Gretilde and Brummer
Where do little Hansels and Gretels go?
WARNING: The following work of fiction based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm contains references to graphic violence that some readers may find upsetting, disturbing or otherwise objectionable. Reader discretion is advised.
Brummer dragged the children to the cutting house. He placed a tin bucket on the floor at the head of the worktable and looked around for his tools. As he found each one, he hung it from a nail protruding from the underside of the table. When he had assembled them all, he put his hands on his waist and took a deep breath.
Everything was ready.
He heaved the unconscious boy onto the table, wincing as a pain in his back reminded him of his age. The boy lay motionless, limbs tossed to the edges of the table, carelessly, it seemed, as if he were asleep in his own bed. His face was placid, his breathing even.
Not a care in the world, Brummer thought.
He reached beneath the table and lifted his big cleaver from its nail. The hickory handle, smooth and stained from years of use, and the weight of the heavy wedge poised over his head felt right. He brought the blade down in a smooth arc with just the required amount of force. It had been so long, yet his body remembered.
Children used to wander into the forest quite frequently. They would show up at the cabin and knock on the door with tears drying on their cheeks and the dark trees rearing up at their backs and ask the way back to town.
“Come in, come in,” his wife Gretilde would say, placing her hands on the children’s shoulders and ushering them into the house. “You must be cold,” or hungry, or tired, or some such. “Oh, look what you’ve done to your trousers. Your mother won’t be happy about that. She must be so worried about you. Wouldn’t you like something to eat before you go? I’ve just finished baking a nice apple pie. You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you? And some milk before you go?”
The forest was gone now. Gretilde had lived there too long for anything to grow anymore. Now there was only rocky wasteland, and since rocky wastelands don’t make good playgrounds, the children hardly ever came by these days.
Nonetheless, his wife had been in fine form today. She had played her role to perfection, confident in her power and enjoying every minute of it.
Brummer took up his flathead skinner. The teeth were slightly dull and the hinge a bit rusty, but the tool would make it through these two little ones.
Of course, watching his wife work today hadn’t been like watching her during the first years of their marriage. Brummer saw her differently now. He saw through the tricks she used to deceive the children, but back when they were young, her words had worked a kind of magic over him just as they had the children. The children had fallen into a trap; he had fallen in love. Gretilde didn’t allow him in the kitchen when children were present (she said he scared them), so he would watch from the next room through a small hole in the wall.
First, she would chat with them about school or the coming fair day while they ate, but then she would say, “You know, they say there’s a witch who lives in these parts. It isn’t good to be in them without your parents.” Then she would relate to them some of the stories. All the while, they would be casting glances out the front window at the darkening day, as if the witch were right outside. “They say she lures them in with sweets and milk and then kills them.”
About this time, sooner or later, depending on their smarts, the children would realize on whose door they had knocked for help. Lips would start to tremble or tears to well up, and at that moment, at that very moment, Gretilde would pass her crooked fingers over their eyes and they would crumple in their chairs in a magical slumber. It was always a moment of such quiet beauty. Then he would come out and trade comments with his wife about how the children were dressed or how their manners had been. Gretilde would wipe the crumbs from the corners of their mouths, and then he would take them out back to be cleaned.
“The teeth were slightly dull and the hinge a bit rusty, but the tool would make it through these two little ones.”
Brummer scraped some odd pieces off the worktable. They landed in the bucket with a moist, tinny sound. Blood and other bodily fluids were running off the table onto the floor, but he didn’t mind. It was a messy job. He could mop up the juice later.
He found it reassuring that his wife hadn’t lost her touch. She sure didn’t look like she used to, though. No, a few things had changed there. She was a lot plumper, for one thing, and somehow shorter. Her witch’s locks, once black and glossy and falling in perfect spirals, were now clumps of a color with no name. Her nose drooped more than hooked, and the mole on her left nostril had grown until it dominated the left side of her face. What’s more, she needed to shave.
How odd that these very aspects of her appearance were the same that had endeared her to him when they were young. The sharp nose with the little mole that he had loved to kiss. The down on her chin. Even her squatness had been charming in those days. Cute. Just one more force she had used to bring him into orbit.
And her eyes. How he wished he could look into those eyes again! His place in the universe had shifted every time he’d seen them. He had found it hard to believe they were human eyes at all, just two anatomical masses among others, and not numinous things passing through on their way from one world to another.
But these, too, had changed. The woman who looked out through them was the same, but the eyes were not. Never big to begin with, they had receded into her head, or her head had, in loose folds of flesh, pushed forward around them. The eyeballs were in there somewhere, but where, he couldn’t tell.
Brummer finished with the boy and dumped the slop out back for the birds. He was surprised any birds remained in the dead landscape, but they were always there, perched on distant ridges and devil’s fingers as if expecting visitors that he did not.
Back in the cutting house, Brummer caught himself whistling some old ditty the world had long forgotten but his mind had remembered all these years. He shook his head. Couldn’t remember last night’s dinner, but here he was whistling a song he hadn’t heard since . . .
. . . he couldn’t remember.
Brummer lifted the girl onto the table and arranged her, heels together, arms straight down at her sides. Pretty as a picture.
He wiped the cleaver with a rag. A part of him had never become fully accustomed to this work, and with the girls it had always been harder. They always seemed so much more innocent, representing as they did, by virtue of their gender, the half of the universe closed to him and therefore unspoilt. But he knew this was illusion. Girls are no more innocent than boys, no matter how much they play up otherwise.
And Daisy was no exception.
Brummer’s hands paused in their work. Daisy. That was the pet name he had come up with for Gretilde the day they had met. A meeting had been arranged through an old biddy in town for Brummer, Gretilde and her two sisters (both crones of repute in their own dying corners of the earth now) to have a picnic in the forest. After they had eaten, the sisters had wandered off under the pretense of gathering some fungus or another for their brews, leaving Brummer and Gretilde alone. Brummer had asked if she would like to take a walk, and she had demurely nodded assent. Not even close enough to hold hands yet, they had talked slowly and politely at first, but it had been effortless, and soon they had become comfortable with each other.
They had discovered a clearing, a field of yellow daisies, into which his future wife had plunged, bounding in the highest of spirits. When he caught up with her, she turned and smiled, and he reached down and plucked a single flower and tucked it behind her ear.
“Daisy,” he said.
They might as well have slept together for the effect of consecrating them to each other the moment had possessed.
He didn’t call her Daisy anymore. He couldn’t remember when he had stopped, and this lack of recall probably stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t even noticed at the time.
They had met weekly for picnics for some time, but the sisters had soon stopped coming. At first, it had been enough to hold hands and look into each other’s eyes, but they had soon discovered there were other pleasures open to girls and boys. He remembered their first kiss. They had been lying in the grass beside a stream, and Gretilde had done something with her mouth, her lips parting and lifting from her teeth as if stimulated by an invisible touch, and he had been unable to resist. He had reached out and touched her hip, that full hip, so matronly, though she could no more bear fruit, being a channel of necrotic powers, than the land she made her home, and he had kissed her.
It had been a good kiss, and when they had gotten around to it, the other caresses had been good, too. There had never been anything wrong with their love life, no sir, though it had dropped off considerably of late. Still, what with Gretilde’s potions and ointments, he figured they had fared better than most.
Brummer looked down at the child. Beyond a certain point, both children looked the same. Still, he made a mental note to remember which was which. Gretilde would need to know. It was important for her magics. He could hear her in the kitchen banging around and wondered if all the racket was intended to hurry him up.
Well, she could just wait a little longer. He wasn’t done yet. Besides, once she got started, there would be no rushing her. Too few children came around these days, so he wanted to enjoy his time with them while he had the chance.
He traded the pincers for his fillet knife.
There had been a wedding ceremony — pagan, of course — attended by a few relatives and friends, but they hadn’t had many of those left by that time. The land was under the influence of a new religion that condemned such activities as were Gretilde’s talent. There were times when he wished for rapprochement between the two worlds, the new one he had been born at the beginning of and the old one Gretilde represented the end of, but there weren’t enough witches left now for anyone to go out of their way to condemn. Gretilde was oddly complacent about this — she said life must feed on life — so Brummer was indignant on her behalf.
Before he knew it, the bucket was full again and the work was finished. Some recess of him was glad. It hadn’t been easy being married to a witch, but you had to make some compromises in marriage. Some, but not too many.
He dumped the leftover tidbits out back, startling the carrion that had gathered, and returned to the cutting house. He wrapped each of the children in a brown paper bundle tied with string. A different knot for each. His wife had taught him these in the early years of their marriage, and he had learned them, and many others, by heart.
“Are you about done?”
He turned to see his wife standing in the doorway, all but her nose, which extended into the light of the cutting house, in the deep shadow of night outside. She had a knife and looked ready to use it.
“Just finished,” he said. He handed her first one package, then the other.
“Did you enjoy your time with them?” she asked.
“Yes. If only there were more.”
“I know.”
The tenderness of this exchange took Brummer by surprise, but whatever further words or gestures were required to perfect it were lost with the passing moment.
“Wash up before you come in,” Gretilde said, checking the knots to make sure he had tied them correctly.
Brummer looked down at himself. He had worked all that time and forgotten to put on his apron.
“Will do.”
Gretilde lumbered up the short slope to their house in an ambling gate she had picked up sometime over the years as the load she carried widened. Brummer listened to her wheezing until she disappeared inside the house, and then he went to the well to wash.
Brummer stepped into the kitchen and was greeted by sounds and smells that conjured the happy kitchens of his early years together with his wife. Gretilde was putting the last of the side dishes on the table, and he watched as her girth floated from one point in the kitchen to another in a rhyme and reason he couldn’t begin to fathom, having never been anything but trouble in the kitchen himself.
He dodged as she transported a stew from the stovetop to the counter and sprinkled something over it. Brummer enjoyed the view. Gretilde had always looked good from behind. He sometimes thought of the soft contours of her backside as her benign face and of her real face, the one with the receding eyes, as her wicked one.
“What are you chuckling about?” Gretilde turned around, pushed him out of the way, and opened the oven, a big cast iron monster he’d made once upon a time. It still stood, it still heated, and he’d never had to do more than fit it with a new pipe or clean out a vent every now and then.
“Oh, nothing.”
“Then sit down.”
Brummer took his seat. He placed his hands on the table and examined them, thought of all they had done.
Gretilde’s burly forearms shoved the children on the table. They steamed and smelled of home. Brummer watched his wife as she removed her potholder mittens and hung them from hooks on the side of the overhead cupboards. Her hips made a brushing sound as she squeezed between chair and tabletop and sat down. Brummer picked up his fork and knife and smiled at his wife, who smiled back.
“They look delicious,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
© 2021 J.P. Williams
Related Reading:
