The Juniper Tree: Murder and Cannibalism
A man with two children remarries after losing his first wife. The new wife particularly hates the son her husband had with his first wife. One day, she entices the boy to retrieve an apple she had tossed into a heavy trunk. She slams the lid down, chopping off his head. She places the head back on the body and sends her daughter Marlene in to talk to her decapitated half-brother. During the ‘conversation,’ the boy’s head falls off, and the woman tells the horrified girl she is at fault. The stepmother and the little girl use the boy’s body in a soup and serves it to her husband. The man eats his son in the soup, having seconds and thirds, with the unquenchable feeling that the soup was ‘all his.’ Marlene buries her half-brother’s bones under a Juniper tree in their yard.