A Tale Dark and Grimm

barrels to keep a whole village in drink for a whole year.

The apples and the wine and the carts and the oxen were all gifts from the two villages, of course. You see, after burying Johannes and making a little headstone for him—Faitful was all it said— Hansel had gone on to the village of the golden apples, where he told them of the mouse gnawing at the roots of their tree. They killed it, and the apples began to grow immediately, and so they gave him as a gift the thousand golden apples and the cart and the quiet, obedient, incredibly large ox. Next he had gone to the village of the wine, where he told them of the frog stopping up their fountain. Once they had killed it, the wine began to flow again, and they gave Hansel as a gift the barrels of wine, the cart, and another quiet, obedient, incredibly large ox.

He named the oxen Ivy and Betty—which is strange, because oxen are boys.

That doesn’t come into the story much. I just thought I’d tell you.

So Hansel, having bested the Devil, and saved the two villages, and now leading a fortune in wine and gold, set out for the Kingdom of Grimm. It wasn’t hard to get directions, either. Everyone could point you toward a kingdom where a dragon was.

But Hansel’s progress was slow. For he stopped at every village, every hamlet, every house and hovel he passed along the way, to ask if they had seen or heard anything of his sister, Gretel. But no one had.

“You mean Gretel, the old woman?”

“No, my sister.”

“Gretel, my sister’s baby?”

“No, my sister. And she’s not a baby.”

“I have a goat named Gretel.”

“No!”

He may have had a fortune in gold and wine behind him, and two obedient oxen to follow him wherever he went, but Hansel’s heart was as black and heavy as it had ever been, and his feet dragged in the mud and the ice. Without his sister, he did not want to go home. Or face a dragon. Or face his parents.

Gretel stood at the door of the tavern, staring down the road. Coming toward her were two enormous oxcarts, each capped, like miniature mountains, with snow. Walking out in front of them was someone with dark hair—a small, dejected someone, whose feet dragged as he walked. There was something about the someone that made Gretel want to wait for him.

As the carts drew nearer, her heart caught in her throat. With her fine, ocean-blue eyes, Gretel could now make out the someone’s face.

She cried aloud and tore off for him down the road.

As Hansel drew closer to the kingdom, he seemed to see Gretel everywhere. In bakeries. In upstairs windows. Going into outhouses (which resulted in some pretty embarrassing moments, as you can imagine). Just up ahead, there was a girl standing at the doorway of a tavern, and, had he not known he was just seeing things, he would have sworn that that girl was Gretel, too.

Then the girl was no longer standing at the door of the tavern. She was sprinting toward him, her long blond hair flying out behind her. Hansel blinked. He stopped dragging his feet. He ran.

Hansel and Gretel came together like two magnets meeting, like meteors that have been screaming through space toward this one moment of collision. They met in the middle with a bang, and instantly their feet went out from under them on the slick roadway. They landed, hard, in a puddle of icy mud.

They stared at each other, sitting in the puddle.

Lost and then found.

Dead and then alive.

Covered in mud.

Sitting on their behinds in three inches of filthy water.

And they began to laugh. They threw their arms around each other and laughed until tears streamed down their faces. They sat, freezing, muddy, in a puddle in the middle of the road, with the gray sky overhead, and their parents’ castle waiting just a few miles away. They sat there and held each other until their arms ached.

“Where have you been?” Hansel asked as they pulled themselves out of the puddle.

“How are you alive?” Gretel asked at just the same moment.

So they climbed up on an oxcart and told each other about every single thing that had happened since the day of the hunt in the Lebenwald—and some things twice.

And as they talked and laughed and gasped and talked some more, Ivy and Betty drew them closer and closer to home.

Hansel and Gretel are coming to the hardest part now.

It’s true that they’ve been nearly eaten by a cannibalistic baker woman; and they’ve talked to the fiery sun and to the child-eating moon and to the kind stars; and they’ve journeyed to the Crystal Mountain; and that Gretel has cut off her own finger, and caused somebody to be boiled alive; and that Hansel has been turned into a beast and been shot and skinned and gambled away; and that he went to Hell and dressed up like the Devil’s grandmother; and that he’s been chased by the Devil himself and has held an old man’s hand as he died.

It’s true they’ve done all those things.

But sometimes, coming home is the hardest thing of all.

Soon Hansel and Gretel found themselves in the heart of the Kingdom of Grimm, driving through towns that still lived in their earliest memories. As they looked around, their stomachs began to twist into knots.

Some of the towns looked just as they remembered them, as if memories of home could be modeled in wood and brick. But other towns—other memories of home—had been razed to the ground. Houses were torn apart, with their roofs and walls scattered and broken. Shops were burned, eviscerated, empty. Dead animals lay in the street, their bloated bellies stiffening as flies walked carefully across the surface of their eyeballs.

“The dragon,” Gretel murmured.

Hansel nodded and stared.

As they passed through one gutted town, the door on the wreckage of a house began to move. Its hinges groaned angrily. Hansel leaned close to Gretel. She took his hand. Then, from the darkness, a head emerged.

It was a child. He was very small—the size of the child Gretel had seen in the tavern. He was followed by an older child, a girl, and then a still-older girl.

“Come out,” the eldest said. “Look.”

From behind them emerged their parents. The whole family was dirty, emaciated, with ragged clothes and frightened eyes.

Gretel said, “This is not good.”

“No,” Hansel said. “It isn’t.”

Suddenly, Gretel jumped down from the cart and ran around to the back. “I’m going to give them an apple,” she shouted to Hansel.

The family heard this, and the father and mother and three children all came out to the cart. “You have apples?” the father said.

“Not the kind you eat,” Gretel told him. “But this might help you.” And she reached under the canvas tarp, took out an apple, and gave it to them.

“It’s golden!” the children cried, and the parents’ eyes grew wide with wonder. But the eldest of the children,