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Back to the Woods

Acronym

                                    “I'm here because all fairy tales take place in the woods,

                                                        King Cole, even those that don’t.”

                                                                                                            -Bill Willingham, Fables

 

            It started when an eight-year-old boy was gifted a book as heavy as a tombstone, and equally plain. “Fairy tales,” his mother told him. The cover confirmed in black corporate font. It was a book bare of gold-edged pages and fancy frills. It promised no nonsense even though it was nothing but nonsense; just the facts when it was just fiction. The boy would spend years unknotting the two.

            At night he scooped the collection into his chest, letting his heart smack against its stubborn cardboard skin. He wanted to remember its toughness so he wouldn’t feel—what was the word his brother used?—“soft,” when he read about all the waltzing princesses.

            The boy did his reading in a bottom-bunk library-dungeon. A wall sealed off one side of the bed and a thick blue blanket the other. As the boy mouthed the words, the space grew clammy with his breath, and the darkness thickened around his reading light.

            The fairy-tale boy read until he forgot himself, read until the book world got too real and he could almost taste the poison apple, sour as a scream, or smell the moldy skin of scabby ogres. Mouth wide with fright, he’d slam the book shut and rip down the blanket wall, letting the bedroom take him back into its velvet hands. He fell asleep to the rhythmic whistle-snores of his big brother above him. That brother, he sometimes thought, could save him from anything. If witches or wolves or giants tried to break in, he would be like a hurricane-force wind, exploding them out the window.

            Big brother brings the happy ending: the idea burrowed into the boy like the fairy tales—latent lessons stored for later, folded pages tucked behind his ribcage.

 

***

 

            —“This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through its tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind." [Catherine Fisher, Darkhenge]

 

***

 

A story from the boy’s book:

            Once upon a time there was a boy named Hansel and a girl named Gretel, and there was a mother and a father, and there was a famine. The whole family felt their bellies go hollow as October pumpkins, grim carved smiles turning to bare-tooth glowers as the shells rotted and slumped. The mother felt worst. Her tummy spoke from her throat: “Let’s kill the kids,” she said to her husband. “We’ll let the woods gobble them up. More food for us.” The father didn’t want that, but he was soft and weak like a limp fern, and he let the mother do as she pleased.

            So they walked into the woods and—well everyone knows the rest, don’t they? How Hansel plunked down pebbles to remember the path home; how the mother tried again, and this time Hansel had only breadcrumbs, which the birds gobbled up; how he and Gretel blundered up to a house with warm cookie walls, and the witch-owner tried to plump them up to eat (mostly Hansel, the nicest-looking meal), but the siblings cooked her instead and found their way home, where the bad mother had died and the father was thrilled and happily ever after.

 

***

 

witch |wiCH| (noun): 1 a woman thought to have evil magic powers. Witches are popularly depicted as wearing a black cloak and pointed hat, and flying on a broomstick.

            • a follower or practitioner of modern witchcraft; a Wiccan priest or priestess.

            • informal an ugly or unpleasant old woman; a hag.

            • a girl or woman capable of enchanting or bewitching a man.

 

***

 

            The fairy-tale boy liked to play with his big brother in the woods. The mostly dead trees carried few leaves, but a lot of fungus, which reminded the boy of the warts that boiled out of his own skin. Both looked like disease. Both made his brother say ew. At least the warts didn’t smell like bleach.

            In the woods there was a wrecked tree with lichen-covered bark, scaly like the hull of a sunk ship. The boys made a fort by leaning long branches against this tree. They played a game called jail. One boy knelt behind the branch-bars, his knees dug into wet squishy leaves. The other was the guard, who made the prisoner answer riddles to get set free.

            Sometimes the big boy got bored and broke out early. He wanted to explore. The fairy-tale boy would whine and whine: Stop it, he said. You have to play fair.

 

***

 

            —“Hansel was given the best things to eat every day, but Gretel received nothing but crayfish shells.” [The Brothers Grimm, "Hansel and Gretel."]

 

***

 

            “Come here you good child come into this cage I will feed you bacon dripping butter and pancakes the size of real cakes and fine hams and foie gras and caviar and so much of the best lobster you have really never eaten so good I am a kindly woman I like to spoil my food I mean my children and you Hansel you are so worth it you are the good one the smart one the best one come here—”

 

***

 

suicide |ˈso͞oiˌsīd|

noun

the action of killing oneself intentionally: his brother committed suicide at the age of eighteen | drug-related suicides.

• a person who does this.

 

***

 

            One day the fairy-tale boy and his brother found a stag’s skull plopped on top of a bed of branches, like an amateur memorial. The head itself, narrow and runty, resembled an athletic cup. What really caught the boys’ eyes were the antlers, quadruple-pronged, reaching up like the gnarled fingers of two outstretched hands begging, why?

            “Let’s go back,” the fairy-tale boy said.

            But his big brother kept staring: “Don’t be a baby,” he said. “It’s cool.”

 

***

 

            —“…for it is ever the way of witches with any two things to care for the more mysterious of the two.” [Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter]     

 

***

 

            “Shoo Gretel shoo go fetch some meat for Hansel or no you know what how about you check the oven I want to make a real nice loaf of bread yes this time you can have some too just step in and tell me is it hot enough what do you mean you don’t know how you stupid kid it’s so easy here I’ll show you I’ll step in myself—”

 

***

 

Ways a suicide is like a witch:

            They both take victims.

            They both prosper in darkness.

            They both think poison a very good tool.

            They both know how to seduce (Come here I know what will make you feel better this

                        warm bread this so healing knife don’t you love to hold my hand—)

            They are both hungry for older brothers.

 

***

 

            When the fairy-tale boy and his brother moved, they didn’t have a forest anymore. They did have a tree, though. From far away it looked like a queen rejiggering her robe: wind sending shimmering currents from top to bottom, side to side.

            Up close, the tree was perfect for climbing. Hefty sandpaper branches gripped sneaker soles. Broad nooks near the trunk let the boys stand and rest, their armpits hanging on higher limbs for extra support. It felt like being lifted up by a parent.

            The fairy-tale boy never made it far up the tree. He liked the resting part—feeling wide green leaves wave in the wind, like a hundred pampering hands working to cool him off. The tree’s coat of dry dirt smelled refreshing after the old forest’s thick fungal muck.

            The big brother was different. He went as high as he could—fifteen, twenty branches up. Eventually he’d get to a spot he called “the point of no return,” where the branches became too narrow, and too far from one another, to welcome him any higher.

            Both boys would stand quiet for a while, the younger happy to have the older up above him, as if they were in bunk beds again, as if they didn’t live in separate rooms on separate floors.

 

***

 

            —“Even you, my brother,

             summer afternoons you look at me as though

             you meant to leave,

            as though it never happened.

            But I killed for you.” [Louise Glück, "Gretel in Darkness"]

 

***

 

            What made the fairy-tale boy remember the fairy tale, the one about the brother and sister?

            Maybe it was one of the last pictures of his big brother: wrapped sideways around a tree branch, gym shorts and t-shirt sinking to the ground, muscles tensed. “It’s like he’s hanging on for dear life!” his mother commented. That was before he died.

            Or maybe it was the condolence cards full of wistful cartoon trees scattering seeds, everything in bloom, even though it was winter.

            Or it could have been the stuff he read in English class, maybe the Thoreau, who said, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”

            Probably he was looking for someone to blame because he hated blaming his brother. When it comes to scapegoating, witches have always been easy victims.

 

***

 

Ways a suicide is not like a witch:

            It does not brew potions in crusty cauldrons.

            It has no time for broomsticks.

            It does not live in gingerbread houses, but lurks in the belly of its victim.

            It does not come in a cloak sewn full of ugly words—hag, wart, wicked, nasty, crooked.

            It is hard to condemn because it means both person and action. (“A suicide,                                               that’s awful”—“how dare you talk about the dead that way!”)

            If you are a suicide you are a suicide forever, but witches can always quit their craft.

            Witches show up in fairy tales but not real life.

            Suicides show up in real life but not in fairy tales.

            Kids don’t grow up scared of suicide.

            Kids don’t dress as suicides for Halloween.

            The most important part: a suicide has no body of its own. You cannot shove it in the                              oven and watch its head pop. It disappears with its victim, leaving you in the                              woods, alone, undone, doomed to call its name again and again, when it never                              knew yours.

 

***

 

            The fairy-tale boy went back to his fairy tales, although that first book was long lost. He reread “Hansel and Gretel” because he wanted to hate the witch and to remember his brother, his Hansel, as a hero. He thought of that first path of pebbles glistening like clean white teeth in the moonlight. He remembered how Hansel grabbed Gretel’s wrist and beckoned, Look what I did. That was the story to him: a little sibling thrilling at such perfect direction, mouth wide and screaming with happiness, hair flung backwards, whole body tugged along by this wonder-boy, this saving brother.

            The fairy-tale boy wanted to remember that feeling. What it meant to be led straight out of the woods.

            But when he reread, he realized Hansel had not been sure-footed like he thought. His faulty second path, the one made of breadcrumbs, the one gobbled up by birds—that’s how the siblings got lost in the first place. And it was Hansel who led them to the gingerbread house, and Hansel who said, “Let’s stay and eat a good meal,” and Hansel who wound up locked in the witch’s cage, which he only escaped when Gretel shoved the witch into the oven.

            So it was up to Gretel after all. It was her job to carve out the happy ending.