When Rachel was very small – so small that she didn’t know her own age yet – her mother read her Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The old versions. Not adaptations. She relished the unabridged, arbitrary cruelty of the justice delivered.
Rachel’s father disapproved slightly but gently, which was okay. It was a private moment for the two of them.
Hansel and Gretel were in the woods, lost, with only breadcrumbs. And what did they find, alone and starving, but a big beautiful cottage made of gingerbread?
Rachel only vaguely knew what a cottage was. It was like a house, but smaller, and by the water. A whole house made of gingerbread.
“What’s gingerbread?” she asked.
“We’ll make some next month,” her mother promised.
They finished the story, and they finished the book, and at the finish of the year for the winter holidays her mother made a gingerbread house (COTTAGE, Rachel firmly corrected) and they decorated it together.
Rachel made sure there was no oven. She’d seen what’d happened to the last gingerbread architect she knew of.
***
When Rachel was larger – somewhat larger, but not big – she went to her grandmother’s after school sometimes, when her mother wasn’t home from work yet. And as she went over her homework and complained about it and completed it, her grandmother would make odd little cookies, with oatmeal and coconut and something impossible to pin down.
“What’s IN these?” Rachel demanded suspiciously. “Vanilla? Nutmeg? Cinnamon?”
“Oatmeal, coconut, and love,” said her grandmother.
“You are SO full of shit!”
“Where did you think YOU got it from?” said her grandmother. And they snorted and cackled and swatted at each other and it was a day that Rachel didn’t realize had stuck in her memory forever until ten years later at the funeral.
She got the cookbook. None of the recipes had love in them, but that didn’t prove anything. Her grandmother had kept a lot of things in her head; most of the recipes were like icebergs, with nine-tenths below the surface of the text.
Rachel’d have to find new secrets for them.
***
When Rachel was Very Much An Adult, she made cookie using the cookbook (or the scan she kept on her tablet), and she knocked on her roommate’s door.
“Go away,” said Troy.
“I have more cookies,” she said.
The door opened with the nudge of a foot delivered from a bed delivered from a body bereft of all hope and joy but still able to eat. “Oh wow. Thanks. It’s great. What’s in these?”
“Oatmeal, coconut, and spite,” said Rachel.
“No love?”
“I think you need spite right now. Or at least more than cookies.”
“Hey, food’s good. I need comfort, and this is comfort food.”
“There’s more than one kind of comfort,” said Rachel.
“This is pretty good. What’s better?”
“Revenge,” she said, with an unnecessary amount of enunciation.
“That sounds harder to make than cookies.”
“Actually, it has many ingredients in common.”
“What?”
“Let me explain.”
***
Two days later Jack Altman, law student and all-around prick, sat in his car and turned the key in the ignition only to find it stuck fast by molasses. Swearing and hauling at the vehicle door, the handle came off – partially sawed through – and a jet of piping-hot caramel filling shot out and scorched him in the hand. He tried to scream and was muffled by his airbag going off and slamming him in the face in a big cloud of aerosolized flour, which exploded.
The burns weren’t fatal to Jack, but his GPA wasn’t so lucky. Rachel was too busy graduating to notice: a triple-major in chemistry, physics, and engineering.
She sat at her desk, and considered her many options until her head hurt.
Then she considered her oven.
Then she said ‘well, this feels inevitable.’
***
History was confused on the matter of Rachel, even years after the dust had settled.
Yes, she had terrorized the entire eastern seaboard with remote—activated sugar bombs until the FDA budget was raised.
It was true that she’d ransomed the British crown prince after kidnapping him in broad daylight using a horrific and utterly uncatchably fast greased gingerbread golem.
No one denied that she’d sucked all of Fort McMurray into a fudge pit over what she considered one stifled pipeline blockade too many.
The moving gingerbread castle she travelled in was considered somewhat tacky even by those who admired the sophistication of its construction principals and the effectiveness of its instant-dry icing.
And of course everyone knew the muffin-men she’d unleashed upon the Midwest until her demands for better home economics funding in schools were met.
But it had to be admitted by even her biggest detractors that the recipes she sent to news outlets appended to her threats, demands, and announcements were consistently cheap, tasty, and surprisingly healthy.
There were never any secret ingredients. She asked that you find those on your own.