Jane

Donut or brownie?
MoopGoop dark chocolate-peppermint-iced, caramel-peanut-butter filled donut, or DreamCream-extra egg yolk-double-butter-stick Oreo-smashed brownie?
She looks from one to the other, and then back up at the cashier. The lady raises an eyebrow expectantly; Cashierlady is plump, her makeup caked so thick that her eyes are mere slits in comparison to her eyeliner and she has attempted to hide the fleshy wart on her cheek with layers of some cheap cream sold on the road.
The girl wonders if people look at her like she looks at Cashierlady.
“I’ll take both,” she announces finally. She anxiously watches Cashierlady grab them; watches each peppermint flake wobble on the MoopGoop; watches the precious DreamCream oreo crumbles fall to the ground as Cashierlady sloppily slaps them in the box.
She crams the little box into her bag while peeking outside. Once she is sure nobody is there to observe her, she quickly slips out and her slippers hit the pavement. Walking briskly with her head down at an angle, she turns the corner, pushing open the door to another store.
“Welcome to Sandy’s Sweets, how can I help you?”
Relief floods her. The girl at the counter must be new. She’s never seen her before.
She nervously returns Countergirl’s greeting and peers at the menu above on the wall above her head. She does this just for show; she already knows what she wants: the same sweets she orders at sunrise on Mondays and sundown on Fridays.
“I’ll take the CimmyBun, Double Lemon Cake, and the Triple CreamPuff Sandwich.”
Something in her peripheral vision vision catches her eye: a rich, velvety strawberry cheesecake rests patiently in the display.
“Add the cheesecake to that,” she tells Countergirl, who is jotting down the order.
She pays, and juggles the bags as she makes her way out, dodging people strolling on the street. Instead of taking the paved path up to the house, she crosses through the grass in the cover of the trees.
Racing the rest of the way, she scrambles up the back steps and flees to her room. Door closed, door locked. Relief. She puts down the bags of Sandy’s Sweets, slides out the box with her MoopGoop and DreamCream, sits on the floor.
She tries to ease the MoopGoop gently into her mouth, but ends up slamming the donut as far as it can go down her throat. She chews voraciously, gnawing like a wild animal and ignoring the chocolate and peanut butter smears on her cheeks and lips. She takes another bite from the MoopGoop even though she hasn’t swallowed the last, her cheeks bulging. Straining, she gulps and pulls the DreamCream from the box. The brownie is rich and sweet and she finishes it in two mouthfuls, licking clean the bits of oreo that are stuck in the nooks and crannies of her teeth. The CimmyBun, oozing vanilla icing, is larger than the palm of her hand. Her teeth sink into the soft bun and she closes her eyes in bliss. Her stomach signals her that she is full, but the message is lost in her delight.
“Jane! You in there? Open this door right now.” Her father is pounding on the door.
Her heart jumps in fright. She crams the CimmyBun back into its Sandy’s Sweets bag and shoves it under her bed, chucks the MoopGoop and DreamCream box into her closet. More pounding. She swipes at the crumbs on the floor and reaches up to unlock her door. It slams open and he stands in the doorway: towering, dominant.
She keeps her head down as her father charges into the room. She does not see his eyes, but she knows they are bloodshot and flaring with anger, fueled by the bottle in his hand.
“Where have you been.” His words slur.
She does not reply.
He shoves her against the wall.
“I went outside for a walk,” she replies quietly.
He sways from side to side as he surveys the room, narrowing his eyes to look for any evidence, any excuse, to beat her. In no time at all, his eyes glint as they land on the Sandy’s Sweets bag sticking out from underneath the bed. He snatches the bag and dangles it in front of her nose.
“I knew it. You went to get food. Where did you get the money from?”
He must not know that she steals from his secret stash.
“I borrowed from my friend.”
He doesn’t know that she has no friends.
“You just ate an hour ago! Do you remember what you had for lunch? Come on, tell me,” he taunts. “Tell me what you had an hour ago!” He growls and flings the bag at her feet.
“I made spaghetti and meatballs and baked some frozen pizza,” her voice remains quiet and controlled, tight with fear.
“And let me tell you exactly how many slices of that medium pizza you had in case you weren’t aware - six slices, Jane. Six slices. So don’t waste money buying more food. You are fat and obese, you hear me? I know you sneak out, you useless lard.”
She feels it before it comes. Flesh meets flesh, bone meets bone. Her cheek burns and she stumbles backwards, head jerked to one side.
Her father flexes his clenched fist and examines his knuckles. “I catch you one more time and you’ll get worse than that.”
He storms away, clinging the toxic liquid in his other hand.
She does not move.

Punch, kick, weep. She can still hear her mother’s sobbing from two years ago. Night after night, she had lain awake in the dark, listening as it continued endlessly. It was a pattern she lived through almost every day. When her mother died, the doctor said it was her heart condition, but Jane knew the beating had to do with it. Jane isolated herself from the world. Day turned into night, night turned into day, and the grief never seemed to leave her. Her father’s violence continued, only now she was its object. So she ate: especially chocolates, candies, and sweets. She ate when she was missing her mother, she ate when she thought about how she was failing school, she ate after her father beat her and her sides were stinging, she ate when she sobbed and choked on her food, she ate when she recalled the words the pretty, skinny girls at school said about her.

She opens her mouth, feeling the ache in her jaw and hoping that his hand hurts just as much. She kneels and stares at Sandy’s Sweets on the ground. The cracked Double Lemon Cake and crumbled Triple CreamPuff Sandwich stare back at her. She picks up the cake and starts to chew, slowly. Thoughts consume her: there’s something wrong with her. Words echo inside her mind: she’s fat and obese. She needs to stop eating. Stop.

She pulls the lemon cake away from her mouth, trembling. It drops to the floor. She stares at the sweets, at the mounds of napkins, at the days and weeks of empty wrappers in her trashcan, and she feels mortification, horror, disgust.

The short hand of the clock turns, turns, turns, until it points directly at the ten. Darkness knocks at the door. She has spent this time peering at herself in a hand-mirror, angling it to examine her protruding stomach and her thick thighs. She opens her door and peers out. Her father is watching television. He barely gives her a second glance as she approaches.
“Father,” she begins quietly. “I need your help.”
He brings the bottle to his mouth and drinks. She wishes he would stop.
“Father, I need your help. I think something is wrong with me.” She does not stumble on her words. They are clear.
“I don’t know how to control what I eat anymore. I am ugly and fat and I don’t want to be ugly, but the only way I know how to feel better is by eating. I have tried my hardest to stop this ever since mother has gone. I need help.”
Her eyes are sad. Her father’s gaze is trained on the television in front of him.
“Everybody can control what they eat,” he says. “Stop eating so much and you’ll be fine. Grow up. You’re not seeing a doctor. You’re not wasting my money.”
Her heart is sad.

The next morning, when her father leaves for work, she rolls her blanket inside her bag and grabs a handful of her father’s hidden cash. She does not forget to stop by Sandy’s Sweets, where she purchases boxes upon boxes of cakes, cookies, and sandwiches.
“They’re for an event,” she hastily tells Countergirl before she whirls away.
She hikes across town, and does not stop even when her feet ache and her stomach rumbles. The sun climbs higher and higher into the sky and begins to descend by the time she reaches the edge of the forest. To the townspeople, the forest is a place of horror and mystery, filled with secrets whispered among the trees. She steps forward and feels the soft earth sink beneath her shoes. Deeper and deeper into the forest she walks, the load of her pack beginning to take a toll. Finally, she stops in a clearing and smiles through her fatigue. There it is: the humble, broken-down cabin she stumbled upon the first time she’d run away from home. She had simply spent a night there before she forced herself to go back.

Now that her mother is gone, she has decided this will be her new home. The towering trees do not scare her, and although she does not know how she will feed herself, anything would be better than another day of locked doors and violence and endless tears.

Inside the cabin, the wood floor creaks. Creatures she cannot see scuttle into hiding. The curtains are cobwebs, the carpet a thick layer of dust. She removes the blanket from her backpack and lies on it; the last thought before she falls asleep is that she hopes with time alone she can heal herself. Heal whatever is wrong with her.
The sun waves goodbye as it descends behind the mountains.


At dawn, the children wake in the woods, cold and stiff from sleeping on the ground.
“Hans, I’m so hungry! I want to go home,” Gret whimpers and clings to her brother’s arm. She is trembling in fear and jumps when she hears a rustle in the leaves, clawing her way further up Hans’s arm.
“Don’t worry, Gret, I’m pretty sure this is the way home. I think I remember that marking on the tree when we were coming here.”
Hans is lying, of course, but he needs to reassure his sister that they aren’t lost, even though they’d been wandering all night in the forest where their stepmother and father had abandond them.
As the children trudge through the broken leaves, Gret stops. Her nose twitches.
“Hans, do you smell that?”
Hans lifts his head and sniffs. A distinct scent wafts in the air, and Hans’ eyes brighten in excitement.
“Chocolate!”
The children bolt in the direction of the smell, nearly blind with hunger. They tumble into a clearing where smoke rises steadily from the chimney of a little cabin. The smell of freshly baked bread and warm, milk chocolate fills their noses. They stand on tiptoes to peer through a window.
Gret’s belly rumbles. “Oh Hans, look!”
A tray of chocolate croissants sits on a wooden table next to a basket of blueberry muffins and dark-chocolate donuts with peppermint icing.
The door swings open when they knock. Hans peers inside and hesitates.
“Hello?”
It seems nobody is home. The famished children do what their bodies tell them to do: eat.
They devour the pastries: chocolate, blueberry, and peppermint plaster their hands and faces. Only when their bellies are close to bursting do they notice a figure standing at the door. Shocked, the children freeze; the person at the door simply stands and watches them, a bucket of water in her hands. Hans is the first to regain his senses.
“We’re very sorry we ate your food, but we’ve been lost in the woods and we were terribly hungry.”
The person steps in and closes the door. Rolls of fat ooze from her sides, and her fingers are pudgy, tints of mustard-yellow lining the edges of her fingernails. Forehead wrinkles and sagging cheeks tell the children that the lady is old, much older than them.
“It’s alright,” she murmurs. “You may eat all you like. There are some chocolate chip cookies baking right now.” She gestures toward an enormous, round oven in the corner of the room blazing with a fire underneath.
Gret jumps. She was so intent on eating she had not noticed the oven. It is big enough to fit a person inside.
“Are you a witch?” Hans shoots Gret a glance when she asks this question, but Gret ignores it.
The lady seems slightly amused. She waddles over to the oven and looks through the oven door holes to check her cookies.
“No, I’m not a witch. My name is Jane.” She pauses. “What are you children doing all the way out here?”
Hans shrugs. “Our stepmother and father tried to leave us in the forest, but we know that our father loves us and wants us to come home. We got lost trying to search for a way back.”
The lady turns to look at them, and her eyes are sad. “You must be very tired. Would you like to rest before you try to find your way home?”
Hans and Gret feel fatigue return once the lady mentions it, and nod sleepily. She leads them to a wooden bed with layers of blankets and pillows where they fall instantly into a deep sleep.


Jane returns to her little kitchen, and removes the sheet of cookies. The familiar sense of self-loathing returns. She can no longer see her feet, only her protruding belly. When she had first moved into the cabin, she had felt proud of herself for fighting for her survival. She had learned to build her own furniture, and she earned enough money to purchase an old oven by working in a pastry shop in the town. She had believed that time spent alone, away from her father, could release her from whatever curse she was under. Instead, the nightmares of her mother suffering and her own haunted her. She ate more than ever.
Now she is a disappointment, a monster, to herself. Jane looks sadly over at the sweet children, who love their terrible father even though he willingly abandoned them in the forest. She wishes she felt love for someone, anyone, and was loved in return. She considers asking the children if they would like to stay and live with her, but who would want to live with her?
She stands abruptly and picks up the trays of remaining croissants, brownies, and muffins. She strides outside and flings them to the ground and grinds them into the dirt with fury. Fury at her father, fury at these children, fury at how they remind her that she is ugly and alone and strange, fury at herself for being unable to control herself, for being crazy and weak and fat and ugly and crazy and weak and fat and ugly and crazy and weak and fat and —.
Suddenly, she stops smashing the food. She steps back, breathing heavily. At her feet lie the remains of the pastries she baked, ground with dirt, sprigs, and insects. She is unaware that tears cling to her eyes. A second passes, a decision is made; she walks back into the cabin, strides straight to the oven without hesitation, opens the door. The dancing flames warm her face: teasing her, calling her.

The oven is wide enough for her to fit.