Chapter 3
SOMETIMES, YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE OBVIOUS CHOICE.
Unfortunately, you are a child.
You aren’t thinking about the story you’re in (you should be), or how the choices you make today will impact what choices are available to you tomorrow (you should be).
Watching your sister push a witch into an oven, watching the witch pull your sister in after her—how can you think about tomorrow? You can only think about right now.
And right now, it seems like there is only one choice:
Run.
Run from the kitchen. From the house with its cookie-dough door knob and caramel ceilings.
Run into the woods—the woods, with dead trees rising like teeth from the jaws of a ravenous wolf—but where else is there for you to go?
Run between the trees, run under their branches, run over their upturned roots.
Run despite the leaves in your face, despite the thornbushes digging into your thighs, despite the high grass slowing your path.
Run until your heart throbs in your teeth.
Until your lungs burn like a furnace. Run farther than you’ve ever run before, and then keep running.
There are monsters in this world that want to harm you, but they can’t harm you until they’ve caught you, and they can’t catch you if you just.
Keep.
Running.
* * *
DO YOU WANT TO GO ON LIVING?
…
yes.
* * *
You collapse beneath the bridal veil of a willow’s long branches.
Beside the willow runs a creek, and the sound of the water trickling against the mossy rocks distracts you from the thud of Gretel’s flesh against the iron oven.
Hidden here, where famine and drought and witches cannot reach you, you inhale the water-speckled scent of the soft, green earth.
You watch the willow’s limp branches give way to the wind, and notice how unlike a cage they are.
But your tongue—your tongue aches with the memory of crystallized sugar, crumbling cheese, salted butter, potato stew, candied peaches…
Turn your open mouth into the dampened clay soil and bite.
Fill up your whole mouth with loam and press it into your cheeks, your palate, the inside of your lip.
Chew so the grains of it stick between your teeth.
Hold the lump in your mouth until you gag, until your stomach lurches, until you retch across the ground.
Now that taste is what sticks to your tongue.
Now, you can think.
The creek must flow somewhere. Perhaps it joins up with a river somewhere?
Or perhaps it wends through a town, or two or three.
Towns full of people—starving people, like yourself, like the parents who left you to the woods—but what else is there for you to do?
Stay here, under the willow, for the rest of your days?
No. You have to find help.
Is it too late for help? You don’t know.
The oven probably killed them both. But still.
It seems like someone should be told about the house.
It seems like someone should go back there and make sure the oven killed them both.
Someone who will take one look at that gingerbread house and say, Don’t worry, I know what to do.
Someone who will take one look at you, and say, for the first time in your life, Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.