HUMOR | SHORT STORY

Satire Version of Hansel & Gretel

How did that tale go again?

Once upon a time, there was a little pre-pubescent boy and a similarly aged girl walking through a forest. The little boy had a packet of smokes but no light — poor thing. His little sister was also nagging him about not having brought a lighter when she reminded him to.

The boy was named Hansel. He had a scar on his left eye like a James Bond villain and shaking hands from nicotine withdrawal. He had a tight haircut all gelled up. The little girl had shaved the sides of her head and had the rest of her long, blonde hair in a ponytail. She wore a pretty, pink dress with tracksuit bottoms underneath and Adidas sneakers. Her name was Gretel.

The whole reason why they had entered a forest was that they were looking for someone that might have a lighter.

A trail of tobacco

Naturally, these children were smart. They didn’t want to get lost while wandering through the forest. Hansel had a great idea. He would throw little bits of ground tobacco onto the forest floor so they could later retrace their steps. Of course, brown tobacco does not at all blend in with the brown forest floor covered with leaves and shit. This plan was sure to work.

Anyway, the pair continued skipping through the woodland, passing a homeless encampment, a serial killer who’d been on the loose fending for himself in the forest, and Bigfoot.

The children asked all the homeless people and Bigfoot if they had a lighter. They all said “no.”

“Bloody bastarzz,” the little boy said, unable to yet pronounce the letter ‘d’ properly. His little sister kept nagging him that she was hungry and maybe a forest wasn’t the best place to find someone who you can ask for a lighter.

A gingerbread house

Naturally, as you do when trekking through a forest, the two children found a house made entirely of gingerbread. Gingerbread is very flammable. The two kids found some cans of gas beside the house and started dousing the building with the chemicals. They then picked up some rocks and started lighting sparks onto the gingerbread dwelling — all so they could start a fire and use it to light up their cigarettes. Food could come later.

As it turned out, there was an elderly blind lady living in the home. She had simply never noticed before that her house was made of gingerbread.

“Those damn community project builders. They made my goddamn house out of gingerbread?” she asked the two children incredulously after preventing them from setting her and the home on fire. The little children had been ignoring her until she told them she had more tobacco and a lighter inside.

However, the witch was evil

As it fucking turns out, witches that offer children cigarettes to come inside their homes are not usually good people. In this case, the evil witch wanted to feed the children as much as possible in order to make them fat. This was because she was a grandmother and that’s what all grandmothers instinctively do — they make children fat.

She began feeding the two wandering delinquents cookies and pies until they were both morbidly obese, months later. The witch had to use all of her military pension which she got from having served three tours in Iraq in order to feed them.

However, beyond making the children fat and pinching their cheeks way too often, this witch had more evil deeds up her sleeve. She wanted to make the pair of 12-years-olds quit smoking.

Cage the little brats

So she put them both in two huge cages where they could weather out their nicotine withdrawal. It was all for the best, she thought. However, what she didn’t know was that at this point, Hansel and his sister were so fat that they could hide tobacco and filters and papers in their rolls of belly fat.

The witch was blind as well, remember. So Hansel and Gretel would just light up smokes right beside her and continued happily puffing away like this for a couple of weeks.

However, after the third week of sitting in a cage and doing nothing but smoking rollies, the two children had had enough. The witch was already suspicious about where the smells of smoke were coming from.

So the two children had an idea.

Escape

Gretel told the old witch that the smoke was coming from her stove which they claimed was burning both tobacco and marijuana. Yes, the children told the blind old witch that she had been “burning marijuana” in her fires for years unknowingly because weed naturally grew on the wood logs she used.

Panicked at having done drugs, the witch let Hansel out of his cage to sort out the problem. Hansel then claimed that the smell of weed was overpowering. When the witch said that she couldn’t smell anything weird, he told her to move her face closer to the door of the oven and she’ll be able to notice it.

So she did and he shoved her into the oven with a boot up her ass, then closed the door. He waited a few minutes until the screams died down and then opened the door again to use the fire to light another cigarette. Afterward, he also released his sister from her cage.

The two children then went outside and finished what they had started months ago. They doused the whole building with kerosene and threw the butts of their cigs on top of it.

Don’t set fire to buildings in the middle of a forest

These children were not yet teens and their wits only went so far. The whole forest around them began to catch fire as well.

This was especially a problem — not that a forest fire wouldn’t have been a problem before — because they were both extremely fat.

“Well, shit, numbskull,” Hansel’s little sister said to him.

“Shut up you nincompoop. I’m trying to think,” he replied.

They were both trying to think about how to get away from the burning forest without having to run or walk. That was not a productive line of thinking and they eventually began walking away, despite the difficulty of moving their enormous bodies.

“If I die, I’ll kick you in the face,” Gretel says

Eventually, the children are forced to start running as the forest fire became no laughing matter. They waddled like penguins as fast as they could — their new equivalent of running — until they reached an area of the forest not yet burnt down or on fire.

Then, Hansel wiggled his nose.

“We’re lost,” Gretel yelled as if that was a bigger problem than the fire that was approaching them.

However, Hansel had a keen sense of smell for tobacco. Ironically, he had lost much of his sense of taste from all his years of smoking, but he could still smell tobacco from a mile away.

He quickly picked up the trail of where he and Gretel had left ground tobacco on the forest floor. They followed that and it lead them right back past the serial killer, Bigfoot, and the homeless encampment.

Again, as they were running/ waddling back, they asked the serial killer this time if he had a lighter since they had forgotten theirs at the witch’s cottage. As it turned out, the old witch was the serial killer’s grandmother.

“No shit, I can see the resemblance now,” Hansel said. Gretel nodded in agreement.

“No shit, I’m going to kill you,” said the serial killer.

A matter of survival

The two kids were far too fat and their lungs were in bits from smoking so they couldn’t run away from their problems this time.

Hansel prepared to smoke his last cigarette before death. However, just then he has a great idea. Beside him, his sister was also smoking her last rollie on earth. It looked to Hansel as if she had thought of the same thing. The two nodded at each other and then put out both their lit cigarettes onto the criminal's nipples.

The criminal howled in pain and the children ran away slowly.

The motorway

Eventually, Hansel and Gretel made it out of the forest and onto a motorway which was always just 5 minutes away from wherever in the forest they were but they had been running in circles for quite a while.

The two young ones then got a lift from a dodgy-looking stranger who despite his appearance actually brought them to their home in a nearby town.

When their parents found them, they were overjoyed, as the two kids had been missing for over 4 months. They promised that they would buy the children as many cigarettes as they wanted if they never left like that again.

The children thought about it for a second and decided that it was the cigarettes that had gotten them into that mess in the first place. They explained the whole story to the parents. They also promised that from that day forth, they would never smoke again.

The family hugged each other happily again.