How Some Children Played at Slaughtering

The darkest, most shocking, grimmest of the Grimm’s tales. Don’t expect fairies.

My name is Hans, and this is my testimony. 

This evening, on my way home from the field to my dinner, I passed my neighbour, the miller’s house.

He was lying by the gate. He was as pale as a winter moon and clutched his chest as if to hold on to his short, shallow breaths.

I went over to him and could see straight away, there wasn’t long left for him. He pointed, weakly to his front yard. It was a slaughterhouse, such a terrible sight I’ve never seen.

His two boys lay in pools of blood, beyond any hope or redemption.

He whispered to me: “the boys watched me slaughter a pig this morning. They thought it a fine game. After I left, the boys were playing. The older boy said to the younger, let’s play at slaughtering. You be the pig and I’ll be the butcher.”

He coughed, grew more faint, so that I could barely hear him but he went on, “Like a fool … I’d left my knife in the kitchen. The older boy took it and slit his little brother’s throat, collected his blood in the bucket.

My wife was upstairs bathing our daughter. She heard the commotion and looked out of the window. When she saw what had happened, she lost her mind and ran downstairs. Took the knife from the pitiful body of the child and pierced the heart of his brother with it and now both were dead”.

I looked over at the terrible scene outside his house, the terrible wounds on the children’s bodies and couldn’t help but imagine the awful events. And now I can’t get them out of my head, don’t dare close my eyes, for fear of the returning vision.

He spoke one last time, “My wife, in her grief, and fury, went back upstairs but my poor daughter, my poor daughter, just a baby, alone in the tub, had drowned while she was away. All my children are gone. I cannot bear it”.

And with that, he was gone and didn’t speak, or breathe anymore.

Although, I was mortally afraid, I couldn’t account for the miller’s wife, and so I had to enter the house. I made my way upstairs and there was the miller’s daughter, wrapped in her mother’s shawl, lifeless by the tub.

When I came back down and turned toward the kitchen, there she was. The miller’s wife hung from a hook on the kitchen wall with a scrap of rope. By her, on the kitchen table she’d left a note for her husband, stained with blood, spattered with tears, she told the story. She couldn’t live with herself and without her children and in shock and in shame, she’d taken her own life.

The miller on his return must have read the note, staggered outside and, overcome, died from his own grief.

They are all gone, and I will never be happy again.

This is my testimony.