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Don’t feed him, Greta. We can’t afford to feed him! There’s not enough to eat!
We were lost when we found the tower made of sugar that stretched up into the sky in endless red and white spirals. A sea of ants milled at its base. Fat dollops of sugar dripped onto the surrounding trees, candied the leaves, and brought curious bees to hover. The grove hummed and buzzed with the sound of hundreds of insect voices, and their lazy, hypnotic thrum lulled me into taking my eyes off my brother.
He reached out and popped a leaf in his mouth, just as quick. I heard the crunch of the dried sugar as he bit down, and I immediately reached out and smacked him hard on the back of the head, so he’d spit it out.
He wailed, then quieted as I pointed at the lee of the giant candy tower. Just visible from where we stood was a staircase, hacked into the tower’s far side.
My brother made a strange little grumbling sound when he saw it. I readied the back of my hand. Fat little Jack, with his constantly rumbling belly and his licorice-drop eyes, too dull to be sweet, as our stepmother said. I thought he was cute, cute enough to eat. The village grannies called me dusty gray Greta, a sour old woman at the age of twelve. But Jack they chucked under the chin. They filled his hands with candied treats that our stepmother snatched away before they could start melting in his palms. He was a handful to look after, a handful of rocks painted silver strewn on the path back home, a handful of sugar-candied leaves melting in the sun.
Still, he was mine. If Hilda didn’t want us and Father couldn’t change her mind, I’d keep him. If they couldn’t find what to feed us, I would. Our mother would have wanted it.
Not sugar, though. That much I knew. No good for a growing boy. Not yet, anyway.
Jack squatted and began to whine. “Greta, my stomach hurts. I’m hungry.”
I shushed him and inspected the staircase more closely. Someone had cut it into the thick sticky spirals with something sharp. An axe, perhaps. I put one foot on the bottom stair, and my bare toes sunk into it.
I called to Jack. “There’ll be something good to eat up above. I’m sure of it.”
He pouted and whined and struck his growling belly with his round little fists, but eventually I persuaded him to come round the candy stalk and join me on the staircase, our feet leaving sunken syrupy prints as we slowly climbed. Ants crawled hither and to, up and down in endless tracks and roadways. Bees whirled past our heads, buzzing cheerily. Where there are ants and bees, there are spiders, hanging in the dark spaces where the candy stairs were hewn more deeply. Jack and I rushed past these as quickly as our toes would let us.
When the heat of the day began to cool and the drip of sugar down the sides of the tower began to slow, we came to a curious place. The cane had been hacked straight through, creating an archway. It opened onto a broad lane paved with dark stones. At the end of it, some small distance away, stood a very large house, red and white with little bell-shaped towers and pointy spires.
We stopped to stare. Even from a distance, the house seemed weirdly huge, and I could not understand what it sat on, for the ground was far below us and the melting tower’s top behind us. For a moment, I thought of turning back, leading my brother back down the slowly melting staircase and returning to my father’s house. I could apologize to Hilda, and do what she said. My brother whined when he was hungry, but perhaps I could learn to sleep through it, if I tried.
Don’t feed him, Greta, my stepmother’s voice said in my mind. There’s not enough for him to eat!
I frowned, looked behind at the tower top and its archway, then ahead to the land that rested beyond, on clouds and air, for all I knew. My toes were glazed white and pink and my legs spotted with clusters of crystals. My brother’s cheeks were decorated with sugary crusts where he had scraped secret handfuls from the floor and the walls. I couldn’t always catch him. Such small bites would cause no trouble, I hoped.
I took my brother’s hand and led him down the lane.
We had not gone far when Jack wrenched his hand from mine and took a few thoughtful steps in place, feeling the ground with his bare feet. He called my name and suddenly bent down, his nails scraping at the white mortar between two of the dark stones under our feet. He pried a corner of one up and put it to his mouth.
By reflex my hand lashed out and struck it from his grasp. He cried out, stunned, tears in his eyes. “Greta! It’s cake! Just taste it!”
I lifted my own sugar-glazed toes, then bent and pried up a chunk of stone for myself. My nails were longer and the stones softer than they should be, so it came up quickly. Forcing myself not to think about strange feet and endless ants, I put it to my mouth and took a small bite.
Jack had already lifted another one and was munching away happily, his face smeared brown and white. “Chocolate, Greta! It’s chocolate cake!”
He was right. I spat it out. I’ve never had much of a taste for sugar, myself. Not good for a growing girl.
I took the cakestone from my brother and threw it into the grass, then covered his fingers with my own, like I used to when Hilda used to yell and my father let her. Instead of calming, he grumbled at me and squatted in the middle of the road like a frog, blinking his dark eyes furiously.
“I’m so hungry! Why won’t you let me eat? I’m starving—” He would have worked his way from grumbles to howls, had I not pulled his wrists sharply and brought him to stand.
“Wouldn’t you rather have some nice food, over there?” I nodded at the big house ahead of us, not far at all now. “See, this is all full of ants and grass. Who knows what’s been walking on this road, with what on their feet? If the people in that house can make all this cake, I’m sure they have nicer food in there. Clean food.”
Jack glanced around himself, then peered ahead at the house. Perhaps his eyes saw something I didn’t, but I saw them narrow, then glitter, and he snatched his hands away from me and walked on without another glance at the cake.
He was getting taller, my little brother. He would be quite big someday. That was what had made Hilda worry so—the thought of feeding my brother as he grew.
I wondered who fed the people of this edible land in the clouds, for they were surely not normal sized. They were large, impossibly so, for the door of the house was giant. The lintel was higher than ten of me, and I was tall for my age, as Hilda often said.
The house’s size was a worry, but its makings were a wonder. What I had thought was red tiling was slabs of hard candy that glistened in the high sun. Enormous amounts of it had been used to form the walls of the house. Although it was far above my head, the roof looked as though it was made of ginger biscuits. The same pure white icing that held the chocolate paving stones together had been piped across the house in cunning little designs. More standing canes of sugar formed the fences, smaller versions of the one we had climbed the stairs through, although striped in different, darker colors. There were glass windows, and I guessed they must be some sort of confection as well.
I reached out and gathered both of my brother’s small hands in my own, ignoring his whimpers. I wanted nothing more than to run away, but my brother began to twist and squeal.
“Let . . . me . . . go! I told you I was hungry, I been telling you, you’re just as mean as Hilda and . . .” With every word he pulled a little harder. If it hadn’t been for the sugar on both of us, he would have slipped from my grasp like an eel.
His squeals soon disappeared, first under a long, loud creak like a giant spoon scraping across the bottom of a very large, very old barrel, and then under an enormous chuckle that came from somewhere far over my head.
I dared not peek over my shoulder to see who—what—it was. I only clutched Jack’s hands so tight within mine that I was able to feel that his fingers were getting longer as he grew, and I willed him to stay quiet and still.
I felt rather than heard footsteps and shut my eyes, willing this to be a nightmare, a dream brought on by heat and sugar.
My brother whispered my name and I lifted one eyelid just the barest sliver, the width of an almond slice, to peer at what was watching us.
I saw an eye, first, although an eye so large and unblinking I thought at first a deep black well had come to meet me in the air. As I opened my own eyes all the way and turned to gape at the house’s creature, I saw that the eyes—for there were two of them, both round and sheeny black—were small for the face, which was huge and square-jawed. In a face so huge, the big black eyes seemed almost piggy, set deep above sallow cheeks, high and flat as tablelands and salted with lines that would have been fine on a much smaller face, but were as wide as garden paths on hers.
This face was roofed by a thatch of poorly kept grey hair that stood up at odd angles like a scarecrow’s straw. A lipless mouth split the bottom half of it, and the teeth were sharp, jagged and dark. I clutched little Jack’s hands even harder.
The lane, the house, the candy stair—they were all owned by a huge and horrible giant with a face as ugly as a sow’s.
But, oh, her voice was lovely. It sounded like the sugar that dripped from her windows and sweetened even more at the tears in Jack’s licorice drop eyes when he snatched his fingers from mine. I reached out to catch him again, but he whined that he was hungry, as though we weren’t but a heavy breath away from being eaten ourselves.
The giant leaned lower to peek at us both with one gruesome eye, then spoke, basting our ears with honey.
“Well, look at us closer, dearies, why don’t you? Look at us good before we catch you and fatten you up, poor sad skinny things. Give us a peek, then maybe speak up a bit and let us know that you’re a good little girl and boy, and not nasty, sour things, all full of worms and old milk.”
Jack’s whines and whimpers quieted, and he stared, his lower lip trembling.
I finally found my voice. I greeted her, softly, and thought to try it again louder, not sure those giant ears, hidden by shucks of grizzled hair, could hear me.
They did, and the giant gave a great hiccupping laugh. Her hand swept down, the nails bitten and grey. Before I could say “Jack, be quick!” my brother and I were snatched up into a palm as hard as stone. We were carried into a huge dark hall beyond the cookie doors, and I curled up around my brother to keep him safe. We nestled tight into the palm of the giant’s hand as she sped deeper into the house, walking at a pace that was probably slow and ambling-old for her but seemed like flying to us. She stopped, cupped her free hand over us protectively, and began to call in that strange, sweet voice.
“Conrad? Conrad, lovey, come and see who I’ve found. Mumma would be proud, she would.”
We felt Conrad before we saw or heard him. A rumble rushed down a long dark staircase made of gumdrops and licorice ropes, and Conrad followed after it, huge and feckless, rosy where his sister was grey, although they had the same unkempt, rudely hacked thatches of hair.
His eyes were the same black pits as his sister’s, too. He peered at us narrowly, and his pink blubberous lips smacked and quivered, a thin stream of liquid dangling from the plump center of the bottom one. It danced and shimmied, catching the little bit of light there at the bottom of that huge and dark staircase. I forced myself to focus on it to avoid his limitless eyes.
I wrapped my arms tighter around my brother, and the giant woman reached one finger out and petted my hair. She was gentle, but I still shuddered.
“See what I’ve found, Conrad,” she said in her syrupy voice. “Such a treat. Let’s get them ready, have a feast, won’t we?”
Jack’s shoulders squared in my embrace, and his voice rose in a thin wavering wail to meet the giant’s. “I’m HUNGRY!”
She only chuckled and said, “I know you are, pet. Let’s get you sorted.”
She took us to the kitchen, a room so large I couldn’t see properly to the other end of it. Conrad followed us. She dumped us into an enormous yellow hearth basket, flat with low sides. It smelled of goose feathers, although it felt clean enough. A giant’s apple would have rolled off of its edges, but Jack and I, small as we were, landed on its large heavy loops and lay there dazed as though we’d landed on the roof of our own house.
When I sat up, my brother was in the center of the basket, curled into himself, arms wrapped around his round little belly, cheeks red, breath puffing. “I’m hungry,” he said, and then repeated himself again and again until it ended on a howl.
I’d seen him like this only once before, the night that Hilda took our father aside and held a hushed and frightened conversation, one that began with a sideways look and ended with me, a path full of rocks, and Jack’s sweaty little hand tucked into my own.
We can’t afford to feed him, Greta. Especially not sweets. You take him into the forest and leave him behind. Leave him behind and run back here so he can’t follow you. You’re a good girl; do what you’re told. Don’t let him eat.
Over the shallow rim of the big basket, I could just see the giant woman moving her big body to an empty wooden table set in the middle of the room. She mumbled and waved her hands over an ebony circle burnt into the center of the table’s streaky yellow wood, and smoke began to rise from it, green with golden sparks. She murmured and mumbled a bit more, and the smoke began to shift and spin, the color changing to pink.
Her hands spun around the cloud of smoke, and then she leaned over and puffed air through her lips, wafting it all away.
Something shiny and domed stayed behind. The giantess reached out a thumb and forefinger. In a delicate grip as sweet as she said she’d treat us, she plucked the thing from the table and carried it over to us.
It was a serving dish, as big around as Jack and I sat together. The giant witch carefully slid the dish, snugged tight in the web of her thumb and finger, into the space between me and my brother.
Then she watched us, waiting.
Jack stopped wailing at the smell of food. He hopped to his feet like a boy much lighter than his size and stumbled to the huge dish as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He’d eaten at our parents’ house, I was sure. I’d seen him, and also seen him chew as many candied leaves and secret handfuls of stair as he could sneak before the flat of my hand found the back of his head.
The dish was wide, but its cover was light, and Jack made quick work of getting his fingers under the edge and heaving it away. It fell with a hollow, tinny crash. The platter underneath was piled with pastries. There were all sorts, lying in heaps—iced white, dripping with sunset-colored marmalade, topped with sugared cherries, glazed with fragrant chocolate. I had never seen some of the things waiting for us on the platter, but I distrusted giant food, and witch food doubly so. It was too much, too soon, and too quick.
Jack waited for less than the space of a blink before plunging both his fists into the pile and stuffing whatever they found into his mouth.
Don’t feed him, Greta rang in my ears. By reflex I rushed to the edge of the platter, my hand open in preparation to strike.
My brother, my hungry little brother, snarled at me. I jerked my hand away from his white teeth—I had never noticed how sharp they were. He snapped them at me, twice, as if for good measure, then sank them into an éclair the length and thickness of his own round arm.
I gazed at him in horror, then jumped and whirled at the sound of a very large tut.
I had forgotten the giants. Conrad’s voice rumbled through the room. “Oh. So soon?”
The giant witch answered him, laughing. “Oh yes, my love. See what your sister has found in the garden today!” Her twinkling eyes were on my brother.
My stomach twisted.
Don’t feed him, Greta.
Jack was growing. His hands were the size of my head now, plump, strained, and puckered at the knuckles like sausage casings. He reached out with one, grasped a fruit-studded hunk of cake, and shoved it into his mouth, which had also grown, not only in size but in distance from the ground.
My brother was taller than me.
I watched him eat, faster and faster, and the quicker the food disappeared into his mouth, the quicker he grew, until his belly strained and tore the seams at his waist, until his neck swelled over his low round collar.
My brother grew and grew, and I stepped back as far from him as I could and made a sound like a kitten, frightened out of my mind. I wasn’t supposed to let him eat, not like this. Not so quickly, or so much.
Cheeks stuffed like a pocket rat, eyes gone black as jet, he whined at me, “I’m hungry.” The sound sent shivers through me.
Conrad was all but dancing with excitement. “Sister, what are you waiting for? Get the boy more food!”
The giantess rushed back to the table and began to mutter and screech. More food began to appear, bigger food. A pile of chocolate cakes as high as the garden wall back home. Eclairs as long as fireplace logs, cherry tarts as wide across as serving trays. Sweets, sweets, sweets, stacked as high as they could reach before toppling into my brother’s wide jelly-smeared mouth.
• • • •
Jack outgrew the basket. Conrad put his arm out and my brother leapt and scampered up until Conrad shook him off onto the table, where he landed amidst the piles of food the witch was conjuring.
We can’t afford to feed him.
The giants certainly could. More and more food appeared, and my brother grew and grew. I cringed near the edge of the basket, my stepmother’s words ringing in my head.
Jack grew until he was almost the size of the giantess, then swallowed the last of a slab of toffee and spoke. His voice was still a boy’s voice, but so large now that the magnified treble notes hurt my ears and made my head thrum.
“Brother, sister,” he said to the giants. “It is nice to be with you at last.”
“Welcome, brother,” replied Conrad, “How do you feel?”
Jack rested his hands on the paunch of his stomach and said, solemnly, with no trace of his customary whine, “I’m still hungry.”
All three giants turned to me, huddled in the bottom of the basket, whimpering at the glimmer in their bright black bottomless eyes.
“Eat,” they said.