Candy for the Children

A fairy tale for nasty, wicked women (that's you)

Chorus: And woman, yea, woman, shall be terrible in story:

The tales too, meseemeth, shall be other than yore.

For a fear there is that cometh out of Woman and a glory,

And that hard hating voices shall encompass her no more!

– Euripides¹

The girl’s fingers are tacky in my own, a mixture of fear, sweat and something else, grime perhaps. The other one, the boy, trails behind us. His eyes are lupine. The thick forest canopy snatches the light and throws it back, dappled, on the loaf of bread that inches towards his mouth. I snatch it off him, stupid boy.

‘Not yet,’ I hiss. I want to wolf it down myself, but my stomach is too shrunk to eat it now, bloated and swollen against jutting bones. My husband walks in front of me, the husband is the head of the wife after all. It is silent but I can hear the scripture. It’s written into the broad planes of his back, the assured easiness of his body, in the way he does not turn to look at me. No matter. Let him think he is in charge. It will make this all easier.   

‘Children,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘Beyond this copse of firs is a small clearing. Mother and I have business in the village, and we cannot take you children with us.’

‘But why?’ The boy, irascible and sharp. Feral eyes shining over a pointed snout. I cannot lie and so I am silent. He watches me.

‘When will you be back?’ The girl, oblivious little thing. She still has sleep in her eye, like food caught in a spider’s web.

‘Before the fire is out,’ says he, ‘So you mustn’t eat all your bread. No one likes greedy children.’

‘Except witches’: the boy again, eyes fixed on me. Maybe he can see it, deep under my skin, the layers my father could not flay. I look at my hands for scales but all I see is pink.

‘There are witches in these woods,’ he says again.  

‘There are no such things as witches,’ I say to the boy, but I know better.

We leave the children beyond the copse of fir trees, two loaves of stale bread in small hands. The boy, smart as he always was, watches us leave without a word. I imagine that you think I am warm and soft, that I kiss his forehead. That I cry and say, ‘I’m sorry, there was no other way. Please, forgive me.’ But I don’t. I am not the maternal type.

I am behind my husband again, transfixed by his loping gait. I don’t feel guilty, but I do feel something. Disgust perhaps, but that could just be the view. He slows and turns to me. We have time and I am not in a rush.

‘Give me a story, Wife,’ he says. His pace is easier now, his steps lighter.

‘What would you hear, my Lord?’

‘Glory. Tell me of my glory.’

I remember when he came to my father’s island wreathed in a halo of glory. I had watched him from my tower window as his corded arms ploughed a field with fire-breathing oxen, then as he felled a dragon and sowed the ground with its teeth. His smile that day was as triumphant as the sun, and I wondered if it would siphon the darkness off me if I basked in his glow. He was a scorching flame and he had lit a future for me that I did not even think possible.

From the shadow of my keep, I helped him achieve his end in ingenious and clever ways; through the maids, I snuck him balms and ointments and pithy prophecies. I would sing him clues wrapped in stories as I braided my hair by the windowsill, wing them down to the base of my tower where he waited with hungry eyes. You could say the glory was ours, but history only remembers his. It remembers me differently.

He returned my maids to me with letters, a boyish scrawl: ‘Sorceress, torment me no longer. Will you not show me your face?’ But which face to show him? For surely, he could not love the red grin that slashed across my mouth in the moonlight.

I dreamed of being with him for the change so that he might see me and love me anyway, but the dream ended the same way each time: the moon rises, he sees how my face melts into scales, my black hair withering into white straw, the dripping burlap sack filled with my shed skin.

Then he does what heroes do when they see a monster. He hacks off my head.

That night, I cut out my womb and offered it to the goddess. I howled her name into the dark and she appeared in front of me, magnificent and terrible.

What could be worth mutilation? she asked.

Love, said I.

Love is a terrible thing, she said, and she gave me an apple, its skin taut and shiny and green. She said I could pass my nights as a woman and not a monster. It would give me the love I sought.

But, she said as she pulled back the apple from my scaled claw. If I accepted her spell, I would be cursed with an insatiable hunger. Could I bear that pain?

Of course, I said, and I ate it. Core and all.

My father let me attend the daytime victory feast (he was a clever merchant and there would be no better opportunity than this) and I was adorned in gold and silks and lapis lazuli.  He, my husband, sat at the centre of the banquet table the way the sun sits at the centre of the universe. Like a flower, I desperately arched my body towards him, attempted to drink him in. His body was the colour of olives, tan face framed by russet locks. That night he laid me on golden fleece, looked at me under the moonlight and asked why I would keep such a face hidden? Then he had me and he had me and he had me and he had me.

We married and sailed to the far side of a distant land, used my dowry to purchase a house by the edge of the forest. At night I slept in his arms, whole and changeless, arms that looked like my own. I imagined his light sinking into my skin, keeping my darkness at bay. Every morning he would turn my head to him and kiss me, why would I keep such a face hidden?

But it did not take long for a ravenous ache to bloom in my belly. I clamped down the pain, focused on how my bones were inside my skin, how soft and pink my fingers were. I palmed my face, felt the flesh on my cheeks, tried not to think of the hidden face that swam beneath my smile. He, my husband, thought the pain was the quickening of a child but how could I tell him what I had done? What use is a woman without a womb?

As time went by and my belly sucked inwards, he was gone longer; there were beasts to be felled, glories to be won, and quests were few and far in between. He stopped kissing me in the morning. In his absence, I began to wilt. Once I found a toy wooden horse in his travelling cloak, small and poorly whittled. I threw it into the fire. Was I not enough? Then one night he asked if I was barren. I said I didn’t want to be a mother and he told me to not be silly for all women were born maternal.

But I was born corrosive.

The rest is as banal as it is expected: my hunger bloomed like mould, impossible to scrape out, and his love for me turned to indifference. Let us see me through his eyes now: I am useless. I am invisible. He does not ask me anymore why I would keep such a pretty face hidden.

Hunger hollows out the belly, but betrayal excavates the chest and I understood that his love for me came with conditions when I saw them together at the wool markets, how her right cheek dimpled when she smiled. She wasn’t invisible and neither was his hunger for her and the way she laughed made me claw at my stomach. I was rebaptised from Wife to Mistress. When his seed quickened and her belly grew, I became Nothing.

Her whelps arrived healthy and hale, first a boy, then a girl. She died after the girl, and my husband had cried over her cold body. But I could only stare at the blood that had sunk into the straw mattress. I licked my lips, sucked at my hollowed cheeks. I was starving. When he handed me the babes I stared into their eyes and thought of putting them into my mouth, swallowing them, before he rechristened me as Mother and I was made whole again. For a time.

You think me a monster for imagining such things. But when the famine struck a few years later and my husband turned his indifferent gaze, the one he reserved for me, upon the babes, was I still the monster? Leaving the children behind was his idea. Hunger makes beasts of us all, and glory is not edible. Besides, the stories say that the childless man is a tragedy, but the childless woman is evil. Will you forgive me, then, for what happens next?

In the forest, he slows, and I see tension written into his back, the intent to unburden, unyoke himself. The thought hasn’t fully formed yet, I don’t think he is even conscious that he wants to kill me, and we look at each other for a moment. I try not to think of the hunger in my belly or the ache for him in my chest. He is still as handsome as the day I first saw him. Reflexively, his rough fingers brush the dirty yellow fleece peeking from under his stained jerkin and I touch the side of his face, run a finger over his cracked lips, kiss him. We could be happy like this, I think before I bludgeon him with a rock from the base of a nearby fir.

Is love not to consume, to return the rib to the flesh? I eat his feet first and then his hands. I eat him part by part so that he may know how it feels to be dismembered. I eat his face quickly (no point being sentimental now) and then I eat his arms and legs. I leave his member, toss it aside so that in death he shall feel what it is to be Nothing. By nightfall I have finished licking his bones, start on the marrow and suck deeply into my aching gut until I begin retching, heaving– I cough up an apple core. As the moon rises, I hear a goddess’ terrible laughter and my body transforms (even women will punish childless women). I shall spare any squeamishness by stating that the transformation is as horrifying as you might imagine. No one ever liked the idea of shucking their own skin to find a monster underneath.

Let us see me through my eyes: I am shame. I am glory. I am vengeance. I am the acid that eats away at metal. I am not Nothing. I am I am I am.

It doesn’t take me long to reach the cottage surrounded by fir trees, the one that smells of cinnamon, star anise and moss. My husband is digesting in my gut, but the hunger is cavernous, insatiable. It has burrowed into me like a worm. It is rooted too deep now. My oozing feet step on breadcrumbs and I see little shadowy figures inside, small voices giggling and the wet sound of eating. By the moonlight my talons wink red, green scales gleaming with oil. I ghost my way past the window, spy the large pot bubbling away by the hearth. Behind the sweet glass, there on the floor is a boy and a girl, covered in powdered sugar.

When I rap my scaled claws on the door, a funeral hush falls over the cottage.

‘Who is it?’ the boy calls.

‘Your mother.’

The children scarper to hide, their hands and feet scraping over the floor in terror. I suck in the sweet smell of broken gingerbread in their sticky paws, and the sharper, more acrid smell of fear. They should not be so afraid, is this not a kindness? I run my purple tongue over my teeth.

Now they shall be a part of me.

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1. Euripides. Medea. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 2000.

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Image: Hansel and Gretel (1859) by Johann Georg Meyer von Bremen