The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  While Esme still worked in the café, before the disease had been diagnosed, Scarlet had been set to go on to sixth form, with the vague notion of pursuing a career in chemistry. The idea of sitting in a lab and blowing things up—which is how she liked to imagine she’d spend her time—seemed like a perfect career goal. She didn’t particularly mind that it had never come to fruition, since it’d only been an idea in the absence of any others. And she still found the kitchen a satisfying alternative to a laboratory. Admittedly, the bubbling alchemy of baking soda with water was tame in comparison to, say, the explosive satisfaction of red phosphorus with potassium chlorate, but it still remained rather magical nevertheless.

  Scarlet had noticed the signs only slowly. At first, Esme started forgetting the names of simple things: a plate, the fridge, cinnamon buns. Then she started losing things and finding them again in inappropriate places: her car keys in the freezer, a pint of milk in the bathroom cabinet, a teaspoon in the till among the five-pound notes. Still, Scarlet didn’t say anything to her grandmother. She didn’t want her fears confirmed, she hoped that the symptoms would disappear—like a spider in the bath that, if left long enough, will eventually fall foul of the plughole.

  Finally, neither Scarlet nor Esme could ignore it any longer. So Esme went to the doctor and the worst was confirmed. And Scarlet surrendered to the fact that baking cakes was as exciting as her science experiments were ever going to get.

  10:58 p.m.—Bea

  In addition to her unnervingly empowering experience in the library—slipping seamlessly into her ink-veined skin in a perfect alignment of body and soul—Bea has started noticing things. Things that make her wonder, with all evidence to the contrary, if her mamá’s tales might be true. Or, at the very least, born of a tiny kernel of truth. Rationally, it’s impossible. Yet Bea is now being forced to expand the boundaries of what she believes possible.

  Lately, Bea has found that she knows what people are going to say before they say it. Not word for word, but the general gist. She thinks of people just before seeing them. And, last week, she predicted almost every question on her moral philosophy paper, a phenomenon that might have been put down to studious diligence except that she’d dreamed of them the night before. Such experiences are still a far cry from the dark premonitions her mamá claims, but they’re nonetheless inexplicable.

  As a result, Bea, much to her dismay, has found herself seeking out certain gates, studying them for anomalies, signs that they might not be exactly as they appear. She’s stopped short of trying to walk through one at 3:33 a.m., though she isn’t sure whether this is because she draws the line at endorsing her mamá’s fantastical notions about fantastical worlds, or because the moon won’t be in the right phase again until 1st November. Still, if she happens to find herself with nothing better to do that night, she might give it a try.

  “When you were a child you could do all that in your sleep,” her mamá says, when she calls, which she does more often than Bea would like.

  “So you keep saying,” Bea says. “I wish you’d stop, you’re making me feel inadequate.”

  “¿Por qué? It should be the opposite. Just wait and see.”

  “I’ve no memory of these things and no evidence of them now, so . . .” Bea shrugs. “I’m only left with the gap between who you say I am and who I feel myself to be.”

  “Stop shrugging,” her mamá says. “It’s bad for your posture.”

  “Stop nagging,” Bea says. “And I’m not.”

  “Lie to anyone you like but not to me,” Cleo says. “You only demean yourself. Besides, it’s fucking annoying. ¡Por amor al . . . demonio!”

  “You’re fucking annoying,” Bea says, wanting to hang up. “And I don’t know why you persist in telling me these ridiculous stories—anyone would think you’re raring to return to Saint Dymphna’s. I’d have thought you’d had enough of that place.”

  Her mamá is silent.

  “You’ll be back there if someone overhears you,” Bea says, unable to resist twisting the knife. “They’ll think you’ve flipped.”

  “That’s because most people have zero imagination and even less intelligence,” her mamá says. “If you walked them through a gate, if you held their hand till dawn, they’d still claim it’d all been a dream. ¿Entiendes? If they saw a spike of blue light in their black-and-white worlds, it’d blow their tiny mortal minds. If they saw anything extraordinary, they’d rationalize it into dust.”

  Bea rolls her eyes.

  “¡Deja!” Cleo snaps. “Stop disrespecting me.”

  “I’m not,” Bea says, annoyed at her mamá’s uncanny ability to know exactly how she’s reacting, even when they’re talking on the phone.

  “You know, I much preferred you when you were younger.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “Well, I did. And I’ll say it again. I can’t wait till you turn eighteen and I finally get my daughter back.”

  Bea starts to roll her eyes again, then stops.

  11:11 p.m.—Leo

  Leo likes to walk the streets of Cambridge at night, especially when the colleges are bursting at the seams with students, their thoughts seeping through the ancient stones, tumbling from every open window and door, drifting through the air like bonfire smoke. He breathes in their desires, their disappointments, their despair.

  Unlike London, here the streets are usually empty late at night, save for a few lone wanderers, and a few too many huddled down to sleep in shop fronts.

  Light spills onto the pavements, illuminating the residents within. Leo wonders who they are, these people whose thoughts he can hear but whose names he doesn’t know. Behind one window, he senses a Grimm girl, one with strengths and skills still dormant, with no idea yet of who she is or what’s to come.

  Most of all, he thinks of Goldie, wondering what happened to her afterwards at the hands of her boss. He’ll find out tomorrow. He hopes she didn’t take any shit from the jumped-up little toad; he hopes she gave as good as she got, hopes she bit off his tiny dick. He smiles when he thinks of her reading his diary. Fortunately he hadn’t written anything incriminating, or he’d have lost his all-important upper hand: the element of surprise.

  Over a decade ago

  Everwhere

  As you step outside the gates you notice the shift. It’s so subtle that, at first, you hardly perceive it. But, as you begin to leave Everwhere behind, as the scent of bonfires no longer lingers on your skin, as your eyes adjust to the sharper light—feet quickening on concrete instead of moss, ears twitching at the close honk of a car horn and the distant bark of a dog—you notice that you feel a little duller, a little denser, a little sadder. Your head feels heavy, as if you haven’t been sleeping well. Something niggles at you, as if you’d recently received bad news but can’t quite recall what it was.

  As you walk deeper into the world you’ve always known, this place where the bricks and mortar are so familiar, the shift feels ever stronger, more acute. The contentment you had felt, the calm, the clarity, is evaporating. The touch of sadness presses on your chest until it seems to pierce your core. Steadily, you feel as if your spirit, every memory of laughter, every capacity for joy, is being sucked out of you, just as clouds leech light from the sky.

  You want to turn back, want to run to the place you’ve left, but you know you cannot. There’s no going back, not until the next first-quarter moon, not until the gates open again. And so you walk on. Until you no longer notice the dull ache of disappointment and sorrow, for now it’s as much a part of you as the blood flowing in your veins. And, after a while, you forget how you once felt. And, finally, you forget that you were ever there at all.

  Goldie

  “You know I only want to keep you safe, don’t you, pet?”

  I nodded. I wanted to tell Ma to stop calling me that. I wanted to ask, Safe from what? But I sensed it’d unleash a hysterical flood of fear I didn’t want to deal with. Whenever Ma was in this sort of mood it was easier to
agree with everything and wait. So I tuned out, took a deep breath, and dived under the waters, while currents of anxiety swirled above as Ma chattered on.

  I wished I could tell Ma I’d be fine, there was nothing to worry about because I could take care of myself. I wanted to tell Ma about my sisters, about what I could do in Everwhere. But I knew she’d dismiss me as a silly girl having fantastical dreams or, worse, subject me to a regurgitated lecture on the infinite perils of life. So I held my breath and kept quiet.

  “Why don’t I tell you a story?” Ma asked, reaching out to twine a finger through my hair. She had blond hair like mine but with a fine fuzz of close-cut curls that gave her a halo effect, a saintly look that sometimes belied her behaviour. “A new one.”

  I flinched. I didn’t often like her stories, but I never knew how to say so. Ma told stories to scare me into staying safe, into never doing anything audacious. She didn’t want me to have adventures, to fall—or fly—over the edges of expectation. One day I would—not under Ma’s custodial eye, but when I was old enough I knew I’d leave. Leave home and go to London, or even farther. Perhaps I wouldn’t even come back.

  Maybe I’d return one day, when I’d been away long enough to miss Ma. But only when I’d seen as much of the world as it was possible to see. Nothing Ma said would change that; no matter how many sad stories she told, it wouldn’t stop me from running away as soon as I could. I’d already learned that when apron strings were tied too tight, it only made the captive child fight all the harder to flee.

  But Ma was a good storyteller, there was no denying that. As a baby, I was wrapped in words as snugly as I was swaddled. But they were silly stories of girls whose only desire was to wed, lonely girls who longed for husbands and homes, for expanding families to whom they could dedicate their lives. Boring stories. I tried not to roll my eyes at their beginnings and I never cared to know how they’d end. But, even though the tales were so dry their dust stuck in my throat, the way Ma told them was still enchanting, which meant I couldn’t help but listen to the words weave together, wrapping strands of sentences through my fingers and hair.

  “Tell me the story of my birth instead,” I said.

  “Oh, pet.” Ma laughed, pulling me into her lap. It was always a bit strange, sitting in my mother’s lap, since she was so small, almost as small as a child. As if she’d decided at thirteen that she couldn’t spare the effort to grow any taller. It wouldn’t be long before I was as tall as Ma. “I’ve told you that one a hundred times.”

  “I don’t care, I love it.”

  “No, tonight I have a different story,” Ma insisted.

  “Okay,” I said, thinking that maybe this time it’d be different.

  Ma smiled, hugging me tight. “All right then, pet. This one’s called ‘Rapunzel.’”

  “I know this one,” I said.

  “No,” Ma said. “Not this version you don’t.”

  I shrugged, pulling away slightly, so there was still an inch of air between us.

  “Once upon a time there lived a queen who longed for a child,” Ma began. “Unfortunately, though she tried every trick and spell to conceive, the queen remained barren.

  “One day a dark fairy came to the kingdom promising he could give the queen what she most desired. After casting his spell the fairy issued a warning, that the queen must not try to possess that which could not be possessed. ‘Love that is craved too deeply,’ he advised, ‘love that is born of bright-white wishing and black-edged desire, will bring more sorrow than joy.’

  “Within a year, the queen gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whom she named Rapunzel. And, happily, the queen found that the fairy had been quite wrong, for Rapunzel only brought her greater joy with every day that passed. She’d never loved another soul so completely, nor been so deeply loved in return.

  “By the time the princess turned thirteen, the queen had forgotten the fairy’s warning. However, now that she was older, Rapunzel frequently left her mother’s side and began to love others. She had many friends and was courted by princes from every kingdom. Soon, the queen became scared.

  “‘Do you still love me?’ she asked every night. ‘Do you still love me as I love you?’

  “‘I do,’ Rapunzel always replied, for she did.

  “But the queen didn’t believe her daughter and, one day, locked her up in a tower so Rapunzel could see no one else. Every night, the queen repeated her plea. Finally, Rapunzel stopped saying that she loved her mother in return, for now she found that she didn’t as she had done before. She begged her mother to free her, for she longed to see the world. But the queen could not let her daughter go.

  “One night, the dark fairy visited the queen, reminding her of his warning. ‘If you do not let her go,’ he said, ‘she will soon grow to hate you.’

  “‘I don’t care,’ the queen said, ‘so long as she stays.’

  “‘Then you no longer love her,’ the fairy said.

  “The queen was devastated. After all, had any mother ever loved her daughter more? She kept a vigil outside the tower, ensuring that the dark fairy never returned. Yet every day the queen saw that Rapunzel’s sorrow only grew and every night she heard her daughter weep louder than the night before. Until, one day, the queen was suddenly filled with regret and released Rapunzel.

  “Delighted to finally be free, Rapunzel fled to the edges of the earth, leaving the queen to mourn the love she’d lost and pray every night that her daughter would one day return. As the years passed and the queen grew pale and thin with grief, still she never lost hope that her daughter would come back. At the other end of the world, Rapunzel felt the pull of her mother’s longing and fled farther still.

  “One winter’s eve, when the queen was at last on her deathbed, she sent word to bring her daughter home. Rapunzel, shocked by the news and suddenly sorry for all that she’d done, took the fastest ship bound for the kingdom and prayed that she would reach her mother in time.

  “Sadly, Rapunzel arrived too late, for the queen had died a few hours before. Filled with regret, and blaming herself for her mother’s death, Rapunzel never again left the castle. Every night she locked herself in the tower and wept for the love she’d lost and would never find again.”

  Ma fell silent then, probably expecting me to speak. I said nothing. I tried not to cry. I tried my hardest. But I couldn’t help it. I stiffened, squeezing my eyes shut as tears fell down my cheeks. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I hated myself for crying, for not having the gumption to brush the fallen sentences from my shoulders, the way I shrugged off Ma’s too-tight hugs. But I couldn’t. I was only seven, after all, and the stupid story seeped into my stupid soft heart despite my every effort to keep it out. And the stupid story wasn’t even true. In the mouth of a lesser teller it would have sounded silly and stale, but not in Ma’s mouth. In her mouth it only sounded true. Ma told me that story over and again until I had every word memorized. And the apron strings tied themselves ever more tightly around my wrists.

  Scarlet

  The timer on the oven sang—Scarlet’s favourite sound. She dashed across the kitchen floor and pressed her nose to the glass.

  “Grandma,” she called. “They’re ready!”

  “Then take them out,” her grandmother called back across the kitchen. “Don’t let them burn.”

  She was the only one who permitted Scarlet such responsibilities. Scarlet’s mother wouldn’t let her close to the oven, let alone allow her to remove piping-hot cakes from within.

  Glancing about, Scarlet grabbed for a dishcloth with one hand and tugged at the oven door with the other. In truth, she didn’t need the cloth, since her hands never seemed to feel the heat, but she suspected that her grandmother (who always used two dishcloths—one for each side) might think it strange if she pulled out the tray with bare fingers.

  Scarlet loved the rush of warmth at opening the oven door. Sometimes she had to suppress a longing to climb in and join the cinnamon buns within. But sh
e’d read “Hansel and Gretel” and wouldn’t do anything so stupid. Scarlet heard her grandmother’s sigh of pleasure as the scent of sugar and spice wafted across the kitchen to where she was mixing the crumpet batter.

  “Heavenly,” her grandmother said. “You know, your grandfather used to bake those for me every Sunday morning while we danced in the kitchen to Bessie Smith. And sometimes . . .”

  “Sometimes what?” Scarlet asked, as she set each bun on the cooling rack.

  “Oh, nothing.” Esme smiled. “I should wait till you’re older before I tell you such things.”

  “I’m nearly eight, Grandma.” Scarlet set her hands on her hips. “I think that’s quite old enough.”

  Esme laughed, dipped her finger into the bowl, and licked at the peak of crumpet batter slowly. In certain ways her grandmother did Scarlet the honour of treating her like an adult; in others it was as if she were still a baby. When and how was unpredictable.

  “Come and taste this.”

  Scarlet scurried over, mouth already open. Her grandmother bent to offer up a spoonful of the batter. Scarlet tasted it thoughtfully.

  “Needs a pinch more salt,” she said, echoing a phrase she’d heard her grandmother say many times before.

  Her grandmother added a pinch of salt to the bowl. “Yes, I thought so too.”

  Scarlet watched, thinking the things she would never admit out loud: how she wished Esme was her mother instead of Ruby, how she wanted to live in the flat above the café and eat cinnamon buns for breakfast every day, how she never wanted to go home. Scarlet’s other secret wish was for siblings, but, sadly, she was sure that was yet another wish that would never come to pass.