Page 13 of How To Survive This Fairytale

“All right,” she says, offering you a vial full of clear liquid.“One drop every morning, no more than that.The effects wear off after a day.Remember, it’s not a pleasant thing… You’re truly certain?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

With a heavy sigh, she dismisses you.“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Thank you,” you say.

In exchange for the vial, you leave all your coins on the counter, as you promised.

Friend leaves the shop first.Just before you step over the threshold to leave, the apothecary mutters, not quite under her breath: “Your ma must be alousycook.What a world we live in…”

* * *

That night, at the Fair Queen’s feast, the food has no taste or smell.It can’t remind you of anything anymore.It can’t enchant you.It can’t trick you.Mush in your mouth, expanding, clogged against your palate—but then it’s down your throat.Almost nauseating, and disgusting if you think about it for too long.It can’t bring you joy, but at least it can’t harm you.

9.

STOP LONGING FOR BEDS YOU’LL NEVER SLEEP IN AGAIN.

The bedthe Fair Queen affords you is the softest bed you’ve ever known.

You can’t sleep in it.

You try.You really do.Night after night you lay there with Friend at your side, her snout on your ribcage and your arm draped around her.You close your eyes andtry.You count as high as you know how.You empty your head until there’s nothing there.You imagine yourself sinking into a black void.What fun games, says your mind, still whirring, still drawn taut as a bowstring,Let’s keep playing.

Except your mind doesn’t play fair.

Your mind keeps showing you the moment Gretel fell into the oven with the hag.And before that: sleeping in the woods, curled around each other as close as two egg yolks in the same shell.And before that: the straw mattress in your father’s home.You’d give anything to go back to that straw mattress.You’d give anything for your story to have stayed in that home, even if your father didn’t want you there.At least you’d still be with Gretel.At least you wouldn’t know the horrible things you know now.

It’s the knowing that’s hard.

Friend licks your face.You don’t know when you started crying, but now you can’t stop.Her droopy ears flop against your cheeks as she laps up your tears, and you laugh through your weeping, even though you don’t want to laugh at all.You want to lie here mourning Gretel until your heart walks out of your body.You want to lie here missing what it was like to sleep in a huddle with Gertrude and Favorite on the hovel’s dirt floor until the sun rises in the west and three moons appear in the sky.

Even though everything inside of you that matters has been scooped out like pumpkin guts—even then, sleep doesn’t come.

Deep in the night, you drag your quilt to the floor.It’s hard and unforgiving beneath your spine, and that feels right.It isn’t fair for you to sleep in a soft bed while Gretel’s ashes sleep in an oven, tangled up with a witch’s ashes.It isn’t fair for you to sleep in a soft bed while Gertrude sleeps on the ground.You may be leagues away from the sister you chose, but if you look toward your window, you can pretend you’re both looking at the moon.

When you rip open your pillow with your new hunting knife, you pretend the white feathers fluttering around you belong to a swan who has at last transformed into a prince.You can just imagine it: Gertrude throwing a shirt of nettles over his body, all the feathers spilling off of him like water, those feathers funneling around him and sculpting him into a human again.And then maybe—oh, maybe—maybe he’ll turn to you, and maybe you’ll be the first thing his human eyes see, and maybe, from that moment on, you’ll be inseparable.

That daydream picks you up in its feathered arms and carries you to sleep.

10.

BECOME A HUNTSMAN, AS YOUR QUEEN COMMANDS.

Followyour mentor into the woods.

Everything always comes back to the woods, doesn’t it?The place where your father left you.The place where danger first snapped at your heels.The place where witches dwell and lure weary travellers into their magic house snares.It’s always thefuckingwoods, with its dark shadows and monstrous noises, each petrified tree a fang in a maw that already has you in its grasp.

But it’s different with your mentor, this huntsman who bites back.

“I wanted to be a locksmith, you know,” he says.“Found it didn’t suit me, so I decided to learn to hunt.The man who taught me gave me a gun that never missed when fired.An excellent gift, to be sure—I killed three ogres with it—but a lazy gift, too.No, Hansel, you’ll learn the hard way.It’s the only way you’ll know what you’ve got inside you is yours.You can lose a gun, but you can’t lose skill.”

From him you learn how to differentiate old tracks from new tracks, what animals leave what shapes behind, how to spot blood on the grass and how to follow it.He teaches you how to string a bow, how to load a gun, how to aim, and how close a creature has to be before you let an arrow or a bullet fly.How to command Friend to retrieve your quarry and how to make her follow a scent.How to hit a moving target, and where to hit to end it fast.What to do when you meet a wolf, or a bear, or a bobcat, or a lynx.How to follow the sunlight home, how to dress your own wounds, how to find water, how to survive for days and days on your own.How to field dress, skin, debone: fish, deer, foxes, pigs, cows, pheasant, fish.How to be a hunter and a butcher all in one.How not to panic at the sight of blood and how to get used to the tack of it in your palm lines.The sound of each bird.The shape of the leaf on each green thing.How to tell when rain is coming.How to sleep in a tree.

“Look,”he says, “by the time I’m done with you, you’ll be able to put a bullet in the left eye of a fly on the branch of an oak tree two miles away.”

The days spin into weeks, into months, into years, and he teaches you how to be ahuntsman.