Greta Unearths the Graves

Greta had a mission. The graveyard was on the other side of the small forest, the one that encroached on her town. Her wooden house was at the end of the street that the forest touched, and rather than bother those in town, she chose to make a shortcut through instead.

She was not the first to make a shortcut here, but most of the footfalls that had worn a path through the beech trees were Greta’s. Normally, this path would be crunching with autumn leaves, but it had rained for so long now that each footfall had to be taken carefully, the leaves slick with rot. They were not the rich oranges and reds from previous autumns; already the rains had leached their colours out and Greta trod on a carpet of endless decaying brown. It was not raining today, yet, but the skies stayed so mild and ashen that it could start at any moment.

She was hungry. She hadn’t had any food to store in her house for some time now. All their animals – chicken, sheep – had long ago been slaughtered, and the wheat she had been saving to make bread had turned black with mould. Everything had mould in her house. The wheat she had tried instead to set alight for warmth, but the dampness within triumphed over her. There was simply no food, it was why her husband had died, a farmer who had expended all his energy tilling crops and seeds that wouldn’t germinate, until all his energy ate him from the inside out.

The hunger led her on.

There was a peculiar limp to Greta’s walk, although it wouldn’t have been clear to a new observer whether she had been afflicted by something, or this was just the way that she avoided slipping over on the leaves. There was no birdsong, no cuckoos, to announce her path through the forest, as most of them had been slingshotted out of trees for villager sustenance. Occasionally, a tree branch creaked against another, an agonising sound that made Greta think of her bones creaking inside her skin.

At the edge of the forest was a stand of junipers; she scanned them for berries but of course there were none to be found.

She turned her attention to the small cemetery. There was no gate to enter, no fence to cross. Some graves had headstones, yes, memorialised in a time when people could afford to. Those who could still afford a simple burial could pay the gravedigger, but not the stonemason. Greta’s husband was not buried here; she could not afford either. His body had been placed in the cold earth behind their house – her house, now – each shovel of dirt felt through her small frame. She wasn’t sad that her husband had left her. That was just how it was now, for everyone in her village, her area, that Death would eventually visit your house as well, as soon as the food dwindled away. Death didn’t so much as take her husband away, to be honest, as much as turn his laboured sleep unlaboured, and Greta had one morning found his stiff body unmoved at dawn, still in bed instead of out with the goats. Despite the cold that infiltrated their house, no misty breath left his mouth. There was no hand-crafted marker to mark his burial, but Gloria had planted seeds to perhaps one day have a tree stand where he died. To this day, no sapling had appeared. As the seasons had turned, only fallen leaves after leaves after leaves, until the outline of the disturbed dirt had been subsumed.

Greta moved towards the part of the cemetery where headstones weren’t planted. The cost of her hunger was expending more energy, but she hoped it was worth it. Her hunger pushed her to the newer graves – the dirt would be easier to lift, the bodies fresher.

She knelt. She tried to pray, but the words remained chewed up in her mouth, an unsatisfying meal, and besides, praying had not helped her town break their famine. Why would it help now? What did she hope to achieve by appealing to the Lord? Did she expect him to forgive her for what she was about to do?

She mimicked the sign of the cross, all piety leaching out of her body into the damp soil. Greta closed her eyes, and began to dig with her hands blindly. The soil was wet and cold. It moved quickly, its loamy texture still loose and lithe. She could have brought one of her husband’s tools, but it was too late to have regrets, and use up more energy trudging home and back. Her bone-thin hands would have to do. They grasped the soil in little fistfuls, slowly making dirt pillars beside the gravesite. Each handful was penance, another bead on a rosary to be rubbed. As the day wore on, Greta leaned lower and lower into the earth to harvest her dirt, until each section of her angular spine rasped with effort. Of course, she could do with some sustenance to give her more energy, but there was none, except for the ghostly promise of sustenance buried under her feet.

The sun carved its path across the sky, its wan light barely warming Greta’s back. It cast anaemic shadows through the stands of trees, and threatened to disappear at any moment in a shudder of mist. The shadows ticked by, and Greta’s hands became as dark as those shadows. The dirt that she had dug clung to her hands, the dampness wrinkling and puckering her fingers. Her face had smears of browny-grey across it, wiped across with her hands in moments of exhaustion. Greta had found a rhythm to her digging, a meditative state surprisingly easy to achieve with the light-headedness that had accompanied her for weeks now. There were no fingernails for the dirt to clump under – she had bitten them down over several nights where she had not been able to put any food on her table.

Her knees were numb underneath her. Greta untangled her lower limbs, and despite moving them around again, no warmth crept back into any of her joints. She had made a bowl, a basin shape, above where she assumed the body was, and it was large enough for her to slide into. Crouched down, the edges of the grave sat at her shoulder height, which she immediately hunched to begin working again. To a passer-by, she could’ve appeared as a fabled witch, the grey hood of her coat casting great shadows on her old, craggy face. But there were no passers-by. The weather continued to turn, and no citizen of the town wanted to be near the cemetery if they could be by their own fire sides instead. Even in her hole, Greta’s nose was touched by skeins of smoke that drifted over from the village, with scents of charred firs, tobacco and clove filtered through the birch woods of the forest. Despite their warm source, the smoke smelled bitter and biting, and sent a chill up Greta’s frail frame.

The stumps of her fingers scraped against something different, something thick that didn’t crumble under the pressure of her hands. Greta had not dug very far into the earth, and honestly, had not expected to need to. Without coffins, or the effort to bury bodies, the dead only rested under a few inches of soil. With that meagre burial, could a prayer even be finished by the time the body was laid in the ground? It wasn’t even a guarantee of a restful death, so close to the surface of the waking. Or really, the waking dead. Greta pulled at the fabric that had appeared under the dirt, and continued to dig and claw, and pulled. Eventually, the fabric tugged away from the ground, and began to separate from what it was shrouded around. Normally, with abnormal happenings, the winds of the forest would whip up, as though God himself was whispering about the wrongdoings he observed. But no sound, no holy presence, no voice from above . The rough texture of the fabric suggested linen fibres, and Greta could not make out the original colour of the piece, as the grains of dirt had embedded themselves in between those fibres, and smeared their blackness across the surface. She scratched and rubbed at the linen, and tugged and pulled again, and the fabric shifted.

In fact, the entire fabric of the earth shifted, and Greta tipped over onto her haunches with a shiver up her spine. She was about to violate the compact between the living and the dead, she knew this – but she was also about to put nourishment in her body as well, and that overrode every stitch of her moral fibre.

With the fabric now loose and unbound, Greta parted the sheet. Reaching out from the sheet was a hand, a small hand, smaller than Greta’s which now grasped it. She didn’t know why she expected it to be warm, but she was still shocked at the frosty chill that met her. The hand was purple, and spongy to the touch, like a pig’s bladder. Greta kneaded it between her own hands, testing it for its meat. The soft membrane of the skin slid over bone, its knobbled form showing an absence of fat. She brought it to her mouth anyway, turned the hand over so the palm was facing her, and bit hungrily at the purpled flesh.

Despite being hungry, it was not as easy as she expected. It took three bites with her rotting teeth to cut through the layers of skin, despite its softness. The bite produced enough flesh for Greta to chew on for some time. Having not eaten in so long, fortunately she had lost the sense of taste, and she shifted the flesh moved around her mouth, munching it like gristle.

Greta swallowed. She had eaten.

She picked up the hand again, and bit more eagerly this time. Her teeth rasped against bone, and began her feast.

Her mother, then a mirror of Greta’s skeletal frame now, had taught Greta how to strip the meat from carcasses. The practice body was a chicken, from the process of plucking to the picking of hot flesh from the bones. Her father had killed it to celebrate another successful harvest; Greta had watched, wide-eyed, as his hatchet had chopped off the chicken’s head. She hard worked hard to pluck it to impress him, and the cooked chicken in front of her was her next test.

“See, Greta? These are the parts that we do not need to eat.” Her mother had waggled a gizzard in her daughter’s direction. “We can make a broth with these tomorrow.” The giblets, placed into Greta’s outstretched hands, felt like they were melting. The livers, in particular, had slid around her palm, the blood making soft, burgundy rivulets in the lines.

“Don’t play with it, Greta, put it down, put it down!” she ordered. “Now we chop.” Before she had picked up the cleaver, her mother helped her rearrange the carcass. “Set up each sides evenly, you want nice, equal pieces,” she had pointed out. Greta had placed her hands on the legs, and maneuvered them until she could see a small smile appear on her mother’s face. “Ready!”

The knife had swung into the chicken frame, and her mother’s bony hands splayed it spreadeagled. Her fingers, like stiff twigs, had pointed to the joints of the skeleton, and motioned for Greta to grab them on either side with her own hands. “Now it’s easier to split the joints apart.” As Greta had reached up over the wooden table, barely able to see over it, her mother’s hands guided hers to the easiest part to take apart – the legs and thighs. The chicken was still warm from being taken out of the iron pot, and her skin had slid against the smoothness and greasiness of the cooked bird. “No, no no, not like that. Grab them firmly. Make a fist around them. Left leg pulls left, right leg pulls right.”

Simultaneously, she had separated the drumsticks away, gristle and bone crunching as they moved. “That’s it! A natural. One day you’ll be making a meal for your mother, you know. Or,” she winked, “a husband.”

Greta did not say anything in reply, but – in an unusual show of affection – had taken a step towards her mother to hug her. She tutted, placed her palms out to capture Greta’s greasy ones, and had clasped the small hands inside hers. “Don’t dirty my dress, my little chicken, or I will have to teach you how to do the laundry as well!” She had guided her daughter’s hands to the top of the bird still splayed on the bench, and instructed her to pull apart the wings. This time, Greta’s movement was deft, sure, and driven by hunger.

The next fingerbone Greta tore at now from the corpse did not separate as quickly or easily. She pulled gently, but that just moved the whole arm. She pushed her lips together, and tugged more forcefully, one hand on the finger, the other over the top of the hand. Sinews still attached, it required more force, but was perhaps would more rewarding to eat than her mother’s golden chicken of her memory.

The bodies in the most recent graves were as bare of flesh as Greta herself, being recent victims of the famine. To eat enough, she would need to get to the rest of the corpse. She listed body parts that would be more fleshy. Stomach. Buttocks. Breasts. Organs?

Greta realised that the longer she stayed perched in this shallow grave, the longer the chance to be discovered by a wandering villager, or worse – the loved one of the human she had turned into a meal. She had seen other graves unfolded, ravaged; she knew others in town had been driven to such desperation. She knew it was happening, but as yet no one had seen someone partaking in such a hellish feast. It was the terminus of a never-ending punishment to the world: first the rains, then the yields shrunk, then what few bushels were harvested became diseased, then the flocks and herds got the murrains, then the goats and sheep froze to death in the fields, then those animals left were slaughtered and their pestilential bodies left to rot in the continuing rains, then some families up and left for the south, then the children started disappearing. Greta had watched the exodus of many of these families across the sodden countryside, as water had endlessly dripped from the thatched eves above her cottage. Even the nobles of the town had attempted to hoard food and grain, but their stone buildings were not impervious to the moisture that ate away at the millet and mildewed the stock.

She remembered the last meal she had fed her husband. By that point, he was so weakened, she had brought it to his bedside. It was an awfully meagre broth, and had not provided him with enough sustenance to wake up the following morning. It had been made of tree roots, grasses and bark, collected by Greta in the small window of dryness where the heavens had closed themselves up momentarily. What a silly woman she had been; she had spilled some of it down his front in her eagerness to feed him. He had barely noticed it, and instead had acknowledged her presence with a wan smile. She had left the empty bowl by his bedside, making the delirious presumption he would arise from his bed in the morning with enough energy to wash it.

But he was gone now, and Greta’s mouth was the only one that needed feeding in her house. And even though his gravesite was far closer than the town’s cemetery, she hadn’t dared touched it. Yet.

Above her, in the cemetery, tree branches creaked a warning to her, and Greta’s head shot up like a rabbit’s. Still with the incriminating fingerbone in her hand, she scanned the muddied grounds around her for the presence of humans. Judging it to be a false alarm, she returned to her corpse and sped up her efforts to eat through it as quickly as possible. Squatting on her haunches, she tipped the body to its side, roughly pulled down its pants, and brought her face down to its buttocks. And here she stayed, mouthful after mouthful of raw muscle and fat. And she swallowed, mouthful after mouthful, until her jaw was tired of chewing and her stomach was heavy and distended. She had moved faster with every bite, as though the wind that swirled around her had given her momentum. Greta was greedy, and if she had slowed down, she would have tasted the fecal sourness of the flesh. When she finished, splayed across her lap, the body was missing a large section of one buttock, and was bruised and purple. Greta leaned back onto the dirt that cradled her and closed her eyes. She couldn’t feel the bits of sticky flesh and the brownish-black smears that stuck to her chin. She was satisfied, for now.

Her eyes hadn’t been closed for long before she felt the pattering of soft raindrops on her eyelids. Like the long stretch of months before this one, it was likely that the raindrops would increase to a downpour. Greta realised the grave would soon be filled with a soupy dirt. While she understood the danger that presented to her, she knew it was also of benefit: soon, the evidence of her witchy doings would be reburied. Clambering out of the hole, Greta wiped the soil and skin fragments onto her clothes, and scanned the graveyard. The greys of the sky had descended onto the town in the distance, as if someone had picked up a scrubbing brush and rubbed it over the terracotta roofing. The thicker the rain got, the more of the colour of the town was scrubbed from the skyline. The hood of the coat would shroud her from both the rain and her transgressions, and she lifted it over her head and hunched her shoulders again, weighed down by the seriousness of what she had done to stay alive.

She chose again not to go through town, but to return via the same shortcut through the woods. She entered the stand of beech trees easily, feeling their protective nature embrace her. The rain was thinner here, too, her head protected by the leaves. Yet not ten steps into the woods, a figure emerged. Father Vasily wasn’t just taking a walk in the forest; he had deliberately stepped into her path.

“Visiting someone?” he asked. He exuded too much of a casual air for someone who just happened to be strolling in the rain through the forest for a chance encounter. Greta stepped back from him, perhaps unnecessarily, and perhaps a little too hastily; whatever her reason, Father Vasily noticed the movement.

“Oh, it’s all right, we’ve all lost somebody in the last year. Who did you lose? Was it a child? Let me remember.”

Greta cut off his attempt at conversation. “I have no children. My husband died last October; you said a few prayers for him.”

“But of course,” he said, with no acknowledgement of remembrance at all. “I hope you said a few kindly prayers for him during your visit.” He gestured towards the cemetery behind her. Greta refused to turn, to acknowledge what she had left behind. Had Father Vasily seen what she’d done? Could he see the unearthed grave now, through the pouring rain?

“Yes, Father, I did. And I best be off before this rain sets in again for another week.” She turned away from him, but he grabbed her arm.

The rain drummed harder around the pair, as he stared at her face.

He raised his hand. Greta thought he was going to strike her, but instead he tilted his head and made a gesture for her to wipe her chin.

She nodded, almost imperceptibly under her hood, and shuffled as quickly as she could away from him through the slippery leaves. She did not look back at his narrowed eyes, or the graveyard beyond. She did not look up until she reached her home. Instead of retreating inside and getting dry, she bypassed the house and strode to her husband’s grave.

“I had to lie to the priest about you.” Greta circled the burial plot. “I told him I was visiting your grave.”

She listened for his reply, but only heard the spattering of rain.

“He ran into me. I mean, he collided into me. I have no idea if he was watching what I was doing; I suspect he was. Why else would he walk out in front of me while I was heading home?” Greta touched the waterlogged and long-dead violets she had lain on his grave. Why did she believe her dead husband was going to speak to her now? Is it because he always stepped in to give her advice when she’d veered into bad life choices?

“He knew what I was doing. He saw, but didn’t stop me. But he will hold on to this, my punishment will come. I will have to make do with what food comes my way at our house. I cannot leave any more. I will remain until Famine rides in on his horse to collect me.”

His grave remained silent.

She turned toward her house. She took a step forward and froze. Through the rain, towards the front, were two small children. One boy, one girl. They were holding hands, and resembled each other enough for Greta to determine they were siblings. They had not seen her cloaked form behind the house, but instead were leaning against her windowpanes and walls. She saw them break a piece of the rotten roof off, and both the boy and girl nibbled gently on it like mice.

They were hungry, Greta thought; what good would bringing them into her house do? She could not feed them.

But she could eat them.

She entered the back door of her house, took off her cloak, and picked up her husband’s walking stick. Her next step towards the front door was with a limp, an affectation designed to deceive. She whipped open the door to welcome the children, but instead they dropped what they had in their hands. She limped towards them and picked up the wood. Greta placed an affectionate hand on the girl’s damp shoulder, and said, “Well now, dear children, who brought you here? Are you hungry? Just come inside and stay with me. Nobody’s going to harm you.”

***

Dani Ringrose is an emerging Gothic author, who lives in Brisbane, Australia. She is a full-time Literature teacher. She enjoys using myths and folk tales for source material, and is inspired by all the clever and creepy animals this continent has to offer.