The Shape of Hunger

The forest air had a strange air quality here, a strangely sour-sweet-rotting scent you could almost sense in your mouth, as if inhaling the exhalation of a gaunt body. That sickly scent had reached me long before the trees had thinned; I could still smell it wafting toward the undergrowth while the canopy was as dense and unbroken as it had always been. A lazy breeze swept it across the winding and rooted track, snaking serpentine tendrils at the pine needles, skimming the slick quality of the wet moss. It had a sound, too, a susurration that seemed to form words: Come closer. And inevitably, they obeyed. Lost children always do, driven by a naïve belief that this world has kindness.

I padded on the rich, dark loam as my paws sank without sound, on the trail, after me, behind two children, the tiny boy with dirt-streaked cheeks and the girl holding a ragged doll. They followed without question and my form had provided warmth: soft-furred and silvery-blue like an uncertain storm cloud in the face of rain and big, gentle emerald-green eyes. Harmless. The girl had cheap ribbons for her hair, one would be frayed and dangling loose; the boy’s pants were torn at the knees, exposing scabs crusted over dried blood. Hunger had opened a cavity under their eyes like a cutting line in them, honing their cheekbones, yet a frantic, tenuous hope had still shone in them. That’s the worst brutality of hunger — it starves the body but feeds the soul full of absurdities, allowing miracles to appear possible, even imminent.

Deep inside the woods, under a small clearing, hiding behind the dark woods, the witch's house hunched over ominously, glowing golden in the dying sunlight of the sun. A thick stack of frozen sugar cradled its eaves like hoarfrost, its corners soaked with long, trembling amber strands of viscous caramel. Windows splintered, faceted and delicate as sugar candy that turned into spun sugar; roof shingles were shards of gingerbread, baking to a deep, burnished gold they felt like an invitation. But this was no sanctuary. It was a gaping maw — ravenous, patient.

And I was its sleek, guiding tongue.

I wore a crown once, so long ago now. Not the sort sung in ballads where sunlight gilds your hair and nightingales celebrate your passing. No. I was an abandoned prince, a prince whose throne was usurped by a brother’s venomous betrayal, who rode alone through never-ending, whispering forests in search of meaning, or maybe even oblivion. That’s when I came across her — or, I thought, where she took me. She posed as a lost maiden at that time. The bruising purple of violets trampled about her visage, lips white as winter rime.

She whispered she was adrift, like I, just wandering free. I reached for her cold fingers to grasp my hand, then she offered it freely. When she said, "Do you believe in magic?" I breathed, "Yes." Her kiss was my undoing—bones cracking, shrinking, twisting; fur exploding from thin skin as her laughter, slicing through the ice, shattered the stillness. The prince vanished. In his place a Russian Blue loaf blinked with horror.

Now, I served. I was the steward, luring the lost to her bready table, the desperate to her bogus hearth. For me there was only survival … a small portion of breath and bitter consciousness I could not find. I observed. I pushed through.

"It’s... made out of cake," the boy choked the syllables in breath which were thin as silk from his tired thinness and a kind of tremble of disbelief.

“It can’t even be real,” the girl said, but her hand pulled out as if some invisible string pulled it.

She took a cut-toothed shard of the sugary windowpane and yanked it to her tongue. “Sweet!” she screamed, wonder triumphing over caution for a moment.

They laid siege to the structure in frenzied rage from the starving, scrabbling at gingerbread brick and candy mortar. I lay beneath a curled peppermint-stick fence post, tail coiling tight against one flank, a silent witness to the coming doom. With a groan like a dying thing, the door swung inward, flooding the way with a sickly, golden glow.

And she appeared.

This time, my mistress had portrayed a shrunken creature—bent, wizened, leaning on a crutch, her eyes murky and milky-white. Still, her voice hung, tinged with false warmth, heavy as poisoned syrup. “Poor little lambs,” she crooned, that sticky-sweet sound. “So hungry and weary. Go inside, lay your exhausted bones. Warmth and food await. You’ll be safe with me.”

Safe. The term lingered in the sweet air, a sick parody of all comfort.

Within that cottage, deceptive warmth poured its life. The wooden table groaned under the impossible bounty: pancakes sparkling with honey, jugs of milk beaded with condensation; apples shining like polished rubies, nuts stacked high in crystal bowls. The children took plenty, gulping on milk, cramming mouths to their stomachs until they stopped moving, until their eyelids drooped, until the witch’s spell of satiation and profound lethargy penetrated into their bones to an extent as deep as the marrow.

I perched on the cold hearthstone behind the girl’s slumped head onto the sticky tabletop and the boy’s breathing went deep into drugged slumber. The witch’s lips stretched into a wan smile that showed only shadows of stained, needle-like teeth. “Clever little beast,” she whispered, huffing hot and sour air into my ear. “You deserve your milk tonight.”

When she tipped the pitcher over my dish, the liquid was thick and red. I lapped it anyway. I always did. It was the metallic tang that coated my tongue.

In morning gray wafted, thick with burnt sugar and damp ashes, the atmosphere was thick through. The witch dragged him—Hansel, she divined—toward a cage made of blackened iron ribs and yellowed bones. Gretel—the skeptical girl, was assigned to carry out the chores.

“Feed him,” the witch ordered, her milky eyes fixed on Gretel. “Feed him honey cakes and sugared nuts. Fatten him up.”

Days crawled past. The forest went unnervingly silent. Hansel receded into his prison, his trepidations glinting like the petals of a bird cage, and he gritted his teeth and clawed at what scraps Gretel would let pass him. Gretel lost her brilliant hair, its dark strands piling together under the scrutiny of her ghostly eyes.

Every morning the witch hobbled over to Hansel’s cage, her own wrinkled fingers groping blindly for the trembling boy’s wrist. Gripping his forefinger with her claw-like nails, she mumbled, “Bones still, sinew still. Skinny as a twig! Why aren’t you swelling?”

Her fading sight was my advantage — her sole disadvantage.

Each time her bony hand pushed between the bars, I slid a little, sleek chicken bone out very fast from beneath my paw and pressed it against Hansel’s fingertips. The witch’s fingers would rub over it, pinch, frown sharply, shout: “Too thin! Bah!”

Hansel understood fast. He became the frail captive and his voice a lame whimper. Gretel once stared down into my eye, unseen by the witch—a fleeting look where pure horror met unspeakable, silent appreciation. It flickered, then vanished.

Four long weeks crawled by. The witch whirred along, her tattered patience reflecting the sunken pockmarks of her aged, yellowed teeth.

“Enough!” she wailed as she screamed at the low light of dawn. “Plump or pitiful, I eat tonight!”

She flung the iron oven door open, fanning the inferno within as waves of blistering heat enveloped the room like a mocking laugh. “Girl!” she barked, waving a crooked finger. “Test the heat! Lean inside and see!”

Gretel was paralysed, terror in her limbs locking tight. I watched the frantic child's pulse leap in her throat.

The witch’s grin turned predatory and cruel. “Go on, sweetling. Just a quick peek.”

It would have ended there, another bleak conclusion, without the sudden, unmistakable glint beneath the witch’s frayed shawl — the brooch. The cursed, heart-shaped brooch formed of tarnished gold she had worn on the fateful day that she unmade me. The touchstone of her lies, the core of her deceptive magic.

At some deep root, though long buried — the ghost of the prince I had once been — snapped like a stiff wire.

I moved with feline fury. My claws, hot and raw as black-and-cold shards of obsidian, ripped through the faded wool of her shawl, catching the cold metal brooch in my teeth. The witch screamed in a guttural noise like that of an unearthly beast, then spun wildly in my direction toward the stunned Gretel. The brooch seared at my jaw like a biting frost.

“Take it!” I spat, the words mangled, thick with smoke and fur, pushing themselves out past the breaking power of the brooch resonating through me. “Throw! Into the fire!”

Gretel stared, bewildered. “What—?”

“NOW!”

She seized the brooch and tossed it, with every ounce of energy, into the roaring furnace. The brooch howled as it melted, a high blood-curdling wail that pierced in the air. Reality shuddered. The witch’s borrowed mask dissolved like brittle wax — her skin bubbling horribly, eyes bleeding streams of pure molasses. “YOU!” her horrible real voice, slurring with a guttural rasp, directed towards me with utter loathing. “FILTHY TRAITOR!”

She lunged, claws outstretched, but Gretel shoved with fierce willpower. The witch staggered along, headlong into the burning oven’s orange gullet. Her shrieks filled the collapsing house, winding grotesquely into the sounds of breaking sugar, smashing gingerbread, snapping bone.

Then came silence. Profound and heavy.

The gingerbread walls melted, sobbing sugar tears; candy decorations slumped. The entire illusion evaporated and we could only see scorched timbers, black stone, and the terrible smell of ash. Gretel dashed to the cage and fumbled with the flimsy latch. Hansel collapsed, tumbling into her arms.

Suddenly, wisps of crimson smoke gathered around me, and in an instant, I was engulfed in some internal fire, not pain but deep disintegration. The fur faded away, like scuffling skin receding into darkness. My paws formed little fingers, my feline limbs extended into human arms and legs. My voice came out—deep, resonant, obviously my voice.

When the smoke finally cleared, I stood like a lion in the wreckage—a man swathed in the pale blue tunic of a kingdom devoured by treachery. Gretel stared but was a bit open in her mouth. “Who… who are you?”

“A friend,” I answered, my tone halting with disuse yet genuine. “And now, your family, if you will take me.”

They nodded, little, weak muscles inching into place as I held them close — one arm around Gretel’s taut shoulders, Hansel holding out another hand. We briskly walked away from the smoking ruins — the restored prince, the brother saved, the sister shielded — toward a sunrise that smelled not of rotten sweetness, but of fresh pine needles and clean rain — and the pure, strong scent of the freedom they were truly capable of.