The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Read Online Free PDF Page A

from between his lips. He couldn’t swallow.
    She drank deeply, great gulping mouthfuls. Then she pulled off her boots and the socks layered under them. She had lovely, strong feet.
    “We’ll walk in the creek. It’ll throw the dogs off.”
    He sat and watched her feet, white against the black moss on the bank.
    She wished she could hold him, but there wasn’t time. She had to break through his shock. Leaning forward, she punched him in the chest to make him move.
    They waded for a long time. She kept looking for a place to leave the creek. Her feet were numb from the cold water, and it didn’t hurt as much when she slipped and hit her toes.
    Then she saw the long slope of stone. She nodded toward it, and hoped he understood. He said nothing, so she grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the shelf of rock. It hung over the water, and she wasn’t able to push him up.
    Bending double she braced her hands against the rocks on the creek bottom. Her face was close to the running water. “Step up,” she ordered.
    She thought he would say he was too heavy, but he did as she ordered. His weight, all bone and stringy muscle, made her gasp as she tried to lock her knees and keep her back high.
    Then he was up. She stretched out her arms, and he pulled her onto the rock overhang. Her bones struck against it as if there was no flesh, no shirt and pants and coat protecting her.
    “Put on your shoes,” she whispered. The leather might have less scent than bare feet.
    They walked, leaping from stone to stone until it was inevitable. They were walking again on the leaves of the forest. She looked up. The smell of snow was sharp in the air, the coldness making the red warmth of her lungs ache.
    “It’s going to snow.”
    He didn’t answer, but she was becoming more confident. It might be possible. The dogs would have trouble tracking through snow.
    “Why would they bother coming back tomorrow?” he asked. “We’re only two people.” He couldn’t help going on with his ideas. “Why did they bother tracking down Mr. Samuels, who was nearly dead and hiding in the sewage tank? Why did they shoot the boy who sold saccharine candy on the corner of Lipsky Street? Why did they beat my mother and father and brother to death? Why’ve they done any of it?”
    She felt the rage coming up in her body. Why had they lifted her baby and smashed his head against the terrace wall? She didn’t say this aloud. She had told him about her family, her husband dead during the first days of the invasion, but not about the baby. She would have told him, but she couldn’t make her mouth say the child’s name.
    “Fuck why.” He had to stop talking.
    They moved onward. He hoped they weren’t going in a circle, and when they came to another creek, he worried that they had doubled back on themselves.
    “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t think it’s the same one.”
    He had never been in the forest at night.
    “Did you walk in the forests—before?”
    She smiled. “Not this far east. This forest has never been logged. Never. I wandered in the smaller forests in the west.”
    She had told him about it. The big house. The servants. The fields of grain moving like an ocean around the house. Lying in the fields in summer with the straw smell of grain around her. Looking up into the sky and watching the wind move the heavy heads of the wheat, bending them until she would pull one off and chew it. And going by cart with the peasants to watch the logging. The trees falling with shrieks as real as human screams.
    It would have been wonderful to sit down and think for an hour about the past, but there was no way to think about the good parts without having her mind drift to the terrible things.
    “We have to rest,” he said.
    “No. We’ll keep moving until dawn and then sleep. We can’t move safely by daylight.”
    So they kept walking, breaking into a stumbling jog when the brush was thin. They had to rest more often than she liked.