For days and weeks, the witch’s threat left me with dread. But it faded with time as I grew older. There was only the witch.
She wanted to scare us. Ruin our lives. Fill us with fear as her final dying wish.
I shake my head, letting out a low scowl.
"What is it?" Gretel asks.
"Nothing," I say.
How am I supposed to tell her that I can’t get that night out of my head? That I dream about it all the time? That all I want to do is forget? The curse might not be real, but what happened to us is very real.
A shape appears in the fog.
"Look," I say, grateful for a distraction.
Gretel looks in the direction I nod to. The shadowy figures of the old barns are barely visible in the fog. She swallows hard, knowing as well as I do that those are the last buildings on the outskirts of the village. Passing them feels like a point of no return.
We can turn back, I remind myself. We can always go home again.
Except there is no home. Not the way it used to be. Not since everything happened.
“The fires.” Gretel moves even closer as she speaks. I don’t want to talk about the destruction that came to our village, but she steels herself. “She made them happen.”
“She was dead.” The witch didn’t do those things. It was bad luck. I lean forward a little, trying to see through the fog. Doesn’t help.
Gretel looks ahead, too.
I can see my horse’s mane, but not much farther. My whole body is sore from how tense I was all night. I wanted to go to her, even if it wouldn’t fix anything.
"How do you explain them, then?" Gretel asks. "All the bad things that happened to our town.”
So much happened.
When we got back from the witch's cottage, we told everyone who would listen. At first we were met with skepticism but when we cried and showed the scars and brought them back to the house, fear spread like the wildfire would.
The next night, alone and scared, I knocked on her door. I was broken, still hurt, and all I could think to do was grab her hand, pull her to me and kiss her. I could taste the salt of her dried tears. I promised myself, if we stayed together, we could protect each other from the terrors of what happened.
I put my arms around her under the full moon and I let myself do something I’d never done before. I kissed her and she kissed me back. With a desperation to forget the pain and simply be loved by someone who knew every piece of you and still loved you.
But right then the door opened, and her father was standing there with bags slung over his shoulders and a look on his face that didn’t mean anything good.
"We're leaving," he barked. "See yourself home, Hansel.” He shoved me back, whatever moment was there, was broken.
“Father,” Gretel protested. “It’s dark. We can’t?—”
"We're leaving," he repeated, his voice stern but also full of dread, and shifted the bag to his other arm so he could pull Gretel along with him. The tale of what we went through had spread through the town and fear was potent. It drifted from her father as he rushed them away.
I followed them, numb. He already had their horse harnessed to their small, rickety wagon and more belongings packed inside. They didn’t have much to begin with, but seeing it all piled in the wagon like that made my stomach clench.
“Where are you taking her?” I questioned and he ignored me. The man was already gone by the looks in his eyes.
“Hansel,” she cried out as she looked back, her eyes shining, but her father steered her into the wagon.
And then she was gone. Stolen away in the middle of the night. Taken from me.
The very next week, the fires came.
I don’t know how Gretel’s father heard about the fires. Everyone must have known. I didn’t know he had come back to help fight them until someone found his body.
