Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
by Mikki Aronoff
Your husband’s in a fury—face flaming, offspring missing; he knows you’ve sent them away. When dispatched to bring them back, you carp at the futility of that, growl you hope you don’t find them. You wrap your shawl around your shoulders and extinguish the fire under the cabbage—with the benefit of bones in the broth since you banished his children, and begin the long trudge into the woods.
Deep down into the tangle of trees you go, grumbling from the pangs in your stomach, hacking branches away from your soured face, the pinch of your mouth. As the sun sets behind you, your eyes stretch like saucers at the tasty sight of a gingerbread cottage—smoke rising like buttercream frosting from the chimney, a stooped crone in the doorway, gnarly hands motioning you in.
Soon those knobby fingers will shove you like the haunch of a deer into a blazing oven, the ravenous woman slavering, basting you with the brush of her drool-slicked broom, two small, muffled voices chuckling from under the table, your toes squirming, toasting and roasting just so.
Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024.
