The Sisters Grimm

by Menna Van Praag

  Red Riding Hood

  Once upon a time there was a girl who always dressed in red. Every day, no matter the weather, she wore a blood-red cloak her mother had made. In summer she’d sweat, but she didn’t care. She often sweated in winter too, since she was always hot, as if fire flowed through her veins instead of blood.

  Little Red Riding Hood, as the townsfolk called her, was a timid girl. But when she wore her cloak, she felt brave. When she wore it to school, the other children didn’t tease her. When she wore it to the bakers, she was offered the best price for bread. When she wore it to bed, it kept nightmares at bay.

  One day Red’s grandmother fell ill. Red’s mother made a pot of chicken soup and asked Red to take it to her grandmother’s cottage in the woods. Now Red feared the woods since it was the home of a terrible wolf who’d eaten many a stray child and a few huntsmen too. But Red’s mother, who feared nothing, assured her daughter that if she stayed on the path, she’d be safe.

  The woods were full of shadows and strange sounds. Red held the soup and clutched the folds of her cloak until, at last, she had her grandmother’s cottage in sight. She started to run towards it, splashing the soup and accidentally straying from the path.

  “Where are you going, little girl?”

  Red turned to see the wolf. She stared—at his fangs, white in the moonlight; at his dripping tongue—transfixed. The wolf leapt. Red ran. Mercifully, she escaped, but her cloak was torn to shreds.

  Red’s mother insisted that she visit her grandmother again the following day.

  “No,” Red said. “I can’t go through the woods without my cloak.”

  “You’ll go at dawn, when the wolf will be sleeping,” her mother promised. “And when you come home your grandmother will light you a torch. All wolves fear fire. He won’t come near you.”

  And so Red went at dawn, carrying a fresh bowl of soup. And, sure enough, the path was clear and the wolf nowhere to be seen. Red reached her grandmother’s cottage safely and they spent a pleasant day together. But when dusk fell, Red begged her grandmother to let her pass the night in the cottage.

  “No,” her grandmother said. “If you hide you will be hiding for the rest of your life. You’re stronger than you think. You don’t need a cloak to protect you.”

  Full of fear and doubt, Red went into the woods brandishing the torch, taking comfort from the heat of the flames and finding her way by their light.

  When the wolf appeared, Red froze.

  “Where are you going, little girl?” he said, baring his teeth and licking his lips.

  Before Red could speak, the wolf pounced. This time Red remembered her grandmother’s words and stood firm, wielding the flaming torch and letting out a terrible scream.

  The wolf leapt back, tail between his legs. Red screamed again, baring her own teeth, releasing all her rage in another bloodcurdling howl. Seeing the wolf about to flee, Red threw the torch. It fell to the grass at the wolf’s paws; a spark caught his fur and set him instantly alight.

  The wolf howled as he burned.

  Red warmed her hands on the fire.

  She was never scared to go into the woods again.

  Scarlet reads the story twice. And then, as she begins it a third time, realizes that she’s read it before. Or heard it. Years ago. She only wishes she knew who’d written it. She wishes too that she was even half as brave as its heroine.

  11:24 p.m.—Liyana

  “I’m sorry,” Kumiko says.

  Liyana, lying on her stomach on the bed, looks up from her drawing of BlackBird about to meet a long-lost Peacock sister she’d never known. “For what?”

  Kumiko, lying on her back, sits up.

  At the look on her girlfriend’s face, Liyana feels a flash of panic. “What is it?”

  Under the duvet, Kumiko shifts slightly, almost imperceptibly inching away, then pulls her knees up to her chest.

  “What?”

  Kumiko traces the embroidered lilies splashed across the duvet with her fingertip.

  “Koko, please. Tell me.”

  Kumiko presses her chin to her knees so a curtain of silky black hair slips over her face, shutting Liyana out. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be with you, but not be with you.”

  “Wait.” Liyana puts down her pen. “I don’t—”

  “Look, I understand what you’re doing with this Mazimoto bloke, with this ridiculous arranged marriage nonsense. I get it, I know it’s the easiest way for you to get what you want, but—”

  “Hold on,” Liyana says. “That’s not fair. And, you know, he’s not as bad as I thought. Maybe if you met him, maybe we—”

  Kumiko throws the duvet aside, anger flaring. “And why the hell would I want to do that? You’re a fool, Ana, if you think you can marry him and still have me.”

  “But you said . . .”

  Kumiko slides to the edge of the bed. “I said that because I thought you’d come to your senses and, when you did, you’d pick me.”

  “But I do pick you.” Liyana’s voice pitches. “Of course I pick you. I love you. I don’t—I barely even like him, I’m just doing it for my aunt—”

  “You say that, but who I think you’re really doing it for is you.”

  “No, I—” Liyana reaches to Kumiko, who pulls away. “Please, don’t go.”

  “You’re a coward, Ana.” Kumiko stands and walks across the room. “You’re taking the easy way out. And, frankly, I can’t be with someone I don’t respect.”

  “Wait, Koko,” Liyana says. “Please, don’t leave.”

  Kumiko turns. “You took the Tesco job, did you? You told that posh boy you won’t marry him?”

  “I did a trial shift,” Liyana objects. “I, I’m supposed to call the manager this week to—”

  “And the posh boy?”

  “Well, um, I”—Liyana falters as Kumiko glowers at her—“But n-no, not yet. But I—I . . .” Liyana bites her lip. “I . . .”

  “No,” Kumiko says, slipping her T-shirt over her head. “I didn’t think so.”

  11:59 p.m.—Bea

  “Are you ready, niña?”

  “Yes,” Bea says, realizing in the wake of her mamá’s silence that this is the first time she’s spoken with such certainty, without a trace of doubt.

  “Bueno,” Cleo says. “Because it’s nearly here.”

  “I know. Nine days. It’s fine.”

  “Don’t get complacent. Your sisters are far stronger than mine were. And you’ll be outnumbered three to one.”

  Bea waits. “I might not have to do anything—if they choose the dark.”

  “Yes,” her mother admits. “But you should ready yourself, niña, in case.”

  Bea says nothing.

  “In a fight,” Cleo continues, “I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble with Liyana. But Scarlet and Goldie are a different matter.”

  “True, she was the most . . .” Bea draws up from her memories. “Scarlet was the strongest, Goldie was by far the fiercest, and Ana was . . . nice, struggling to free herself from her mamá’s grasp.”

  “But then rather uncorked by her death,” Cleo says. “It knocked the fury and the fight right out of her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Cleo ignores the question. “Just because my death wouldn’t take the spring out of your step, niña, doesn’t mean other daughters are quite so cold.”

  Bea thinks again of those Sunday afternoon visits, of the birthdays and Christmases spent with strangers after her abuela died. “You’ve hardly been a paragon of maternal devotion, Mamá.”

  Cleo ignores this remark too. “Isisa Chiweshe was a nauseating example of motherhood. Those tiger mamás living their ambitions through their daughters. It’s pathetic.”

  Bea frowns. “How did you know Ana’s mamá?”

  “I didn’t, not personally,” Cleo says with a shrug. “I watched her, heard her thoughts, felt her heart, no more than that.”


  “¿Cómo?”

  “When you stand in the shadows you can see into the light,” Cleo says. “But when you stand in the light you can’t see what’s hiding in the dark.”

  “¿Que?” Bea opens her eyes. “Mamá?”

  But she’s alone. Dreaming? Surely not—the conversation was as vivid as if her mamá were sitting on the bed right beside her. Words and sentences return. A plan. What is it? Scarlet. Goldie. Ana. Who are they?

  24th October

  Eight days . . .

  6:33 a.m.—Goldie

  I’m shaking when I wake, adrenaline in my blood, a scream on the air. I shut my mouth and pray I didn’t wake Teddy. I realize as I settle that my screams weren’t fuelled by fear but by courage.

  The tendrils of the dream unwind . . . I wasn’t a victim but a warrior. I was Joan of Arc, Artemisia, Boudicca. I was going into battle with breasts bare, spear held aloft. Although I’d stood not on a battlefield but in a forest—one unlike any forest I’d ever seen before. For a start, all the trees were white. And their leaves blew in the winds but also scattered from the sky. Rain fell too, and the air was so heavy with fog that the trees were barely visible in the moonlight.

  Everwhere.

  I wasn’t alone. I stood in a glade with three girls: Ana and our two sisters. I knew their names then, though I can’t recall them now. I spoke with them in the dream. We stood in a clearing looking up at the leaves falling with the rain. We were meeting after a long time apart. We love this place, we’ve always loved it. It is our home. But something was wrong.

  I reached for my sisters’ hands, when into the glade walked a man. He looked at us and smiled. Who was he? Why were we there?

  Then I remembered. He was our father. And we were there to fight him.

  I bury my face in Leo’s bare chest and he, ever awake, wraps an arm around me. I don’t speak—I don’t want to open a discussion of fantastical worlds—I just breathe him in. I feel his solidity, his surety, and use it to calm my heart. Until I feel less like a clutch of leaves being whipped up by the wind and more like the ancient and immovable rock of Leo. I think of his claim to be a fallen star. Energetically, it describes him perfectly. He certainly feels as permanent and timeless and ethereal as a thing that’s been in the cosmos for a million years. And that dream . . .

  I can’t help but wonder if, given everything else, that’s quite so impossible after all. Is it conceivable he’s been telling the truth? The dream felt so real, as real as this man beside me now. Despite my doubts, I feel the seed of hope being sown in my thoughts—desperate and insistent as a weed.

  “I had a nightmare,” I whisper, not minding that he can’t hear me. I wish I could sleep with him every night of my life. In which case, I’ll have to introduce him to Teddy. I take a deep breath. My dream-father was terrifying. I wish I could unsee his face. Yet, even as I shiver at the recollection, I feel comforted now, as if nothing too bad could happen with Leo here. The simple fact of his existence in the world seems to afford protection. He has a great solidity about him, a sort of ancient strength, as if he’s been shaped from stone and steel.

  I glance up at the kitchen clock and nudge him. “You’ve got to go, Teddy will be up soon.”

  From under the covers, Leo groans.

  “Sorry,” I hiss. “But he’s a hideously early riser.”

  “Can’t I stay?” Leo mumbles, reaching around my waist and holding me tight. “Please.”

  “I wish you could, but it’d scare the daylights out of Ted if he woke up to find a stranger in his sister’s bed.”

  “All right.” Leo releases me with a sigh. “I suppose we wouldn’t want that. So, when will I be allowed to . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he says, slipping out from under the duvet, reaching for his jumper. “Sometimes I think we have forever, that’s all.”

  I feel a sudden shot of panic. “But we do, don’t we? I mean, why wouldn’t we?”

  Leo is silent, pulling his jumper over his head. “No one has forever.”

  I can’t argue with that, but still it seems that he’s saying less than he’s suggesting. I want to ask him, press him, but I sense he’d either evade or push back and I don’t want to risk waking Teddy.

  “Well, I suppose you’re right. But I hope we have longer than most.”

  6:43 a.m.—Bea

  After Vali’s death, sleep had been an escape. But now Bea doesn’t want to sleep, not with her dreams and the sense of foreboding left in their wake. She wants to be elsewhere. She wants to be gliding through the sky, drifting on updraughts of thermal air. But she can’t go to Dr. Finch, not now. Not today. So Bea shuns the bed to sit on the bathroom floor, chin pressed to her knees. Now she picks up a razor blade and carefully draws it across her inner thigh.

  Bea bites her teeth together, but the stinging pain still fills her eyes.

  “Don’t cry,” she hisses. “Don’t you fucking cry.”

  Bea watches the trickle of blood slide slowly down her leg. She thinks of flying again and hopes that’s what death will be like—that she’ll be nothing but breath and air. When the blood pools at her ankle, Bea begins again.

  10:33 a.m.—Scarlet

  The surveyor sent by the insurance company is perfectly polite, if curt—dismissing Scarlet’s offer of tea and cinnamon buns before she’s even finished her sentence. He’s exceedingly thorough too, investigating every remnant of the ceiling that has crashed to the floor—as instructed, she’s been keeping the rubble in a bin by the back gate—along with every inch of the gaping hole it has left behind.

  While he’s upstairs, scouring the bathroom with a magnifying glass, or so Scarlet imagines, she paces the kitchen floor and prays.

  10:13 p.m.—Goldie

  When I dream again it’s not of Ma or Leo but of Liyana. Ana. My sister. We are flying above trees, among the stars. We’re connected and we aren’t. We’re together and we’re separate. We share the same thoughts, breath, heartbeat, soul. The stars imprint their shadows upon us, marking our skin with an impression of the night sky.

  Where are we? We’ve been here. A long, long time ago.

  Eventually, we tire and begin to float down through the trees to settle on the ground. In a glade, we see two young women looking up at us. I’m sure I know them. I try to make out their faces but I can’t.

  Then I wake.

  As the tendrils of sleep and memory—this time I’m certain it was both—slip away, I think that Leo is telling the truth after all. A weed of faith pushes up through the soil. I want to call Leo, interrogate him. I reach for my phone, scrolling to his number. My finger hovers. An earthquake rumbles beneath me, the tectonic plates shifting and tearing apart, the cracks opening up. But I’m still clutching on, postponing the moment of falling until I can’t anymore. So, instead of calling Leo, I call my sister.

  10:59 p.m.—Goldie & Liyana

  Liyana sighs.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just been feeling weird lately.”

  “How?” The weed of faith sprouts a fresh leaf. I’m not the only one.

  “I don’t—I keep having this feeling that something’s going to happen,” Liyana says. “Like a premonition.”

  “Something bad?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I think so.”

  “I’ve been having strange dreams,” I admit. “Only they feel more like memories than dreams.”

  “About what?”

  “About being in a place, another world sort of place. With you and two other girls. And the really weird bit is that I’ve been to this place many times before, and the girls, they’re our—”

  “Sisters.”

  In my surprise, I lose my grip on the phone. It slips out of my hand and falls behind the sofa. I scramble to get it back. “Hey, Ana—sorry, are you still there?”

  “Yeah, you all right?”

  I nod, forgetting she can’t see me. “Yeah, yeah. But how did you know—about the sisters?”<
br />
  “Maybe we’re having the same sort of dreams,” Liyana says. “But mine are more like, I don’t know . . . visions. Did you see anything that could help us find them?”

  “No. Because we’re not here, we’re somewhere else.” I pause, feeling myself about to fall into the abyss. Though perhaps I’m no longer falling but jumping. “I don’t know, I—I think they live here.”

  “In Cambridge?”

  I nod, forgetting again. “The redhead works in a café on King’s Parade—I even asked her for a job a few weeks ago, but I’d not seen her before that . . . And I saw the other once in the hotel, but I’ve not seen her again.”

  “So, why don’t you go back to the café? If you know where she is, you could find her. You could tell her tomorrow.”

  The thought of it makes me want to hide under the sofa, to scramble back up to solid, steady ground. “And what would I say? That . . . what? ‘I saw you in my dreams’?”

  “It’s what I said to you.”

  “True. And I stuck a kitchen knife in your face.”

  “Yeah. Good point.”

  We both laugh then, a little too loud and a little too long, perhaps because we want to forget our fears and pretend, if only for a moment, that we’re simply two ordinary sisters chatting on the phone at night about silly, inconsequential things.

  11:43 p.m.—Liyana

  “What’s wrong, vinye?”

  “Nothing,” Liyana says. Except a longing to be gliding along the bottom of the swimming pool right now.

  Her aunt nods at the television. “You’re not watching it.”

  Liyana shrugs. “I know it by heart.”

  “Bloody hell, Ana.” Her aunt sighs. “If that’s a comment on the state of the youth of today, then we are in a sorry state.”

  “What?”