"Hello, children," Jacob said. "Who are you, and what are you doing?"

"We are Harold Dean and Grettie Mae," the boy said. "And we are following the trail of beef jerky so that we may find our way back home tomorrow.

"Why must you do that?" Wilhelm asked. "And what is this beef jerky?"

The two children appeared shocked.

"You don’t know what beef jerky is?" Harold Dean said. "I thought everyone knew what that was."

"Is it like bread crumbs?" Jacob asked.

"Not really," Harold Dean said. "We make it from the cows my dad kills."

"Oh, I see," Wilhelm said, cringing. "That’s all very nice, but why did you have to leave a trail to get back home? Where are your parents?"

"They left us," Grettie Mae said. "They don’t have the money to feed us, so they left us in the woods with only a bit of beef jerky. We made a trail so we could find our way back."

"My, what clever children you are," Jacob said. "May we follow you back home? I’d like to have a talk with your parents about abandoning their children."

"Y’all can come with us, if we can find the way," Harold Dean said. "Birds or something have eaten our beef jerky, and now we’re lost."

"What a quaint dialect you two have," Wilhelm said. "Do you mind telling us exactly where we are?"

"Well, I don’t know anything about a dialect, but we’re all in Oklahoma," Harold Dean said. "How did you guys get here?"

"Well, it was all rather magical, so we’re not quite sure," Jacob said.

"Probably a tornado, we get a lot of those around here," Harold Dean said.

After walking awhile, the group realized that they were definitely lost. Finally, after several hours, they saw a pigeon. It sang them a song and then flew away. Not having anything better to do, they followed it until they came upon a trailer house in the middle of the woods. Amazingly, the trailer was built of food -- bread and cake, with windows made of sugar -- and it was a double-wide. There was plenty of food for everyone. The Grimms, Harold Dean and Grettie Mae hungrily ripped into the windows.

Suddenly, a frightful old woman came running out of the house. She had curlers in her hair, and was wearing lots of makeup and an old, pink bathrobe.

"Chew, chew, on my double wide, why must you ruin my home’s outside?" she said.

No one knew quite what to say. They waited for her to continue.

"Y’all, please don’t eat my windows like that," she said. "Come on inside. I’ve been wanting to have a barbecue for a few weeks now, and tonight we can have it."

Even though the woman was strange, the children and the Grimms followed her inside after Grettie Mae explained to Jacob and Wilhelm exactly what barbecue was.

Grettie Mae offered to help the woman season the meat.

"So, do you use KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce or that great stuff the Selmon brothers make?" Grettie Mae asked politely.

"Actually, I make my own stuff," the woman said. "It gives it a special flavoring. Here, why don’t you help me clean out the barbecue pit?"

"But shouldn’t we let the meat start to thaw first?" Grettie Mae asked.

"Don’t worry about it, sweetie," the woman said. "Just hop on into that pit with this brush."

As Grettie Mae leaned over the pit, she saw that it was already lit. The woman tried to push her in, but Grettie Mae jumped out of the way and shoved the woman in as the Grimms stood by and watched in shock. The awful woman slowly burned up.

"Well, that’d make some interesting jerky," Harold Dean said.

"Eww!" Grettie Mae said. "That’s gross, Harold Dean. You be quiet. Now, let’s go home."

First, they took all of the woman’s money and a few pieces of her trailer for an afternoon snack. Then they all went skipping through the forest until they found their home.

From there, the Grimm brothers called the police and reported Harold Dean and Grettie Mae’s parents for child abandonment. Harold Dean and Grettie Mae later asked the court to be declared legally emancipated from their parents. They won their case and then moved back into the woman’s trailer. After that, they invited the Grimm brothers over to visit every week for Monday Night Football and barbecued ribs.

Author’s Note: For this week’s story, I "Oklahomaized" (my new verb) the story of Hansel and Grethel. Since the Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, are in my frame tale, I put them into the story. I kept the basic details of the story: the kids’ parents try to leave them in the woods, the kids leave a trail to find their way home, they find a witch’s home and narrowly escape being cooked for dinner. However, I changed some of the details of the story, such as making the bread crumbs into beef jerky, and I changed the ending.

Bibliography

"Hansel and Grethel"
Website: Mythology Folklore Online
Weblink: http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/grimm/pages/02.htm.