A Tale Dark and Grimm

They stared at her. She raised her left hand to show them. They gasped.

“No? How about killing people? How many people have you killed?”

“Killed?” her father said.

“Yes. Besides me and Hansel.”

The king’s face grew red, and his voice quiet. “None, honey. Why?”

“Well, we have. Two,” Gretel said.

Hansel stood up beside her. “Has either of you been to Hell?” he asked.

“What?” his parents cried.

“Been tortured by demons?” Hansel added.

They shook their heads and stared at their children.

He gave them one last chance. “Had the Devil’s head in your lap?”

Neither replied.

“Then I think you’d better leave this to us,” Gretel said. And the two children went back to their room to talk things over.

An hour later they returned. “So,” Hansel said, “dragons love treasure, right?”

“At least in storybooks,” Gretel added.

Their parents looked at each other and shrugged. “I guess,” the king replied.

“Okay, let’s say they do,” Hansel said. “We have a cartload of golden apples in the stable right now.”

His mother’s eyes grew wide. “You do?”

“How on earth did you get that?” the king asked.

“We’ll explain later,” Gretel said impatiently. “Are you listening?”

The king and queen nodded sheepishly.

“Okay, so we take the cart of apples out to a clearing in the forest,” Hansel said.

“We open it up,” Gretel cut in, “so the dragon can see it. Hopefully, he’ll be attracted to the gold.”

“We’ll have to raise an army. They’ll be hiding in the trees all around,” Hansel said. “With bows and arrows.”

“And swords and axes,” Gretel added.

“And when the dragon is distracted by the apples, the archers will fire at it from the cover of the trees. It won’t know where the arrows are coming from, and it will be confused and, hopefully, wounded.”

“And that’s when everyone else will run out and attack it,” Gretel concluded.

Slowly, the queen began to nod. “That’s not a bad plan,” she said. She turned to the king.

Well, the king tried to find some fault or other, because that’s what fathers do. “Raising an army,” he said. “That will be difficult. Our people don’t want to fight anymore. They’re afraid.”

“We have to try,” Hansel said.

“It may not work,” Gretel agreed. “But it’s better than doing nothing.”

After a few more perfunctory objections, their father finally had to admit that, indeed, it sounded like a pretty good plan.

The queen, blushing a little, said, “Do you need all the apples for the plan? If so, I understand, of course ... I just ...”

The king smiled. “Your mother would like an apple,” he said. “She’s always had a passion for gold. That’s how we met, you know.”

“I heard,” Gretel said. “You stole her.”

“I did not!” the king said.

“Admit it, darling,” the queen laughed. “You sort of did.”

“You stole Mother?” Hansel asked.

“Well, yes ... I ... I suppose ... I sort of did.”

The king laughed at himself, and the queen laughed some more. Hansel and Gretel began to smile. It was the first crack in their armor their parents had yet seen. The king and the queen, laughing and tearful, reached out their arms to their children.

But with that, the children’s smiles died away. After a moment, the king and queen lowered their arms.

Gretel whispered, “We have to go to bed now. It’s late, and we have a lot to do tomorrow.”

Hansel stood without moving for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. That’s true.”

And the two children turned away from their parents and went upstairs to bed.

“I feel like something is pressing down on my chest,” Gretel said, lying in her bed that night, her eyes wide open. “Something heavy and sharp and painful. I’ve felt it for a long, long time now.”

“Since we left,” Hansel said, nodding in the darkness.

“Since just before we left,” Gretel corrected him. There was silence. Then she said, “It’s been getting worse recently. It’s never been so bad as it is right now. I feel like I can barely breathe.”

“I know.”

“I just want to take it and throw it off of me. Make someone else feel it and hold it and carry it for a while.”

The beds creaked and settled beneath them. They had been empty for a long time. At last, Hansel said, “Not just someone else.”

“No,” Gretel agreed. “Not just someone else.”

HANSEL and GRETEL and the Dragon

Once upon a time, on a bright but sunless morning, Hansel and Gretel stood in the middle of the town of Wachsend’s tiny central square. Actually, it wasn’t even a square. It was more like a grassy hole between the tavern and the bakery. Hansel and Gretel wore their finest, most regal clothes, and, so that all could see them, they stood on a table that had been brought out from the tavern.

The people of Wachsend gathered around the black-haired prince and the golden-blond princess and peered at them wonderingly, expectantly. This was the strangest thing to have happened in their little town in anyone’s memory. Not only was it unheard of for royalty to pay them a visit, unless in some grand procession that was just passing through (Hansel and Gretel had come alone—alone!), but the prince and princess had been the talk of the kingdom since their return. To see them? Here? Well, you can imagine that no self- respecting Wachsender would miss it.

So they gathered in the grassy square, beneath birds that sang in the bare branches of the trees, and waited to hear what had brought the young prince and princess to their town.

Hansel shifted uneasily from foot to foot as he looked at the expectant faces before him. Wachsend had been lucky so far. The dragon had not yet visited. But nonetheless the people were thin, from the lean times the dragon had brought to the kingdom. And they looked afraid. There seemed to be fear lingering at the corners of their mouths; a few even glanced up at the sky periodically. Hansel didn’t have to ask what they were looking for.

Gretel saw all this, too. And then she began to speak to the people of Wachsend.

She told them she knew they were scared. She told them that she was scared, too. She told them that fear would not save them from the dragon. She told them that only courage would save them. They must fight it, she said. They must fight it.

Gretel spoke, and the people of Wachsend—grown men and women—listened to her. Not a single villager spoke, not a single villager moved. When she had finished, every person was totally still.

And then someone shouted, “What?”

“What did she say?” cried someone else.

Gretel looked confused. Had they not been able to hear her?

“She must be out of her mind!” another called.

“She’s crazy!”

“Is that child talking to us?”