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There is a forest growing inside apartment number ten. You stumble upon it by accident, when the clanky elevator of your building spits you out on the wrong floor. The sweet, tantalizing scent of petrichor lures you to the door at the end of the hallway. Thin tendrils of fog slither across the threadbare wall-to-wall burgundy carpet and, when you get down on all fours to peer into the crack underneath the ordinary-looking door panel, you see sharp points of dark green grass quivering in the wind.
The sound of approaching footsteps echoes from the stairwell landing, and you scramble off the floor to avoid embarrassment. Picking up the scattered grocery bags, you turn on your heel and march past the elevator and up the remaining flight of stairs with the most nonchalant expression you can master. Grandmother would have been so proud.
Back in your own apartment, with its lovely wallpaper the color of candy floss and the lingering scent of vanilla, you arrange your purchases on the kitchen countertop—an extra-large bag of flour, three boxes of frozen berries, the multicolored packets of marshmallows, raisins, chocolate buttons, pecan nuts, and, finally, a small, plump bottle of maple syrup.
Grandmother always said, “When you’re feeling lost and lonely, whip up a batch of cookies.” You never expected to be alone. No one ever left Grandmother.
You think of the little house hidden in the deepest thicket of the faraway woods, with its caramel rooftop and the pink meringue roses by the front steps, and feel so much better. You remember Grandmother. How she saw your cooking talent immediately, as soon as you opened the door made of gingerbread for the first time.
“Grandmother isn’t really your grandmother,” echoes a young boy’s voice from some long-forgotten memory.
“Shut up, why do you have to ruin everything?” You hiss in a poisonous whisper. “It’s not as if you’re my real brother either.”
A bright green vine unfurls from the air vent, wrapping around the handle of your spatula, and you snap it off with sharp kitchen shears. There is a long day of cooking ahead, and you cannot afford to be distracted by this nonsense.
“No woman who knows her way around the kitchen and can handle a cookie cutter is ever truly alone,” Grandmother used to say, time and again. You wonder if it worked for her.
“Of course, it didn’t, numpty head,” says the boy in your memory, his smile cruel as it is sharp. “That’s why she kept luring in wayward children. One for the spatula, one for the stew. One to help cooking and the other one to be eaten. Don’t you remember?” You swat the memory away like a bothersome fly.
Smiles of the happy couples you saw in the street, the first spring breeze, and the echoes of your empty bedroom get added to the recipe, just the way Grandmother taught. The dough in your hands bleeds with ruby-red cherry droplets, ready to turn into the most addictive cookies, sold in cute little boxes from your Instagram page. Customers cannot stay away from your Sugar-Candy House. You’re good at your craft.
The familiar, cozy kitchen hugs you like a brilliant white eggshell, and the buttercream whirls in the mixer with an utterly soothing noise, yet you cannot stop thinking about that forest blooming in the apartment one floor below.
The boy was a boy like all the others, not fit to hold the spatula, good only for the stew, but he had the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen. Green like the unfurling new leaves on the approach of summer. That’s why you couldn’t let Grandmother have him. That’s why you held the rattling oven door shut, tears streaming down your face. That’s why you couldn’t stay in the gingerbread cottage after Grandmother became cinders and ash. That’s why you left the boy behind. That’s why you ran, and you ran, and you ran, until the forest fell away, and the gray skyscrapers of this faraway city rose around you like sentries, hiding you away from the ravenous green.
Little by little, you forgot all about the boy, the cottage, and the smoldering black oven, but now that the forest is here, dark and luscious, memories buzz in the back of your head like a disturbed beehive.
You lay down the whisker and wipe your hands with a crisp waffle towel. Cookies will have to wait. On the landing, light bulbs flicker on and off, and you hesitate for half a heartbeat before diving into the murky shadows of the stairwell. The dark veins of branches creep up the walls, quivering and expanding.
The door to apartment number ten stands ajar. You give a tentative push, and it swings wide open.
A trail of shortbread dough unrolls at your feet and, in the distance, a black cut-out against the blazing mango sorbet sky, looms a figure you never expected to see again. You bite your tongue hard enough to draw blood. “Hansel,” you whisper. Wolves are lurking in the shadows of the trees, and this forest will eat out your heart like a ripe, red apple.
Laila Amado is a migrating writer of speculative and literary fiction. She writes in her second language, has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth, and can now be found staring at the North Sea, instead of the Mediterranean. The sea, occasionally, stares back. Her stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Tales to Terrify, and Three Lobed Burning Eye, as well as in various anthologies. You can find her at her website, on Twitter/X as @onbonbon7, Instagram as @laila_amado, and BlueSky as amadolaila.bsky.social