Broken Ever Afters

Part 1 - Chapter 1

Once upon a time. How many life preludes commence with this obnoxious phrase – my own included. Happy ever afters, on the other hand, are precious as a rare gem in my world. The tragic endings I write might reflect my own life's tragedies, being ripped away from what I cared and loved the most. At first I wanted to stop writing, leaving William to carry on our family name on his own. My brother, knowing me better than I know myself, convinced me otherwise.

William and I live together in the sparsely populated German village of Steinbach, alongside the bank of the Kinzig river, near the Black Forest. We left our crowded family home in Hanau five years ago to pursue our writing career. Today, five years later, we are close to publishing our first fairy tale collection entitled Grimm's Fairy Tales.

"What if we change this part of Rapunzel? One has to scale her long, yellow hair to climb inside the tower, but rather than having no door, the entrance is closed off by rocks," William suggests.

I finish off the last sentence in our handwritten manuscript, dipping the feather quill in the ink bottle one last time. Inside this book we only include stories which we've completed and proofread.

"I've just finished copying it into the manuscript," I say, putting down the quill beside the book.

One sacred rule we both agreed to when we started the manuscript is we would never rip pages out of it. I'm always the one who writes in it because, according to William, my handwriting is more legible than his. When I write, I copy the text from our drafts and taking care not to make mistakes, always ascertaining a page is dry before turning it, to avoid smears and smudges.

"If you dislike how we described the tower, why didn't you speak up sooner?"

William opens his mouth to answer my question but he doesn't get the chance to speak. The floor shakes. The ink in the bottle swirls. China and glassware rattles and clinks in the cupboards. Paintings swivel on their hooks and drop crash to the ground. Ornamental vases slide off surfaces and shatter. I forgot whether I ever experienced an earthquake of such magnitude.

The ground tremors ebb and our surroundings fall quite. Alas the silence is short-lived. Tree roots punch through the dado and crawl all over the floor. I raise my feet and prop them backwards on the seat to stand on the chair. William climbs onto the sofa. Thick branches break our front windows with snaps, rip our curtains and knock down some furniture in the process, filling our living room with greenery. The room now resembles a cluttered greenhouse.

"That was one mean earthquake," William exclaims, inspecting a branch by his head. The leaf at the end brushes his ear.

"Where did the trees come from?"

"Whatever the tremor was, it sure wasn't an earthquake," I reply, getting off the chair and looking at our surroundings. What earthquake would cause trees to sprout into our home when we live on a street across the river from the wood?

William gets off the sofa, dusting off some leaves which flew on him when the branches broke in. I grab the manuscript book, secure it in my leather satchel and make my way to the front door. The thick branches make it impossible for us to see the outside through the windows. The door might be blocked from the outside for all I know.

With a little force, the door swings open all the way to the wall. The familiar rubble street and the clopping, horse-drawn carriages have disappeared, replaced by soil, grass, flowers and moss. Tall trees reaching out to the sky replace the neighbouring wooden houses and shop windows. Our house is now wedged between two cypresses in a grove.

"Where are we?" William asks as we step into the forest. "Call me crazy, brother, but our surroundings seem oddly familiar. Are we in the Black Forest?"