"Afterwards, Gretel Calls It God’s Way of Telling Her to Be an Architect" by Chris Cottom

I fetch her the toy bricks Father made from a fallen hornbeam, but she rolls her eyes, hands me

a slice of castellated krustenbrot, sends me to town for a bushel of ginger. She bakes model

cottages with strudel-work windows, byres with almond-paste oxen, kennels with marzipan

puppies. When her schloss cake collapses from its surfeit of turrets, she simply laughs and

starts again.

Soon she’s building sturdy barns with dumpling mortar, merchants’ houses with

pumpernickel shingles, hammerbeam roofs entirely of pastry. Czars and princes commission

pink meringue palaces for their courtesans, insist on ceilings of soured cream stucco. Yet my

sister sleeps fitfully, mumbling about hearths and roasting spits, stoves and sin. One night I

wake to the stench of burning, find she’s severed her waist-length braid, is feeding it into the

flames as if it's a serpent.

Every Friday, as fog smothers the trees, Gretel clears the table of her drawings and

models, calls Father and me inside. She bids us bow our heads, gives thanks for the forest’s

bounty, for our delivery from evil. Then she fetches a baked replica of a familiar cottage, steam

curling from its chimney, sometimes a line of tiny rats fleeing out the back, always a beaky

figure behind a window. Each week, Gretel lifts her blade, asks the Lord to forgive us our

trespasses, weeps as she cleaves pie and crone with a single cut.

Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work features in 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, Oxford Flash Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Find him at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom