It was true about the breadcrumbs.
Our father had told us to break them off in pieces and leave them on the ground to help us find our way back. He should have known the crows would find them. He should have realized we would never return.
The rest of the story was a lie. There was no gingerbread house pegged with ruby colored gum drops or framed with tall striped candy canes. There was a witch, yes, but she wasn’t the wrinkled cackling kind; the crooked-nosed crone with the hideous mole at its very tip. No. She was as beautiful as pale moonlight in the quiet of the woods.
She was mesmerizing.
I had watched her with amazement as she nimbly sliced my brother’s throat with her knife, as silent as breath. So compelling was her presence that the vein-chilling shock came a prayer-breadth later, as I heard my brother’s feeble gasps for air as blood curdled in his gaping throat.
Only a few moments ago, she had kindly welcomed us, Hansel and I, and opened her door broadly. We looked up in awe into her startling purple eyes, the color of twilight. She charmingly gestured us in and remarked at our famished expressions, our exhausted eyes failing to notice how she constantly, and yet gracefully, kept one arm behind her back.
“Poor dears,” she said, smiling, her voice a faint wisp of cool wind. “You must be ravenous.”
Hansel and I nodded eagerly, melting in her serene gaze.
“Then I would love to have you for supper,” she replied like moonlight.
With that, she glided towards Hansel, my blood-kin and only sibling, covered his mouth with her hand and, with the other that had been kept from our sight since we came, sliced his throat in one calm and dexterous stroke. I screamed but she ignored me. I found that I could not move. I thought then that perhaps she had put a spell upon me to keep me planted where I was, but I had already told you, she was not that kind of witch. She knew no magic spells. It was fear that kept me still.
She carried Hansel’s body towards the big clay pot, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. She disrobed him, carefully placed him inside, then poured water over his body until the pot was half full. Hansel was still gurgling faintly by the time she had stopped pouring water. My brother was still alive.
“We shall be having stew,” she stated with a smile.
Salty tears fell from my face. I thought of my mother and the absurdity of the similarity of how she and the witch cooked stew. She let the meat boil as she prepared the potatoes and the greens, just like mother, so that as soon as she had finished paring and slicing them, the meat would be ready. By the time the witch had added the vegetables, my brother had been long dead and was tender enough to chew.
My father loved stew.
He liked it so much that he hunted diligently for game to bring home to mother. Those were the happiest of days. He would come home with deer or wild boar, and Hansel and I would gather round him and listen to exciting tales of triumphant hunts as mother contentedly prepared her savory stew. The time came when we noticed that father went hunting more and more but, more often than not, came home sadly empty handed. Then one day, after my brother and I had come home from picking wild berries for pie, mother was gone. Father told us that she went off with another man. We could hardly believe it, our dear mother unfaithful and wicked. We told father, “No! It can’t be!” But it was true, he said. She had left a note. In a meager attempt at atonement, she had also left a big bowl of stew.
“Let us to supper, then, my children,” father said in gloom. “It is not for us to waste good stew. It is your mother’s last.”
And so we supped silently with our father. Hansel broke our hushed repast, asking suddenly when this game had been brought home for he kept track of our father’s hunting jaunts faithfully; constantly waiting to be asked to come along, wondering resentfully why he had not been asked in more recent weeks. Later, I would not believe Hansel when he insisted that father, for a brief moment, had appeared startled before muttering some answer I could no longer remember.
The happiest of days.
One day our father told us that some men are coming for him, vicious men to whom he owed money. He had foolishly given his coins to our mother for safe-keeping, and she had cruelly taken it with her when she left. He told us to leave quickly, to come back after a fortnight, and pointed to a path in the darker part of the woods that we had never walked before.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “That path is safe and so shall you be, my children.”
He gave us a loaf of hard bread and told us to scatter some as we walk, to mark where we had been, to show the way back home. I looked back only once and saw him framed in our cabin’s doorway, the setting sun casting a dark shadow on his face.
I remember now how he had almost appeared sinister in his creeping shadow mask. Still, I waved to him a tearful goodbye, sobbing as I sob now, stock-still in a corner, waiting for death.
The witch tasted the newly cooked stew and nodded thoughtfully.
She then set the table for three.
“One for me. One for you, for it is a waste to starve you away, my dear,’ she said in an almost sing-song tone. “And one for my beloved.”
He entered then, her beloved. He rushed into her embrace and kissed her deeply, madly. She led him to the table and pulled out his chair for him, her arm a graceful arc. She then lovingly ladled some stew into his bowl as he remarked how hungry he was, amorously ogling her. He had known the crows would find the breadcrumbs for he had eyes only for her, for her pale beauty and grace; and she had eyes only for him.
Slowly, my father turned and said to me:
“Come and eat.”