Home Sweet Home

Gretel couldn’t fault a child for having a sweet tooth. Not unless they knew the rules. “Sir, the warning signs are plain,” she was saying. “Guests may only consume portions of the home in the indicated areas, and nothing may be eaten after dark.”

Mr. Schwartz held up a small stone painted with a peppermint swirl. It had nearly choked his son. “This is a misrepresentation,” Mr. Schwartz said. “A trick. We were promised the most whimsical experience in all of the Rhineland.” Whimsical did not begin to describe the eccentric cottage that Gretel called home: gingerbread walls jointed with icing, windows made from crystalized sugar, a floor build of solid chocolate planks and pinned down with peppermint nails. And all of it held together by a magic so strong that not an inch would ever crumble or melt.

The Schwartz family, with their angry frowns and their drab grey and brown clothing in the Cologne style, did not at all look at home in such a place. Even the boy had a scowl for Gretel, sulking with his injured jaw.

“Please understand,” Gretel said. “This cottage was built in an old, traditional style. Originally it was quite small. The rented room is a false addition, built to accommodate guests and decorated in the style of the original home. Yet these decorations are purely an atheistic--not edible certainly.” And decorated fairly well, Gretel thought, if her painted stone had tempted the boy.

“I see,” said Mr. Schwartz. “Then properly we should have received an original room.”

“I’m afraid the only spare room belongs to my brother,” Gretel said, “and he is off fighting the French. I won’t rent it in his absence. It’s simply bad luck.”

Her mention of the war seemed to mollify Mr. Schwartz’s temperament. Gretel took it as an opportunity to redirect the conversation before things could escalate further. She suggested they take tea in her sitting room before returning to bed--drinks but not food, as per the rules. Mrs. Schwartz picked up the conversation for her now silent husband. “Is this sitting room also one of your additions?” she asked, indicating the partitions which enclosed the area.

“Why, yes.” Gretel touched the wood, a simple framing yet inset with fanciful carvings of castles and rolling countryside. “Anything to put my own mark on this place. Its eccentricities can lose their charm over time.” As she spoke, the Schwartz boy reached toward a plate of cookies set on the table from the night before--real ones, the type which normally adorned the cabinets.

“My apologies,” Gretel said, tossing a napkin over the plate. “It’s a... peculiar kind of magic which sustains this place. During the daylight hours we are free to eat any portion of the home. Under those circumstances whatever we consume will have regrown by morning. Not so for anything eaten after dark.” She motioned to a gingerbread beam nearby which was missing a bite-size chunk.

Mr. Schwartz held a cookie up. “This does not look load-bearing,” he said.

“Rules are rules, Mr. Schwartz,” Gretel said. “The rules do not specify that it is only the house which may not be eaten, rather that nothing may.”

“But they are your rules.”

Gretel declined to answer.

Mr. Schwartz tossed the cookie away. “Let us discuss something meaningful. The boy has a chipped tooth. I would like compensation. A reduction of our bill, perhaps?”

“I’m afraid I can’t oblige,” Gretel said. “The levies for the war are quite large this near to the front. Surely you understand.” And yet she couldn’t have the Schwartz family badmouthing their stay, not with the expansions she and Hansel had planned. Ten matching houses: built per Gretel’s design in the large clearing behind the candy home. Future guests could sleep in these new lodgings so that main home could be kept private. Then they could avoid these kinds of incidents. Not to mention how much more money they would bring in with the additional guest capacity.

“Then compensation of a different form,” Mr. Schwartz suggested. “Perhaps vouchers for additional stays? But they must be transferable. I would sell them to recoup my loses.”

Gretel sighed. “I suppose that is agreeable.” It wouldn’t be quite the same as money out of her pocket, and in a way it would be free advertising.

“Excellent,” Mr. Schwartz said. They shook hands. Gretel shook her head to herself as she stepped away to find ink and paper. Renting to a single guest a time, while it allowed her to charge a higher rate, attracted entirely the wrong sort of people. She’d rather be boarding regular folk in need of only a warm hearth. She would have that once Hansel returned; his pay from soldering would provide the initial investment of materials for the new construction, and their own hands would provide the labor. On her kitchen counter sat a row of intricately crafted gingerbread homes: scale models of different cottage designs Gretel had in mind for the expansion. She and Hansel would finally have the main house all to themselves, just like it used to be. Unless...

Gretel smiled to herself. When Hansel left on campaign, he had a notion that he might meet a nice French girl. They knew the language unlike most Germans, thanks to their mother. She looked to the Schwartz family, sitting peacefully in the little alcove. Gretel imagined little nieces and nephews. Or if the French girl didn’t work out, perhaps they could take in a few orphans, as she and Hansel had been. Gretel didn’t mind children, really, not as long as they followed the rules.

“Ow!” The boy shouted and grabbed at his lip. “This cookie hurt me!”

His father rolled his eyes. “Give your jaw a rest, you oaf. Haven’t you had your fill of sweets?”

“No, it bit me!”

“Oh dear,” Gretel said, helpless as the little gingerbread person in the boy’s hand--the same cookie he had tried to sneak a bite of--climbed up his sleeve and went on the attack.

When Gretel mentioned the war with France, she had caught a look in Mr. Schwartz’s eyes like a longing--a regret that his age kept him from doing his duty to his country. Perhaps he lied awake some nights, imagining himself single-handedly pushing the French back on their side of the Rhine. Or if not himself, then perhaps his son a few years hence--everyone expected the war to drag on that long. And yet none of these imagined battles could have prepared Mr. Schwartz for the sight of his son being savaged by a pastry.

For her part Gretel ought to have seen this coming. She cursed her oversight, moving quickly to make an attempt at snatching the gingerbread person off the boy’s arm. The boy’s flailing made Gretel’s task difficult. The cookie hung tightly to the puff of the young man’s collar, pinching at the nape of his neck until his panic sent him running circles around the table. Somewhere amidst this ruckus Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz found their wits, if not enough of them to make an intervention, then at least enough to stand and demand explanations. Gretel didn’t have any good ones. At once the boy lost his footing and slammed headlong into Gretel’s partition. The cookie lost its grip on the boy’s collar and went sailing across the room. There the boy lay, blubbering, and wishing, Gretel guessed, that he’d bitten off the cookie’s head when he’d had the chance.

“The devil take your vouchers,” Mrs. Schwartz said, “and this home along with them!” She and her husband snatched up their startled boy and together the family made their escape.

“The magistrates will hear of this!” Mr. Schwartz shouted as they fled. Down the lane they went, forgetting their baggage and without so much as shutting the door. Gretel closed it herself then pressed her forehead against the gingerbread. She thudded it against the grain in frustration. In syncopation came the soft patter of tiny feet on the chocolate floor: the witch Agatha, trapped in a tiny gingerbread body.

“May I ask,” Gretel said to the approaching witch. “Just what you imagine Mr. Schwartz will say about us after returning to Frankfurt? Or did that even enter into your chewy brain?”

“I imagine the same thing he would do in any situation,” Agatha said. “Whatever is the cruelest or nastiest thing a person could do, without requiring a great deal of effort. Will he speak ill of us? Yes. But he would have done the same whether you gave him any concessions or not.”

“Perhaps,” Gretel conceded, “But would his negative review have included tales of a black magic using innkeeper who unleashed her cookie familiars to torment his family?”

Agatha dismissed the rebuke with the wave of a gingerbread hand. “So his tale gets a little bigger in the telling, and folk believe it even less. Anyways it doesn’t matter. They broke the rules: the boy ate after dark. Worse, he tried to eat me.”

“No, the boy tried to eat a painted stone. If he had really taken a bite out of you, you’d be standing here in his body instead of arguing with my ankles.”

“He broke the spirit of the rules,” Agatha said, putting the argument to a close. These were Agatha’s house rules, and she had the final say in their interpretations. Stretching the wordings was within her purview. All Gretel could do was make the warning signs more specific. Certainly, this would not be the last time Agatha tried to catch one of Gretel’s guests breaking the rules. For sure the witch had hidden herself in that plate of cookies on purpose, hoping that the boy would take a bite out of her and so put himself into her power.

Originally the entire house had been one of Agatha’s traps: a bait for lost children with hungry bellies and in need of place to sleep. She and Hansel had been those lost babes once upon a time. Agatha had been a straw-haired old woman then--a human woman made of flesh and bone, if not still a bit crumbly from her age. The witch had bid them come in to eat their fill. Then just before bedding them down for the night, Agatha had whispered in passing, ever so quietly, that her house rules forbade eating anything after dark. To keep the bedding clean, ostensibly. A simple rule and easy to follow, but how many children could resist the temptation? Few, the cruel witch knew, and when children did eat of the house after dark the Old Magic gave her permission to punish them as she saw fit. And what better punishment than to switch bodies with the rule-breaking child? In this way the witch had extended her natural life years upon years, for a time hiding in that other place where witches go when they are still young, then when she was old reappearing into empty forest clearings with the candy home, and always where lost children were sure to find her.

Simple luck had saved Gretel and her brother from the same fate. Hansel had never cared for sweets in particular, and so he had eaten very little of the candy home despite the witch’s urgings. That night he lay awake in bed chewing on a strip of leather, easing his hunger pains. Chewing, but not swallowing. That was an important distinction as the Old Magic goes. Just then the old witch burst into their room. In her haste and in envy of their young bodies, Agatha did not look closely at what Hansel was chewing. She snatched him up by his hair, screaming, Ah-ha! Now I have you naughty child! The witch dragged poor Hansel out of his bed, beating at his legs with a thin wood switch, crackling and screeching all the while.

But the Old Magic had a thing or two to say about punishing children who didn’t deserve it. With that act, all of Agatha’s oaths were broken. Her shambling clothes fell to the floor in a sloppy pile. Her old bones turned to dust leaving only her glowing spirit to flap about like a bird trapped inside of doors. With no replacement body her soul was forced to settle on the closest thing at hand: a gingerbread man cookie she had left baking in the oven. That cookie had been her prison ever since.

Gretel slumped into her sitting chair, tired from the late hour yet her mind awake with worries. She frowned at seeing where the boy’s head had cracked her wall. He’d put a hole in her castle as if he were battering ram. “What do you want from me, Agatha?” she asked aloud. “I’m not unkind to you. I’ve done my best to make you feel at home.” She gestured to the scale-model houses on the countertop. They had been built for the witch’s comfort as much as for planning the renovations.

Agatha climbed the miniature staircase carved around the base of the end table. At the summit she sat upon a sewing cushion, then drew out a small tobacco pipe carved from a chicken bone. “I want what I have always wanted,” she said, ”I want you to eat me. You’ve put twenty years on that body, but I figure it’s still got twenty good years left.”

“For the tenth time, for the hundredth time,” Gretel said, “I’m not going to eat you.”

“Then find someone who will.” And because Agatha already knew Gretel’s answer to that, she quickly added, “Or become my apprentice. There’s a lot of magic locked into this old house. It was never meant to exist for so long on this form. It’s getting restless just sitting around, re-growing the same bits of candy day after day. Have you noticed it’s repairing itself more slowly?”

Gretel had noticed and nodded. “Why does it do that?” she asked.

“Because it’s bored.”

“Magic can get bored?”

The witch shook her gingerbread head. “Of course it can--next ask me if a sow can fart. And when the magic gets bored enough it will leave. With it go the spells which keep this sticky hut from melting in the sun. The sugar windows will melt. The furniture will fall through this improbable chocolate floor. And the bugs...” She shuddered. “Wards keeps them away now, but if the Old Magic stops working this place will be swarming with them like ants on... well, I guess that goes without saying.“

Gretel could imagine it and she didn’t like the imagining one wit. The witch had never shared this information. Not having known something so essential about the workings of her own home made Gretel almost angry. Then another implication struck her. “What will happen to you when the magic fails?”

“Me?” The witched seemed to not have considered. “I suppose I’ll start to get stale, maybe get a bit crumbly. That’s if the ants don’t get me first.” She reached out to pat Gretel’s hand. “But none of this need come to pass. Not if I pass the title of Master of the House onto you. Then you can make your own rules. The magic will be refreshed, and all will be right.”

“Let me guess,” Gretel said. “In order to pass the title you need a human body.”

The old witch’s smile told Gretel she’d guessed correct. “That or die and leave the house unclaimed. Don’t get any ideas though. It’s a tricky business trying to convince a house you’re in charge. There’s always a few rooms who won’t listen.”

Agatha bade Gretel to give the notion some thought, taking her own leave. “They needn’t be innocent,” the witch suggested. “I know you don’t have it in your nature to lure some sweet babes to their doom. Give me a murderer. Get me some miser half into his grave.”

“Or a Frenchman?” Gretel asked, jokingly.

“Or a Frenchman too. Maybe Hansel can smuggle us one in a sack. Just get someone in this house and have them break a rule. And a little appetite for gingerbread wouldn’t hurt either.” She gestured to her own body, grinning with her icing smile as she bid Gretel goodnight.