A Tale Dark and Grimm

by Adam Gidwitz

truth. In fact she was just a regular woman who had discovered, sometime around the birth of her second child, that while she liked chicken and she liked beef and she liked pork, what she really, really liked was child.

that. There is a certain kind of pain that can change you.

In this moment, you will look at your parents and realize that—no matter what it sounds like they are saying—they are actually asking you for forgiveness. This is a very painful moment.

“I feel like something is pressing down on my chest,” Gretel said, lying in her bed that night, her eyes wide open. “Something heavy and sharp and painful. I’ve felt it for a long, long time now.”

“I just want to take it and throw it off of me. Make someone else feel it and hold it and carry it for a while.”

“Habeas corpus!” cried the first, somewhat tangentially.

The moon is not afraid of anything, except the sun, and only then because the sun calls him names and he does not appreciate that.

stopped—“there is a wisdom in children, a kind of knowing, a kind of believing, that we, as adults, do not have.