There once was a man and his wife who had seven children, all boys. They were all very human and very poor. The youngest boy was so tiny and malnourished that they called him Little Thumb; but though small, he was very clever. Then there came a very bad year, and the famine was so great that these poor people decided to abandon their children in the woods.

But that’s not how your story starts. Your story starts with the monster.

• • • •

You know you are the daughter of ogres. That means your parents are like any other set of parents during the day. They feed you, they wash you, they clothe you, and send you to school. But when the sun goes down and the door to their bedroom closes behind them, you know better than to go in there looking for solace from a nightmare.

That’s when the breaking and regrowing of limbs, and backbone, and flesh begins. You can hear them changing into something else, something hiding under taut skin during the day. Your parents’ voices go from a soft monotone to guttural growls. Wickedness laces their laughter. Their loud wishing to devour the flesh of little children like you keeps you up at night. We shall grind them into paste and stuff their innards in spicy sausages.

You listen. One ear always pressed against the wall that separates your room from theirs. You watch them eat dinner, in their human form, every night. Praying that their bellies stay full to the brim, that this fullness exhausts them so much that, later, they won’t even think to turn the knob and walk the ten steps down the corridor all the way to your bed.

None of this is your imagination. You know it’s true with the ancient knowledge of all children who can smell the monster under their bed. Monsters don’t bother to hide in front of little ones. Children aren’t the ones who make the rules in this world. They are powerless. And so easy to dismiss.

In your mind you already hear the clanking of jaws, the slurping of marrow. For now, they are only echoes of the future. Of what could happen to those children you were in the schoolyard with yesterday. Of what could happen to you. Still, you stay, and you check your own body at night for signs of change. Because where else could you go? You are the daughter of ogres and that means you are an ogre too. Is there any place that would take you?

• • • •

The children returned home guided by the cunning Little Thumb, and their parents cried happy tears. But the famine knew no heroes and so the children were sent back into the woods again. This time farther away and deeper still.

The second time Little Thumb found a house in the woods and begged the woman who opened the door to take them all in.

“Alas, poor babies,” she lamented. “Don’t you know that this house belongs to an ogre who eats up little children?” But because she felt sorry for them, she let them in and hid them under the bed where the Ogre’s seven daughters slept.

Only in reality your mother would hide the poor, hungry children inside her big, big mouth.

• • • •

You are tall for your age. Instead of eleven you look closer to thirteen, and your parents are tall too, but that’s not what makes an ogre. An ogre preys on children. There was a time when your parents read you these stories before going to sleep and you nestled in your mother’s arms thinking, That’s not a fairy tale.

Kids stay away from you and call you a freak but you are not sure if it’s because you are weird or because deep down, they sense you are an ogre. Your parents don’t seem to have the same problem though. When your mother visits your school your classmates flock around her like she is some kind of fairy. And she does look the part. Tall and graceful and full of smiles. Your father blends in well with the other dads when he joins them for a game of soccer or two every Saturday afternoon. Some children eventually come around and approach you. Especially Pantelis, the little boy with the crooked glasses and the silly smile. You play tag every day during recess until you start thinking you might be human after all; Perhaps you were secretly adopted. Read stories of ogres with human children. You start believing in your own tale.

Until one day he asks to visit your home. Your shoulders slump but you reluctantly agree. “As long as you leave before it gets dark,” you say. That’s a fairy tale line if you’ve ever said one.

Your parents are happy to accommodate. Too happy. They buy all sorts of snacks and treats, let you play video games in the living room, and don’t complain when you spill soda on the thick carpet. “Stay as long as you like,” they say as they slowly retreat to their bedroom.

Sweat trickles down your spine. You pretend not to smell their hunger in the air. Pantelis doesn’t notice but you hear their murmurs from behind the door of their room. Just a bite they say. Surely, his parents won’t notice. What’s a little finger or a piece of a shoulder? It’s an ogre thing to be able to hear others of your kind. You look out the window. Noon turns into afternoon, turns to twilight.

“You must leave,” you say. “It’s getting late.” You hope he’ll miss the panic lacing your voice.

Pantelis doesn’t listen to you. He is so absorbed in killing robots that he has lost track of time and is about to lose so much more.

You lean closer to him. So close, your nose taps against the frame of his glasses.

“Please leave.”

“Hey!” he says. “Cut it out, you weirdo!”

You stop. If this was a fairy tale, he would listen to you. He would find a way to make your parents disappear and you would help him. If this was a fairy tale, he’d take you with him.

“Fine.” You fake nonchalance. You know that what you are about to do is the wrong thing. But he hurt you. And you want to hurt him back, like the little monster that you are. “But you have to go ask my parents if you can stay.”

Pantelis sighs, leaves the controller at your feet and goes for the bedroom door. You watch him from your spot on the carpet with morbid curiosity. He knocks once, twice and then the door opens.

A hand that should have been your mother’s caresses his face, with bone-like claws. The palm is the size of the boy’s head. It could crush it like a grape at any moment. The boy looks on, unable to move. Mesmerized or petrified you can’t tell. Maybe both. Sweet little boy, a starved voice that might have been your father’s whispers from somewhere inside. Come a little closer. I shall sink my teeth in your supple flesh.

Just before that horrible hand stretches its hungry fingers and drags him inside, the thing that had been bubbling in your chest all day spills over and you start yelling.

“Get out, get out, get out!”

You don’t remember what happens afterwards, not in detail. But you remember Pantelis snapping back to reality and running for his life. You remember his glasses falling on the cusp between the bedroom and the hall and something, a giant foot with yellow nails, stomping on them. You remember yelling at him, please, take me with you, and him not even looking back. And then there was that hungry voice echoing through the house, or was it inside your head? I shall lick your bones clean. I shall taste your marrow sweet against my tongue.

The next day in school Pantelis is nowhere to be found. Your parents have taken it upon themselves to bring you closer to your traditions in their own subtle way. They read you the same fairy tales that they did when you were little, only this time with added commentary.

“What’s a man to do anyway? Starve to death?”

“Ogres are born out of necessity not fun!”

“It’s a man-eat-man world out there,” your father says like it’s the best joke.

Your parents never talk to you about being an ogre directly, and never when it’s day out, the same way you don’t dare make a sound during the night and never set foot in their bedroom. You wonder sometimes if they are as scared of you during the day as you are of them during the night. Or if they just expect you to figure it all out on your own. Like some calling in your blood. You check your hands over and over. You count the knobs of your spine with your fingertips. Your jaw remains firm in its place. Not a monster yet. Not on the outside.

Pantelis does come back to school a few days later, wearing new glasses. He avoids you as if your hair has lice and gossips about you with his other, normal, friends. You can tell by the way they all look at you now, worse than before, all the bridges you’ve been building have been torn down.

You approach Tina, a girl who’s been nice to you and ask what they’ve all been talking about, fearing that soon the police will be at your doorstep and you’ll be an orphan searching for bread crumbs from house to house.

“Oh, just that you hit him the other day and broke his glasses. And that you are nuts.”

But whenever your mother visits the school Pantelis makes sure to avoid her at all costs.

• • • •

When the Ogre came home, he caught the whiff of tender human flesh. “Is there a child here? I smell fresh meat,” the Ogre asked his wife.

She denied there had ever been a human child in there. “You smell the calf I have been roasting in the fire. Now, stop this nonsense and go kiss your daughters’ goodnight.”

“I know what I am smelling!” the Ogre insisted, but he went to see his daughters nonetheless. He loved them so dearly he had placed crowns upon their heads. He would never, ever hurt his little monsters.

That’s what you tell yourself on the nights when you are scared out of your wits.

• • • •

At sixteen you give yourself a buzzcut and paint the rim of your eye with coal-black eyeliner. You try to be as different from your parents as possible. You figure if kids think you are dangerous, they’ll steer clear from you and from them. Nobody will get hurt. If nothing else works, you’ll make yourself the red flag that people—especially kids—notice from afar.

But Emilia is a red flag all on her own. It’s less in the way she dresses, and more in the way she carries herself, like balancing on a razor’s edge. Where you are tall, she is small. Her hair, unlike yours, is pitch dark and waist-long. Her pale face hides behind it and between her slumped shoulders. Sometimes you notice a faint bruise blooming on her clavicle when the neck of her oversized shirt slips to the side. Sometimes the bruise is under her eye and sometimes it’s not a bruise at all but a scratch. She manages to hide them all under the hair and thick layers of makeup, but you know. You notice things others brush off too easily, don’t you? And you know a thing or two about parents who can pretend.

It’s only a matter of time until your mouth meets hers with the urgency of two girls who know everything about each other by instinct. And as far as fairy tales go, you know which one she came from. Emilia’s father hasn’t managed to keep a job for more than three months at a time. She works night shifts at the pizza-by-the-slice place and steals a few slices for herself since she is always hungry. Her parents have already kicked her out of the house a couple of times, only letting her back in because they need the extra cash she brings in. And she always returned because her little brother was too small to fend for himself.

“One of these days I’ll get a place all of my own,” she says between your shared breaths. “I’ve got a couple of friends crashing at one of those abandoned buildings downtown. You can come and visit.”

You nod because what else can you do? You know too much about her nightmares but she doesn’t know about yours. Perhaps she suspects and perhaps she doesn’t. Your family is respectable on the outside. It’s only you who embarrasses them. On the outside, you might seem like the spoiled one.

So you just nod and let her kiss you again and you hold on to her like the fairy tale is about to end.

• • • •

“Don’t you have like a home to go to?”

Emilia glances at you as she wraps oily pizza slices in oilier parchment paper, to hand to the drunk twentysomethings on their way to a concert just around the corner.

You shrug but inside you are annoyed she doesn’t think you’re the kind who stays out late. Truth is, you can’t stay for long. Your parents always insist that you are home when darkness falls. “We wouldn’t want something awful to happen,” they say, and you know that by “something awful” they mean you. They don’t want you to happen out in the open where everyone can see. That’s why you take extra care to check yourself in the bathroom mirror every fifteen minutes or so, pretending you’re re-applying makeup. Emilia can brush it off as vanity. Better safe than sorry.

“I can scare off all the weirdoes for you. The kids think I am scary.”

You pull a mean face. Or at least what you think a mean face looks like.

Emilia snorts. “Nah, that’s just for show. You’re tender-hearted, babe.”

When you deflate, Emilia reaches out a green-nailed finger and brushes your cheek.

“Hey, it’s okay. I am like that too. You know what, here—” Emilia hands you a pepperoni and cheese pizza. The slice wilts like melted candle and drips fat just as bad. “On the house.”

“Doesn’t your boss count them?

Emilia winks. “It’s not like he pays me a proper wage. That’s my bonus you’re munching on.”

You smile without meaning to.

“I just . . . want to keep you company. Aren’t you scared out here at night all alone?”

“So much weird shit happens here, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” She looks around, and for a moment you glimpse the scared child underneath. Then her bangs fall over her eyes and the illusion fades. “It’s still better than being at home.”

You can’t tell her how much alike you are. Nor how different you are in other ways that matter. That you are one of the weirdos. In fact, she can’t imagine just how close to danger she is in. But she is all you’ve got and you can’t give her up.

Emilia flashes her impossibly tall platforms at you. When she wears them, she is almost your height.

“I know how to handle weird shit. That’s why I got these. Trust me. Go home.”

• • • •

This time it’s already late in the afternoon when the doorbell rings. Your parents have been in their room for the past hour or so. You dare not go in there. Then your phone buzzes with a message.

Yo, it’s me.

You knew this was coming. There was no other way this could have happened. She is the hero of this story. She has to come to your place. Isn’t that how the fairy tale goes? The kid is kicked out of the house because there isn’t enough food and finds the ogre’s house. Your parents have been inside your head for so long you can’t tell fairy tale from reality now.

The phone buzzes again.

Open plz. I need a place to crash. Just for tonight.

You feel the boiling in your chest rising again. You get off the bed while cataloguing the hiding places in this house.

When you open the door, she falls into your arms. You catch her sniffing at your nightshirt as if it’s the best smell in the world. Something breaks inside you.

“Be quiet,” you say, although she hasn’t made much noise. “Come to my room.”

You squeeze her hand and lead her and her duffel bag down the small corridor to your room. As you pass outside your parents’ bedroom the silence feels like someone holding their breath. Like a wolf ready to pounce.

“How’d you figure out where I live?”

Emilia snorts. “Everyone knows where you live. I’ve talked to your mom, remember?”

Your heart drops. Of course your mother would have something to do with this. Ever since you were a kid, she has been involved with school activities and youth groups. The reasons have always been obvious to you but nobody else could guess them. Emilia must have read something on your face because she suddenly goes all serious.

“I promise I’ll leave in the morning.” When she glances away you already imagine a bruise blooming somewhere behind the hair she doesn’t dare pull away from her face.

You cup her cheek, gently, because you don’t want to hurt her more. “It’s okay. I’m glad you’re here. You look tired.”

“I’m freaking exhausted.”

You touch her shoulders and pull her to the bed. She follows you obediently as you both huddle under the covers. You hug her back, your chin resting on her neck. Does your body feel bigger? Are your arms stretching farther than normal? You can’t tell for sure.

“This was the last time,” she mumbles to herself. She doesn’t know how right she is. “I’m calling my aunt tomorrow to come pick up my brother.”

“It’s okay,” you say. “It’s okay, just sleep.” Because you can’t add your own burden to hers. Your parents are quiet tonight. Maybe you can make it until morning. So, you hug her tighter.

And you doze off together.

• • • •

The Ogre woke up in the night and searched for the children again. But smart Little Thumb wore the crowns of the Ogre’s daughters on himself and his brothers. The Ogre’s hunger guided him to the children sleeping in his daughters’ bed. He picked up his large knife and got to work.

Well pleased with what he had done, he went to bed again to his wife.

Nobody said the ogre’s kids are safe from their parents’ hunger.

• • • •

You don’t know how much time has passed when you wake up feeling the two figures looming over you. Over both of you.

Which one is it? One figure—your father—growl-whispers. Which one is ours and which one is the other one?

Does it matter? They smell the same. I am hungry!

You realize then why the ogre of the story ate his own daughters instead of the boys. The creatures that are your parents are made of nothing but hunger. Your parents look more like stretched-out and hollow shadows of themselves than giants. Their massive bodies occupy every inch of empty space around you. But their faces are gaunt, starved. Cheekbones protruding like knives. Two crooked figures full of hole and crevasse, sinew and bone separating.

What happens when ogres eat their own children? Do they weep for their mistake?

This is the part where you sacrifice yourself. This is where every road was leading all along.

“Wake up!” you say. This time your voice is not a whisper but a desperate howl. It even scares your parents with their gaping mouths and their sharp, twisted teeth.

Emilia’s eyes dart open, compelled by a habit drilled into her from her own home. She jumps but doesn’t flinch at the sight of the two ghastly figures stretching their limbs in an attempt at a morbid embrace.

How could you do this to us, daughter? We are hungry! We’ve been starving all our lives for your sake! We shall dip her limbs in honey and roast them until crisp. Then squeeze her juices dry and you won’t get a single bite!

“Fuck that!” Emilia yells. She kicks her platforms in the air hard enough it makes your parents—your monsters—scatter. “Are these your parents?”

You flush. This is the first time that you can tell that yes, without a doubt you are their daughter. Without meaning to your bones separate and your flesh becomes mushy and elastic. Whatever you do, you cannot stop this. You are bigger. You are so big you are threatening to tear this place down with just a stretch of your shoulders. There’s space to fill inside you now, a kind of hunger.

“I didn’t know how to tell you.” You hide your hideous face in your hands. Emilia seems so small now. “I am sorry I messed up.”

Finally, you have arrived. Help us prepare dinner or we shall boil both your heads in a broth made by the juice of your tongues.

Ogres can eat their children. Blood doesn’t stop them. Nothing stops them. Nothing can stop you either. You take a step forward and unspool your newfound body so much so that if Emilia is still in the room, they’ll forget she ever existed.

Then you speak, in that way only Ogres can hear.

You pitiful, pathetic monsters. If I so much sniff you close to us you will be my very first meal. Ogres can eat their parents too. I’ll sure try.

Your parents hiss and take a step into the shadows of the room, shaken. Their bodies diminish a little in your eyes. Or it might be that they are bending more now, afraid of a blow. Perhaps they were afraid of their little monster in the making after all.

Emilia grabs your hand and pulls you towards her with a strength you didn’t know she had. As if she can still tell it’s you. You move slow but your parents don’t stop you. Ungrateful monster. They growl but there’s fear in there. A warning for you to stay away. To never come back.

When you leave the room, the anger rushes out of your body and you feel smaller again. Small and afraid. You stop and close your eyes. Your parents are all you have. Where will you go now?

Someone is touching your arm. The hand is warm and fits into yours.

Emilia asks, “Dude, are you coming?”

“Are you sure you want me with you?”

“If you promise not to cook me later.”

You know Emilia is joking but maybe there’s a truth there. Everywhere, monsters hide in the dark. And you don’t know if you are one of them or not. But you want a chance to grow up to not be one.

You take her hand and turn on the lights.