The Witch

Via: Daily Prompt – Outlier

 

Image: Pixabay

I have said this before: being raised abroad and then in the city made childhood visits to my maternal grandparents quite an adventure. My baby brother and I were treated like royalties and, apart from spoiling us a bit, it also made us feel extremely coddled. Each time the car doors slid open, we would rush into our grandmother’s arms. Then we would look over her shoulders to the well-governed agricultural surrounding and feel even giddier at the prospect of being exposed to so much nature. Not that the adults ever let us stray too far out of their sights. Not that we didn’t give escape a good try anyway and succeed.

Among one of our favorite haunts was to visit the old witch who lived on the edge of the village. She was still quite within the bounds of the neighborhood but her two-story delipidated ranch house was set all the way to where the mustard fields touched the hamlet. Her two-story ranch house was the only two-story ranch house of its kind in the village, for that matter.

Its wooden frames had browned with age and become swollen in places. Most of the exterior walls of the structure had come loose so that we could easily glimpse into its innards through the gaps and see how vacant and lifeless the rooms were. When she moved around in the house – and she was the restless sort – the creaks could be heard all the way across her barren yard to the copse in which my cousins and I hid to watch her.