Chapter 9
STOP LONGING FOR BEDS YOU’LL NEVER SLEEP IN AGAIN.
The bed the Fair Queen affords you is the softest bed you’ve ever known.
You can’t sleep in it.
You try. You really do. Night after night you lay there with Friend at your side, her snout on your ribcage and your arm draped around her.
You close your eyes and try. You count as high as you know how.
You empty your head until there’s nothing there.
You imagine yourself sinking into a black void.
What fun games, says your mind, still whirring, still drawn taut as a bowstring, Let’s keep playing.
Except your mind doesn’t play fair.
Your mind keeps showing you the moment Gretel fell into the oven with the hag.
And before that: sleeping in the woods, curled around each other as close as two egg yolks in the same shell.
And before that: the straw mattress in your father’s home.
You’d give anything to go back to that straw mattress.
You’d give anything for your story to have stayed in that home, even if your father didn’t want you there.
At least you’d still be with Gretel. At least you wouldn’t know the horrible things you know now.
It’s the knowing that’s hard.
Friend licks your face. You don’t know when you started crying, but now you can’t stop.
Her droopy ears flop against your cheeks as she laps up your tears, and you laugh through your weeping, even though you don’t want to laugh at all.
You want to lie here mourning Gretel until your heart walks out of your body.
You want to lie here missing what it was like to sleep in a huddle with Gertrude and Favorite on the hovel’s dirt floor until the sun rises in the west and three moons appear in the sky.
Even though everything inside of you that matters has been scooped out like pumpkin guts—even then, sleep doesn’t come.
Deep in the night, you drag your quilt to the floor.
It’s hard and unforgiving beneath your spine, and that feels right.
It isn’t fair for you to sleep in a soft bed while Gretel’s ashes sleep in an oven, tangled up with a witch’s ashes.
It isn’t fair for you to sleep in a soft bed while Gertrude sleeps on the ground.
You may be leagues away from the sister you chose, but if you look toward your window, you can pretend you’re both looking at the moon.
When you rip open your pillow with your new hunting knife, you pretend the white feathers fluttering around you belong to a swan who has at last transformed into a prince.
You can just imagine it: Gertrude throwing a shirt of nettles over his body, all the feathers spilling off of him like water, those feathers funneling around him and sculpting him into a human again.
And then maybe—oh, maybe—maybe he’ll turn to you, and maybe you’ll be the first thing his human eyes see, and maybe, from that moment on, you’ll be inseparable.
That daydream picks you up in its feathered arms and carries you to sleep.