his heart beating faster for the unusual demands put on it, plodding past an ancient volcanic fumarole, around which the mythic Morrah gathered with their z’ombiz, there to practice unspeakable rites. He dragged his bare feet and scuffed his pink toes at every instance where he saw yellow eyes glare at him from the dark, every time something shook the drizzled underbrush or lurched against the trunk of some majestically tall giant and, most emphatically, whenever he heard a macqueman’s conspiratorial whisper carry on the night breeze. Breathing hard, harder than before, he began to climb up one side of a massive tree trunk that had fallen across the track. Slipping and sliding on its mantle of moss so that swards of it tore under the weight of his bare feet, he stopped in a crouch at the midpoint, preparatory to sliding down the other side.

 

Fully exposed for a moment in shimmering moonlight, he stared down at a well-worn path in a candy-tinseled glen, cheerily lit with sugar-glazed lamps fluted in the shape of honeysuckle blossoms. While portentous clouds scudded across the luminous round face of the moon, he followed the path with his eyes as it wound under the gentle light of those lamps through cultivated fields of nickle bars, emblazoned with exotic names across their paper jackets, and over a high meadow of penny candies, rustling eagerly in their cellophane wraps. When the clouds finally covered the moon in a dark aspect, leaving only the muted light of the lamps, further dimmed by the erratic flight of licorice-black moths encircling them, he strained his eyes to see what lay beyond the footpath, past the candy-appled trees and marble-cake hedges that bordered it most of the way, past the chocolate waterfall spilling from between the vari-colored scoops of an ice cream hillock, past even the lollipop footbridge over a bubbling soda-pop pond which floated a happy family of tri-colored, candycorn duckies...past all that to shuddering dread in a dark hollow beyond. With a squint of the eyes, he unraveled and untangled the darker weave of shadows in that forbidding hollow until, nearly aghast, he exposed the low-eaved gingerbread house, squatting in wait under its cotton-candy thatch. He gawked at it, knowing what it was, who lived there, what happened to little boys who ventured too close to the waffle-ironed door of that ominous house.

 

As suddenly, lights came on in the kitchen, flickering shadows across the windows from a fire deep inside.

 

Spellbound, he stared at the better lit of those sugar-glazed panes, afraid of what he would see there but too morbidly fascinated to turn away, staring as if comatose until he saw the hump-backed silhouette of the witch-hag delineated across it. Losing his balance at the sight of her, which vaguely reminded him of a horror deep inside ~ a mystery too unnerving to unravel or untangle for the darker weave of shadows, too hopeless to weft the warp and warp the weft of the damaged self inside ~ he lost his footing and, toppling backwards with his feet kicking up, fell to his backside. With a visible bounce and an audible thump, he began to slide down the cambering slope, skidding barebacked towards the candy-tinseled glen below, deep inside.

 

Clawing his fingers through the damp moss, he found the hidden bark beneath; digging his nails into the wood, he desperately combed the slits and fissures for a handhold. Succeeding only in crumbling off chunks and chips and slivers of bark that, let loose, rolled or cartwheeled past him, he watched them all disappear, simply blinking out of sight, where the trunk curved in upon itself. Himself gathering speed towards the brink where he would also be launched into free-fall, deep inside the candy-tinseled glen, he backpedaled on the slippery moss, tearing up huge swaths with his tiny feet while his pudgy fingers furrowed the mat behind. With thick ribbons of moss gathering at his wrists throughout, reminders of his failure to secure even the smallest of handholds, he yet came to a virtual stop, safe somehow, though his feet and shins had already gone over the side, dangling in air.

 

Finding himself anchored to gnarled burls and broken boughs by those same thick ribbons of moss, he leaned his head up, hardly believing his luck. Staring out into the farthest distance where the gingerbread house toadied in the dark (where the witch inside went about her solitary business, leisurely stirring the cauldron, adding a little of this with a smidge of wolfsbane and some of that with an eye of newt, then a little more of this and some more of that), he caught his breath, which had escaped him at the beginning of his fall, and sniffed the scent of simmering butterscotch, as if it had been sent wafting across the landscape in search of little boys. Though his stomach churned in rebellious want for the smooth thick candy and his eyes flickered with imagined ladles of deliciously hot butterscotch spilling into his open mouth, he gritted his teeth to a dry screech of enamel, determined to resist the witch-call.

 

Opting instead to test the strength of his bindings, whether they would hold him when he turned to hands and knees, hopefully to crawl back up, he twisted one of his wrists round only to hear the sputtering rip of moss shredding. He stopped wriggling, knowing any more strain could tear whatever remained of the moss and send him hurtling down below, deep inside. Holding his breath, lest even the added weight of air in the lower reaches of his lungs should launch him over the side, deep inside, he stayed stock still, wondering how much longer he could remain there if no other solution presented itself, waiting and wondering until a licorice moth floated up from below, flitting above and between the gossamer swirls of butterscotch mist, searching for a place to land, making for his big toe. With the mind of the man, he frantically calculated the physics of how much flex to apply to that toe in order to counteract the displacement created by the moth; then, having accomplished that much, he factored in the flex itself with however much more weight that added past the recalibrated fulcrum of his foot. Convinced that the displacement of the moth could not be offset by any such action of his big toe, he blew at the moth with whatever puff of air he could spare from the top of his lungs, trying to deter the creature, creating vortices in the butterscotch mist to force it to land elsewhere.

 

Against the disturbing wind of his breath, the moth executed a downstroke, nearly touching the tips of its wings against each other in an effort to keep above the current, to avoid being blown topsy-turvy in helter-skelter; with that downstroke, it created a vortex that spun the gossamer strands of butterscotch mist into a swirl, the outer filaments of which, when lighting against that very same toe (whether due to exceptional weight in that witch world or in his own expectation of such weight), tore the remaining moss from his wrists and sent him whirling down below.

 

He tumbled head over heels. Tearing through candied verdure that grew out of that side of the trunk, he grasped at jelly-roll burls and latched onto jelly-bean sprigs, all in an effort to break his fall, succeeding at most in tearing out the sprigs and raining a colorful spray of jelly beans into the brake of ferns below. Spinning and turning, head over heels, he flew in air, all chubby arms and pudgy legs, until he swished into the depths of those taffy ferns. Dropping past that verdant canopy, he crashed into a silvery bush of jingling peppermint canes, shaking hundreds of those loose. In a ricochet of arms and legs, he fell through the snarl of branches and, thumped here and there, had the breath knocked out of him. When it seemed he would never stop falling, never stop careening against those silvery branches, he stopped, finding himself sitting straight up, if in a bouncy wobble, with a thick cushion of sponge-cake underneath him. Disoriented but otherwise unhurt, he gazed about him from within a flurry of peppermint canes, which continued to rain down on him.

 

A bare few bounced off to the outer edges of the impact zone, strewn about, unbroken; but most of the peppermint canes, when striking against each other or bopping the top of his head, shattered, splintered, slivered. In breaking into ever-smaller pieces, the shards tinkled in ever-higher pitch, vibrating the ambient mists of butterscotch, unsettling the air far across that candied landscape until...growing insidiously shrill in tones too strident to be ignored, they reached the witch’s ear.

 

She perked her head up from the steaming cauldron, her scraggly eyebrows raising, her morbid mind racing with a yoke of impressions: ‘how big the boy; how old the meat.’ Wavering as to whether she should add a pinch more of this or a bigger dash of that, since every step of her recipe required the split-timing infusion of ingredients into the pot, she yet swivelled her head in the direction of the window and, tipping her witch’s hat with her bone-thin hand, poofed out of sight, reappearing in the blink of an eye across the room. Pressing her crone face against the sugar glaze of her window pane, now melting under the vaporous heat of her breath, she studied the winding path, following it back up the peanut-brittle bricks of its many curves until, her dark eyes flashing wide in wonder and exultation, she spotted him underneath the peppermint bush.

 

He spied her there at the window, with her cone hat cocked over her brow, shadowing the ravenous insanity in her eyes. His young heart pounding pulses up his throat with the blood-curdling tales of the Witch-Hag, made more vivid now that he was actually there at her gingerbread house, he gave a sudden start when the lights unexpectedly flickered out, leaving him in the dark, prey to worse imaginings. Though the honeysuckle lamps came on again, almost instantly, he leaned forward and gawked in amazement, little believing that he could have lost sight of her so quickly. Desperately scanning the interior of the gingerbread house, at least those parts visible to him through its many windows, he traveled his eyes several times across a discordant fuzz of disfocus along the peanut-brittle path, only to realize at last that ~ somehow, without even a flutter of the drapes, in less than an instant really ~ she had exited the house. Shocked that she had made it that far, that she was that much closer, he instinctively drew back, only to find himself squeezed up against the trunk of the toppled giant, though his heels continued to dig into the sponge-cake turf, pushing and tearing.

 

‘How big the boy?’ she ruminated, down on the path.

 

Breathing hard, harder still, hyperventilating so much that he grew nauseous on the fumes of butterscotch, he frantically squelched up against the fallen tree in a frenzy of wild imaginings, seeing her scuttling at breakneck speed towards him, her mouth open, yellow fangs exposed...before he realized that, instead, she was perfectly still on the lollipop footbridge, that she was completely immobile, virtually a part of the rooted landscape.

 

‘How old the meat?’ she fretted.

 

Thinking that Amaga had been foiled in her nefarious predations, that she had been frozen by some fairy godparent watching over him, he breathed a little easier. Leaning forward, he rocked himself onto hands and knees. As he tried to fathom how it was even possible that the witch had already rounded the playground teeter-totter by the soda pop pond (since that landmark was as much as a third of the distance and the lamps had flickered out for just a second), he blinked. In that moment of opening his eyes again, he saw that he’d lost sight of her once more. Traveling his gaze along the path, he spotted her again, this time as close as the merry-go-round and, surprisingly, in the same attitude as before: the weight of her hunchback buttressed against her crooked cane, one withered hand atop the other.

 

‘How big the boy?’ she brooded. ‘How old the meat?’

 

Seeing the witch totally motionless under his gaze, not so much as breathing under the glow of those yellow lamps, he scrutinized her for any sign of life, searching for the slightest sway of her body, just so much as the flutter of her robes, even the creep of her shadow across the peanut-brittle bricks...then gasped in shock when the lights strobed out, leaving him in the dark, completely alone, lolling on the wet tongue of his monstrously jawed fears. When the lights came on again ~ just as quickly, within the second even ~ he gawked in disbelief, with child-sweat now beading on his brow, on seeing that she had traveled past the playground slide and was now as close as the marble-cake hedge, there underneath the candy-apple trees. Reflexively, he gulped and, before he could stop himself, blinked. Knowing that at every instance when he lost sight of her, she appeared closer still, he forcibly opened his eyes, seeing that his heedlessness had brought her as close as the playground swings by the chocolate waterfall, that velvety rich flow between vari-colored scoops of ice cream which, viewed only from the corner of his eyes, still drew salivary want along his back teeth and hunger pangs down into his stomach.

 

‘How big.... How old....’

 

Since she was completely still, simply hunched up against her crooked cane, he warily got to his feet and pressed a hand behind him against the hoary trunk. While keeping her fixed under his gaze, he guided himself away from underneath the candy-cane bush, at one point brushing his hand against a pair of licorice moths which had settled on the trunk, sending them up in air, fluttering on the fringe of his vision. Because the witch was so much closer, close enough to make out her features, he furrowed his brow and, in lurid curiosity sparked of fairy tales which invariably closed on happy endings, strained his eyes, focusing on her face. Noting with the mind of the man that there was a vague similarity in her features to a composite of all women he’d known, there in the obscurity of thirty and more years of dissolute living, even as the mind of the child forced a wretched comparison to Mindy duQuesne ~ if older, more depraved ~ he suddenly lost sight of everything, as if all the lights had gone out, blacked out...since he certainly hadn’t blinked. As quickly as he realized that a pair of moths had each settled on his eyes, he brushed them off and, readjusting his focus, saw the witch now planted in the cultivated fields of nickle bars, just beyond the high meadow of penny candies in their cellophane wraps. Knowing that the next time he blinked or the lights went out or some other impossible event occurred to obstruct his vision, she would be upon him in the full horror of the Witch-Hag, the Amaga of the BaUtuu, he crumpled down onto the sponge-cake turf and, his knuckles rubbing against the moth tickle at his eyes, began to cry.

 

"Little boy," she croaked, her withered hand pushing back the blond forelock from his brow, "how old...."

Author's Note

Don't worry about the dissimilarities with the original story, which was simply a launch pad for a more relevant story of these people. Concentrate on how the story is told, where it seems to hang, when it should do more than it does, etc.