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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Handsome and Regretful
Erin O’Riordan
It was early in the morning when the boy woke his sister up.
“I want to go exploring in the woods,” he said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Go away,” she said. She yawned. “But don’t go in those woods, you idiot. You’ll get lost.”
“I won’t get lost,” her brother said defiantly. “I’m going to mark my path as I go.”
She laughed. Without even lifting her head off her pillow, she said, “With what, bread crumbs? You always want to do dumb things like that, like things you’ve read in fairy tales. You just graduated from high school, for crying out loud. Grow up.”
“Not bread crumbs,” he said. “I’m eighteen, not eight. And I can handle it. Now, are you going to come exploring with me, or are you going to stay in bed all day?”
She pulled the blanket up over her head. “I’m going to stay in bed all day.”
“Fine,” her brother said. “You know where to find me if you change your mind. All you’ll have to do is follow my trail.”
He closed the door behind himself, but it sounded to the boy as if his sister was laughing at him.
He went into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and found a white paper bag. He looked inside; it was full of red, orange, yellow and green jelly candies in the shape of fish. No birds would eat these, he reasoned. He ate a few of them himself. Then he pulled on his warm jacket and headed for the woods.
He walked deep into the woods, leaving a trail of candy fish behind him. He walked until the white paper bag was empty. It then occurred to him that he was very hungry. He turned around to follow his path back out of the woods, so that he could go home and have some brunch.
The bright fish were easy to spot among the gray and brown of the dirt and decayed leaves. Here he saw a green fish. There a yellow one. Another yellow. And here a red one.
After a time, the candies were fewer, and farther in between. He spotted a yellow fish, and then no more.
He looked around in all four directions, but he could not figure out which way to go. He began to panic. This only made it more difficult for him to find his way. Soon he was thoroughly lost.
He ran this way and that, frantically, searching for any sign that he was near the edge of the woods. He hadn’t planned on this, so he hadn’t brought any food or water with him. By the time he looked up and saw that the sun had begun to set, hunger and exhaustion claimed him. He sank to his knees.
Just then, he caught a glimpse of something red out of the corner of his eye.
It was one of his fish. And there was another.
Somehow he managed to struggle to his feet. He began walking, slowly, in the direction of the second fish. A few yards ahead, there was another yellow one. A green one lay beyond that. Relieved, he followed the trail with confidence.
Before too long, he was finding them two at a time. Then they were in small piles.
“There must have been a hole in the bag,” he said. Just to see, he pulled the crumpled-up white paper bag from his jacket pocket. He unjumbled it, but couldn’t find a hole. Very strange, he thought.
As he followed the trail further, the piles grew bigger. He’d found far more candy than he’d started out with. Soon it appeared that the path was paved with jelly candies in the shape of fish.
Just when he was beginning to think that something was terribly wrong with this, he saw a house. He’d never known that there was a house in these woods. As he came closer, he smelled many sweet smells. The most prominent of these was the odor of gingerbread. In fact, it seemed that the house was made of gingerbread, trimmed with pink icing and covered in candies.
“This is a hallucination,” he said. “I’ve smoked too much pot, and now I’m having a hallucination.”
The boy’s stomach grumbled, telling him to keep moving in the direction of the house, whether it was a hallucination or not. He was desperately hungry. He began to break small pieces off the gingerbread house. They tasted real enough. He began to grab handfuls of gingerbread, lemon drops, hot cinnamon candies, peppermints, and blobs of pink icing.
The door opened. “What are you doing?” a woman’s voice said. The boy was so startled, he dropped his handful of sweets.
“Who is it?” a second woman’s voice asked, from inside the house.
The first woman, sticking her head out through the door, was a rather pretty little thing. She was thin and blonde, with large blue eyes. “It’s a teenage boy,” she called inside to the other woman. “A plump little thing, with curly hair. And he’s eating up our house.”
The other woman appeared in the doorway. They must have been sisters, for their faces were the same. The second sister had dark hair and large brown eyes. As the boy stared dumbly at them, they came nearer.
“He’s pretty,” the blonde sister said.
The dark-haired sister placed her hand under the boy’s chin. Her fingernails were long, sharp, and blood-red. “What a pretty mouth,” she said. With the other hand, she touched the boy’s lips. He shuddered. “Such full, red lips.”
The blonde sister ran her fingers through his curly hair. “Come inside with us,” she said.
The boy hesitated. This was all very strange: the path of candy fish, the gingerbread house, and most of all these women. They were so pretty, and so friendly. Why would he be so lucky? He was more convinced than ever that this was just a hallucination.
Oh well, he said to himself. If he was only dreaming, he might as well enjoy the dream. He went into the house.
The sisters pulled the boy’s warm jacket off of him. “Sit down,” the dark-haired sister said. “You must be hungry. Let us get you something to eat.”
“Okay,” he said. He really was hungry.
They fed him blueberry pie, peppermint ice cream, chocolate milkshakes, peanut butter fudge, and devil’s food cake. The boy ate until he was stuffed and sleepy. The sisters led him to their bed, a bed which they seemed to share. This didn’t seem right, but by then he was too full and sleepy to protest.
This is the part, he said to himself, where the dream becomes a nightmare.
The boy lay on the soft pink blanket of the big bed. The sisters lay beside him, one on either side. They began stroking his hair and kissing his chubby cheeks.
Now the boy was confused. He wanted to stay, but everything inside him was telling him that he should go.
As if they were reading his mind, the sisters said to him, “Don’t be afraid, boy. Lie back and relax. Stay here with us tonight. We won’t hurt you.”
The boy did relax a little. The sisters took turns kissing his mouth. Then they kissed him both at once. Their lips moved down his chin, down his throat. They unbuttoned his shirt and kissed his chest. Their fingers reached down and played with his plump little belly as their lips and tongues sucked and licked at his chest. All of his fear of these two strangers disappeared in a haze of satisfaction.
At last the sisters lay down and fell asleep beside the boy, one on either side of him. They all fell asleep. But soon the boy woke up, shaken gently by the dark-haired sister. She whispered in his ear, “You’re not safe in this house, boy. My sister and I are witches, and she is very wicked. She’s going to wake up and ask you to have sex with her, but you can’t do it.”
“Why not?” the boy asked. It seemed to him that he would like that very much.
She beckoned him into the other room, away from her sister. Sitting at the little table on which he’d been served so many good things to eat, she told him her story.
“When my sister and I were very young witches, an old witch got very jealous of us. She put a spell on us. We look young and beautiful to you now, but what you don’t see is that we have teeth . . .”
“Everyone has teeth,” he started to say.
“ . . . In our vaginas,” she continued. “As part of the curse, we have to stay here in the woods, where we lure young men into our house. We get them to have sex with us, and then the teeth chew them all to pieces, and they die.”
He drew in one deep breath, let it out, and drew in another. “Why did you tell me this?” he asked. “You’re supposed to kill me, aren’t you?”
“I don’t like killing,” she said, and she started to cry. “You’re so pretty, and I really do like you.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
Wiping the tears from her eyes, she came over to where he stood. She took his hand and slid his fingers up her skirt. He felt some hair, some very smooth skin, and a little bit of wetness. Then, some very sharp teeth. He pulled his hand back with a shout.
“Quickly,” the dark-haired sister said in a loud whisper, “you have to leave!”
“I don’t know the way!” he whispered back.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. As they ran, hand-in-hand, out the back door, she said, “I can go to the edge of the woods, and no further.”
They ran, following the trail of candy fish. When the trail finally ended, the boy was once again lost. But the dark-haired witch seemed to know the way. They ran as far as they could, and then walked. As the first light of dawn was breaking, the boy saw the edge of the woods.
“You saved my life,” the boy said. “Your sister is going to be angry with you.”
She nodded. “She’ll kill me,” she said.
“I can’t leave you here,” the boy said. “I won’t let your sister hurt you. What can I do to help you? How do I break the spell?”
“You have to make a promise,” she said.
“Anything.”
“You have to promise to break out all of the teeth.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do that,” he said. “That would hurt you. I won’t hurt a woman.”
She looked back into the woods, desperate. “I can try to hide from her,” she said, “but eventually, my sister will find me.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I promise. Somehow, I’ll break the teeth out.”
They ran from the woods and didn’t stop until they reached the boy’s sister’s house.
The next morning, while the witch was still safely in bed, the boy’s sister got up to find him in the kitchen, making breakfast. He held the phone to his ear.
“You were gone for a long time yesterday,” she said. “You got lost in the woods, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “You were right. I’m never going into those woods again.”
“I told you so,” she said. “Who are you on the phone with, now?”
“I’m on hold,” he said. “But I’m trying to make an emergency appointment with the dentist.”
“Is something wrong with your teeth?”
“I guess you could say that,” the boy said.
Inspired by the Ponca-Otoe American Indian legend “Teeth In the Wrong Places,” as recorded by Richard Erdoes in American Indian Myths and Legends, edited by Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
