The brats flit about my home and crow to each other like arrogant cocks broken loose from their coup. The moments whip past me in dizzying flashes. A chicken bone for the boy’s finger, the girl’s sly fingers snatch the key from my belt.

“Hansel, pocket the treasure!”

“Now, Gretel!”

Why I even bother giving chase, I do not know. I am not as spry as I once was; knobbly knuckles and sagging skin, the seams blurring in my darkening vision. Perhaps I’ve run out of patience for fattening tomorrow night’s dinner, taking my sweet time to make that boy sufficiently plump and juicy. All those weeks I carefully fattened that impudent child in my cage, and it will all be for nothing. As the girl pushes me into the oven, crams my creaking bones into the child-sized hearth, my stomach rumbles.

Maybe it is as simple as this: I meet my end in such a foolish manner because I am just that hungry. 

The bolt of the grate, the whoops of victory, the slam of my front door, and then a new horrible shrieking as their footsteps recede, too close for comfort. My weathered body, with all its witchy charms and wily ways, is no match against scalding wrought iron. Leaping flames glowing red like a gloaming sunset, but these embers do not herald imminent darkness now, just searing, awful light.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Oh, how I thought I knew you, fire! The years I spent honing the craft of coaxing roaring tongues of flame and smouldering coals, rendering the fat off children’s rumps to bake bread and simmer bony stock.

Did I not feed you with the finest wood? Birchbark and thick slabs of cedar like juicy steaks, taking the time to snap each stick into chewable, twiggy pieces. I tended to you like a dearly beloved son. Now you gnaw at me like an angry daughter unleashing the relentless roar of her hunger. Suffocating, simmering, sweltering, sizzling. My fat runs away from me like seconds. In minutes, my skin melts and crisps, caramelising like nuts in a drum. I momentarily marvel at the notion that there is that much sugar in me before a cough combusts through my throat, and I realise I am the shrieking. 

Help! Help! Help!

There is no one to answer, and if there were, they would demand confession. 

Witch! Wench! Child eater!

What sufficient explanation might there be? That I grew up with nothing but the tunic on my back? My mind scrambles to escape the inferno, swimming back into its earliest memories. My father dips tallow candles, my mother scrubs her bitterness into every wall of our hovel until it glistens. As a girl, I stand in the town square and watch the other children swarm the baker’s door, pressing their snotty noses up against the glass to sniff out the daily wares. Foolish, all of them. What do sweets provide but momentary pleasure and rotten teeth? The butcher shop stands right next to the bakery, and its stoop is as empty as the cabinets back home. No other curious children clamouring for bone shards and slabs of flesh, that’s for sure

Only I, snagging glimpses of the butcher working through the door, every blow of the knife confident and necessary. The careful draining of blood towards grates on the floor.

I hear the snuffle and shuffle of cows and pigs in their pen out back, their troughs are heaped with exorbitant grain to get the cattle fat. The stones of the street press through the thinned soles of my shoes, and I watch the children now. They have plump, rosy cheeks, and their muscles strain as they lick their chops over peppermint sticks. They know nothing of hunger. My mouth waters steadily with consistent practice. From that moment, I knew what I must do and worked strenuously to make it happen. 

I took up trade as a baker in another village. Lingered by the masons as they went about their work. Saved money on beef. Moved so deep into the woods that only those looking to get lost will find me. You see, these woods teem with the lost. One week, it is my cold-footed father. Next, the mayor’s daughter, whisked away by wolves. The elderly cobbler never returns from pissing out behind the tavern. People whisper of a witch’s seduction. I poured myself a cup of peppermint tea and waited for the hapless, the hopeless, and the wandering orphans to show up. 

What a waste! 

No one considers the determination required to build a house out of sugar in the woods and have it stand tall against countless, curious mouths. I built my house by hand, with butter, flour, and sugar and sugar and sugar. The oven baked sheets of gingerbread to form the walls, thick, hearty loaves perfume every morning with the aroma of cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves. Sweet, sweet smells that would lure anyone up the gumdrop cobblestones, into the open jaws of the sweetmeat-studded door. Whorls of snow-white cream, liquorice coiling like sleek black snakes, shortcake thatching the roof; a feast for the eyes, all crafted piece by piece, conjured from this trusty hearth. 

Now, I will be the final confection this oven will ever hold. My smouldering bones rest upon the last tray, which will never be pulled. 

Slurp! Snap! Spit!

Smoke lances my every opening to swell through my insides.
My father carries a candlelit lantern into the woods, determined to lose himself. My mother comes to me with a face like a desiccated plum, all wet hacking coughs and the potent stench of salted meat and rank dust. She dies cold, frigid plagued veins draining even the blush from her cheeks. The doctors cart her away deep into the woods with all the others who succumbed to the illness. I stand before our front door, a young girl with her back to the maw of inside, watching the smoke waft on the horizon, knowing I will never return home.

But I have become my mother, in that I am now bitter, in that I can now feel what it must have been like to be deep in that pit of death, dark pitch thick with smoke until there is nothing left. Charring skin, blackening bones. I bless the mercy of the universe to at least have her die before being burned. 

Why does it curse me? 

The fire, like those spoiled children with their peppermint sticks, licks and licks and licks, until there is nothing left for it to hold.

What I would give! 

No matter how many children I lured through the door of my home-sweet-home I never felt fully satiated. The rumble in my gut like far-off thunder, like an ever-approaching storm. I honed my methods, experimented with flavours, and innovated new dishes into existence. I was even merciful with my slaughter, charming them all to sleep with wine before the knife fell. Not even the butcher I watched as a girl did that. Just held the flailing lambs down by their throat and made it quick. 

And what for? What for? What for?

Without me here to hold them off, the animals of the forest will finally have their fill. Squirrels will crawl down the cold chimney and nibble every thatch of my shortcake roof until it caves. A grizzly bear will shamble out of the thicket and lick at the sugar windowpanes until he falls asleep in a giddy daze. Starlings will use their needle beaks to break through the crisp sugar shells of the gumdrops studding my walkway to sip the soft, jellied center. Jealousy lashes along my spine, the bones laid bare. 

Let them be full! 

I would scream had the chords of my throat not already frizzled. No more words for me. No more sound for me at all. The agony has begun to recede, and I know it is because soon there will be nothing left of me to burn. Within the final flash of leaping fire, I take comfort that there will be but one facet of my house that the earth will not reclaim for itself. Even if this oven ended up betraying me in the end, it was not at fault. The children of the village whisper that if one ventures deep enough into the woods, past the thicket that overran with rabbits every spring, skirted around the pond where the frogs sing in harmony, slipped between the silver-tipped pines, they just might find an oven in the middle of a wide green clearing. You will find it. Unlit and cold to the touch. A metal vessel glinting silver in the sun.

“Lean in,” the children say beneath their breath, “and listen just close enough, you might hear the pulse of heaving wood and spitting sparks. Listen in, now, closer, and you might hear a clap of thunder in the distance. That awful rumble of her belly, that dread witch’s horrid appetite, still haunting the steadfast iron oven.”