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THE TRUTH ABOUT HANSEL AND GRETEL (WHO NOW GOES BY “HEATHER”)

AND THAT CRAZY WITCH

A Fable Retold in Modern Bop Talk

By Denise Weeks

So, like, everyone has this story totally wrong, and I want to set the record straight.

Yes, once upon a time there actually were these creepy little twins named Hansel and Gretel—you know they’re wack when you hear THOSE names, dog, because normal names are like Typhani and Eethan—and they lived way out in the woods of Tennessee somewhere, or Appalachia, or wherever (what am I, a map?) Anyhow, it was some grotty place where nobody had any shoes and they all married their sisters or cousins and had outhouses and no Wii gaming systems, if you can believe that.

So out there where there was practically no civilization, there’s this widowed woodchopper with two kids who remarries some crazy woman so he can get a little now and then, if you know what I mean, but things weren’t working out too well. For one thing, there was a recession going on and the Fed had just chopped the prime rate like the lumberjacks can split a log, but it hadn’t done any good. And the new wife just had a gastric bypass and she’s starving but she couldn’t eat and she wouldn’t keep any food in the house except potein powder. Her hormones were in quite a state, as you might imagine.

One morning the kids woke up to the sound of chaos and shrieking downstairs in their cabin.

“Food? I must have food!” screamed the verklempt stepmom, running in circles and tugging at her hair, which was really just bad extensions over a failed perm and dye job, and handfuls of it were coming loose, and it was NOT a pretty sight. “Feed me! Feed me!” Like one of those crazy electronic pet things that were so in fashion a few years back that you could never shut off.

But the woodchopper just wagged his finger. “Be strong, Verla Mae. Remember what all you went through to lose that 240 pounds last year. Food isn’t everything, dear.”

“You’re one to talk—I found your hidden Twinkies!”

“I need a bit now and then.”

She bit him.

Things didn’t get better from there, and the two of them got into a real knockdown-dragout complete with sound effects like crashing of china and fingernails down a chalkboard. So Hansel finally said to Gretel, “Let’s get the hell outa here.”

Gretel’s awake. She threw back the covers and she’s totally dressed, like she’d been thinking the same thing. “How? Where do we go?”

“We’ll walk.” He grabbed his backpack and she got her ragdoll and they climbed down the rope ladder they kept in the toy box under the window for sneaking out to the dance clubs at night and off they went, into the deep mysterious Uncharted Wood (Jed Clampett had vacated years ago, and his old place was overrun with kudzu and backwards mice.)

Now Hansel was pretty fat—he should’ve had one of those operations or at least the lap band himself—so Gretel knew he really was desperate. She was really skinny herself, having seen her stepmother struggle so, and she had a dab of anorexia, truth be told (and a membership in Pro-Ana.) She could walk a lot faster than he could, and she kept having to stop to let him catch up. Fortunately, she was a think-aheader, and she was leaving a trail of Reese’s Pieces so they could find their way back out of the forest should the worst happen, such as they might run into a Big Bad Wolf or a Wicked Witch.

“From now on, I’m gonna be called Heather,” she announced. “Gretel sounds like some kind of guttural German skank who scrubs toilets.”

Hansel caught up with her. “What?” he said around a mouthful of Reese’s Pieces. When she glared at him, he went on the defensive. “You dropped these. You wouldn’t have eaten them after they were on the forest floor.”

“Stupe! I’ve been leaving those as a trail to find our way back!”

“Oh.” He bobbled his head like one of those bobble-head things. “Well, I don’t wanna go back.”

“Guess we can’t now.” She made a little noise of exasperation almost exactly like Jessica Simpson makes whenever her sister Ashlee miffs another lip-synch in concert.

So they had to go forward. Deeper in the forest, things got dim and moist. Darkness fell with a little THUD all around Gretel—er, Heather’s feet. “We’re lost,” she said dully.

“No, look!” Hansel pointed to a light between the trees. They followed it to this wack little cottage. A three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath Victorian gingerbread house with a candy cane tree and a soda pop birdbath, all adorned with candies in primary colors.

Gretel/Heather scoffed. “What kind of idiot developer builds ONE house out in a forest? And no community pool?”

But Hansel was fascinated by the idea of a house made of candy. Hansel was a candy fiend. ALL his teeth were sweet teeth. In no time he had eaten a big hole in the side wall and was working on the rock candy window, with Gret—er, Heather pleading for him to stop, but to no avail.

“If only you were neurohemically normal, brother dear.” Wandering inside, Heather called, “ Hello?” Then she looked in the fridge. Empty. “Doesn’t anybody even keep any Jell-O shots?” She stepped back outside to find Hansel in a candy coma. Poking him, she couldn’t rouse him.

Then there was a rustling in the candy tree overhead. Out of its top branches fell a big, awkward, but beautiful hunched-over woman with a nose ring and bridge piercing, holding a broom and wearing a black jumpsuit and pointy hat.

“What’s with the dunce cap?” said Heather, without thinking.

“Authentic wicked witch costume. It’s designer,” she said in a raspy Fannie Flagg voice, swatting at the girl with the broom as she leaped out of the way. “Why are you little delinquents chewing on my house?”

“This is your house?” Heather asked, more to buy time than anything else, as she pulled at Hansel’s coat to try to get him to run away. It was no use: his tongue was stuck to the clear-sugar windowpane.

“Long story. I couldn’t get a mortgage even from a nonconforming lender because of prejudice, and had to resort to calling on Habitat for Witches. It happened that their sponsor and supplier that year was Wonka International. They trucked in all the remaindered Christmas and Halloween candy that hadn’t sold, which by last summer was stale and hard as a rock. But that made it perfect for building a little cottage in the woods. All in all, it worked out pretty well, and I’ve never had termites, only ants.” She frowned and uttered a magic word that froze the children’s feet in place so they couldn’t escape. “Where are your parents? Who are you?”

They introduced themselves, complete with curtsies (actually, Hansel merely belched and fell flat on his butt.)

Hearing their names, the witch said, “That’s so weird. You mean like in
Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel?”

Hansel looked mystified.

Heather folded her arms. “Don’t be ridiculous. He never did opera. His big hit was ‘Please Release Me.’ Speaking of which, how about it?”

“Nice play on words,” said the witch. “But no chance. And furthermore, you’re wrong. That was another guy with the same name. It was his stage name.”

“That’s silly. Why in the hell would somebody change his name to ‘Engelbert Humperdinck’?”

“It was his agent’s idea. Now, be quiet and let me think how best to proceed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re my prisoners.”

“But we’re just little kids.” Heather remembered the tactic used by Stan in the first episode of South Park where he appeals to the aliens to help out a little kid who is just trying his best in the cruel world. She figured it was worth a shot. Pasting on a pitiable expression, she turned her pinafore’s pockets inside-out and held them up like that guy does on the Monopoly money. “We had to run away because we were so hungry. Our stepmother is wacked-out and she used to weigh like warp zillion and now she can’t keep any food in the house and everybody’s starving.”

“I know the feeling,” said the witch, pinching Heather and making annotation on her Crackberry PDA, probably about Heather’s Body Mass Index. “You are indeed too stringy to eat and need to be fattened up. Why aren’t you licking my house?”

“Eeeew, kinky. I’m just not into that. However--“ she kicked her brother, who was rubbing himself indelicately against the gingerbread front door.

The witch pinched his butt. “Wow, he’s way too fatty. More than 30% of calories from fat by weight. Totally have to starve him down.”

Heather fluttered her lashes as a distraction, belatedly remembering that the “just an innocent child” plea hadn’t worked for South Park’s Stan, either. “What are you going to do with us?” She kept thinking this must be some kind of toughlove camp, and in a minute the witch would pull out a Bible (or whatever turned her on) and start preaching to them until they fell over and were converted—Heather could fake it, she was sure.

But the witch was screwed up. “Hate to have to tell you, dear, but guess who’s coming to dinner? The other white meat.”

Heather gasped. “You mean you have like pica or something? That’s this compulsion to eat weird stuff like chalk, paste, and little kids.”

“No, I’m just on the Atkins diet. South Beach. Nothing but protein, protein, protein.”

She waved her hands. “It’s torture, really, to live in the candy that you can’t eat—no carbs on phase one, you know. Protein—you’re what’s for dinner.”

“EEEUWWW!” Heather yanked wildly at her calves, but her feet were unresponsive.

The witch collared both children, lifting them up as if Hansel weren’t a total cow. She hauled them inside and locked them into matching dog crates next to the stove.

Hansel came out of his candy coma as he hit the metal wires and blinked. “Hey! Did you say you’re a wicked witch?”

Preening and polishing her fingernails on her polyester lapel, the witch smiled.

“Technically, yes. Although I’m not one of your ugly versions. I’m more of an attractive nuisance.”

“Just thought I’d ask. Seeing that broom, I thought you were the cleaning lady,” he said. But you’re a bad witch.”

“We prefer the term ‘neo-sorceress,’ but basically, yes.”

“Then you’ve got all kinds of magic powers?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Can you turn red lights green? Breathe fire and smoke?”

“That’s overrated. It just gave me reflux.”

Hansel persisted. “But you can summon demons?”

“I never thought to try that. Let’s see.” She grabbed up this twisted old staff that had fake emeralds and rubies glued all over it—on second look, Heather saw that they were actually hard candies, probably cinnamon and that green mint flavor that burns your tongue but is supposed to make you have really good breath—and started waving it around. “Abracadabra! Hey Presto! Yo, demons. Come to big mama!”

A bluebird popped into the air and landed delicately on the tip of her duncecap, er, hat.

Hansel doubled over laughing. “Some witch!”

“I meant to do that,” the witch said defensively, hopping up and down on her stilettos. Never mind. I’ll show you some real magic.” She started waving the wand and yelling every known magic word. “Open sesame. Toora-loora-loora. Nine-eleven!” An entire flock of bluebirds were soon flying around and singing, making the witch a new dress out of ribbons and white taffeta, er, taffy.

When the witch brushed at the skirt, her hands got covered with stretchy stuff not unlike strings of melted cheese off an extra-cheese deep-dish pizza. “This is sticky—gross!” She waved the staff to shoo them away and poked it high into the air. “Give me something larger!”

A white duck appeared at her feet. No, it was a goose.

“There, see? The goose that lays the golden eggs!” she cried in triumph.

“No way, lady. That was just a fairy tale,” the goose informed her, heading outside to peck for stray kernels of corn.

“You won’t find anything but candy corn,” Hansel said, sucking his thumb. “You know, I taste pretty good.”

The witch was taking all this personally, Heather could see. Yelling every cussword the woodchopper had ever said and then some, in various combinations, she circled the room, spinning the staff. This only made matters worse, because every word popped into being as a cheeky, mischievous brownie-elf about a foot tall. As they appeared, they giggled. It was the sound of a pissed-off Singer sewing machine with a defective bobbin. The witch jumped up and down hollering, and every stomp produced a little fairy about six inches tall with Tinkerbell wings.

“Dispel! Undo!” she cried. “Begone! Damn you, get out of here!”

“We don’t THINK so,” chorused the magical critters. Taking a good look up and down her, they nodded decisively. “She’s defective! No warning label!”

Fairy dust sprayed out over her, paralyzing her and knocking her over. Picking up her prone form the way ants would heft a picnic basket, they headed for the oven.

The witch sounded panicked. “I have a soufflé in there. You’re going to make it fall!”

“And that’s not all.” They shoved her into the oven, but it wasn’t rated for Witch-Burning temperatures, and it set the place on fire. Laughing, the creatures joined hands and danced in a circle, then started streaming out the window with the empty pane where Hansel had eaten it.

“Help! Wait!” Heather flailed her arms and wailed. “You can’t leave us here to flambé!”

The brownies utterly ignored her (probably because she’d been a Camp Fire Girl instead and hadn’t even bought any Girl Scout cookies), but fairies streamed over to each cage and worked their magic to flip the latches and free the children just in time. The twins crawled out through the crumbling gingerbread door just as the house started stinking like toast does when it’s getting all charred and black, and the hard candy began melting down the walls like mascara running down a pop singer’s face.

“Too bad about her,” said Hansel, mouth full of toasted marshmallows off the windowsill trim. “She seemed like a nice enough sort.”

The goose, pecking in the yard, hit a hollow spot that suddenly collapsed. “Aflak!” it quacked as it jumped into flight, shedding a pillowful of feathers.

Heather peeked into the sinkhole. It was where the witch had kept her stash. “Look!” she called to her brother, and both of them dug down through the candy-corn dirt to fill their pockets with the good stuff. Heather figured it had a street value you wouldn’t shake a magical staff at.

A siren blatted out. The fire department roared up in a Clydesdale-drawn sleigh. “You little vandals set the house on fire!” yelled the head fire dude, an angry-looking gnome. “And you looted the place,” he added, sticking his hands in their pocketses. “Street drugs—that’s good for at least a misdemeanor.”

And so the children were hauled away to the Authorities, who were not sympathetic to their explanation. “Witches! Imagine, such nonsense. Just for lying, we’ll throw away the key!”

They got thrown in juvie hall, as they couldn’t be tried as adults for doing in “that poor eccentric little old lady.” Hansel soon became a favorite of the large mean boys, changed his name to Ben Dover, and when he got out became famous as one of those fashion guys who has a TV show telling women what not to wear. Heather changed her name back to Gretel and started writing erotic romances that she sold to an e-book publisher. She made so much money that she bought her way out of the place early and now makes a good living writing reality shows for Fox TV.

So that’s the REAL skinny, and don’t say I didn’t tell you straight. t

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