Outsmarting the Witch of Ardiers

The Witch was a bitch. She'd always been a bitch.

But this time she'd gone too far.

Ida had been looking for the best apples for her pie for hours, and now she was exhausted. Her back hurt from all of the bending, and her eyes were sore from squinting into the sunlight. It was late afternoon, and she needed to get home before dark, but the witch's apples were so close - just in that little bit of woods that separated Ida's little orchard from The Witch's vast, spooky, evil forest.

She could see their redness, their roundness, in her mind's eye; she could taste them in her mouth already! But she would need to avoid the witch. And that meant getting past The Witch's house, which loomed ominously over the rest of the village like a mountain over rolling hills. There were stories about what went on behind those walls...and they were not good ones. No one had ever seen The Witch except for the butcher - who said he wanted to enter into an arrangement with her - and his daughter, who went missing five years ago and never came back.

Ida wasn't sure why anyone would want to enter into an arrangement with The Witch anyway - everyone knew that deals with witches didn't end well for anybody. Ida remembered being told as a child about how her grandfather used to travel up to the mountains every month to bring fresh food to some strange woman who lived alone in a cave there; he'd told his family that he was giving it to a dear old friend who couldn't leave her home anymore because of arthritis. But then his oldest son had died under mysterious circumstances; he fell off his horse while trying to jump a fence, and broke his neck when his head hit the ground. No one knew how it happened...and soon after that, Grandpa himself passed away suddenly while trimming his rosebushes one day. The townspeople said it was because he missed his son so much - but Ida thought it may have something to do with whatever awful bargain he'd made with this "friend".

She shivered involuntarily at the memory as she finally reached the edge of the orchard, gazing down at the witch's trees through their own canopy of leaves and branches. They looked angry today: their branches twisting and curling around each other like snakes fighting inside of a basket. Ida could feel something calling from them...but she shook her head sharply and forced herself to think about the pies instead. The apples plucked from these trees would be soft as butter in her pies! She had decided to use three different kinds - Golden Deliciouses (for sweetness), Granny Smiths (for tartness), and Pink Ladies (because they were pretty) - but surely one more couldn't hurt? She bent down once again, straining to pluck another apple from the lower branch of one tree...and felt something cold grip her shoulder almost painfully tight.

"What are you doing?" came a voice like ice shards scraping across glass; sharp and piercingly shrill even though it was barely above a whisper. Ida turned around slowly, feeling dizzy all of a sudden; she could feel her eyelids drooping over her eyes like curtains closing on cue before a performance began....and there she was: The Witch herself. Her skin looked papery thin; thin enough that you could practically see her veins underneath it all if you pressed your face close enough (Ida would find out later that one old lady in the village did exactly this; against all good sense, she wanted proof). She had long black hair that fell down over her shoulders like water running over rocks... black eyes like pits cut out of night skies full of stars, wide lips painted bright red like streaks on apples...and fangs where teeth should be in her mouth! She looked at Ida expectantly, waiting for an answer....but Ida couldn't speak: there was nothing left of her left inside except fear; fear so deep that it ate away everything else inside of her until there was nothing left but terror screaming like blood through every vein in her body! All she could do was stare helplessly at The Witch as time itself seemed to freeze around them both and linger forever before eventually moving again....like an hourglass with sand slipping through its throat drop by precious drop toward its ultimate end!

"What are you doing?" The Witch asked again after an eternity had passed between them; only now there was something sinister in those words beyond simple curiosity: now there seemed to be hunger hiding behind those innocent-sounding words like hidden daggers behind innocent smiles! "What are you doing here?"