Dave awoke in his favorite way possible, to the sound and sizzling of bacon. He pried his eyes open. Aside from the bathroom, their home didn’t really have rooms. If anyone wanted their own room they could just as easy get the town to build them a new house wherever they so pleased, complete with water and gas. The kitchen, or rather the place in the house that contained the cabinets and the stove, was visible between David’s feet while he laid on his back in bed. Arin was in the kitchen, already making breakfast. They noticed Dave get up.

“Morning, sleepy. I’m guessing the book was good?” Arin asked, flipping the bacon over in the pan. 

“Yeah, I’m really liking it so far.”

“Awesome.” Arin kept their attention on the pan. “I thought I’d make us some meat, you might need the protein for your big day of punching witches.”

Dave rubbed his eyes. “Ugh, I think I was trying to forget.”

“Why on earth would you not wanna go fight some magic lady for no reason?” Arin put some bacon on a plate. “Here, this will get you enough energy to punch twelve of them straight in the domepiece.”

“What if there’s thirteen witches?” Dave grinned.

Arin added another slice of bacon to the pile on the plate.

Dave chuckled. “And what if those thirteen witches all have pistols and fire spells and really harsh language?”

Arin put the rest of the bacon on their plate. “Then I guess you’ll just have to use that energy to run away.”

Dave ate his meal quickly and put the plate in the sink. “Thank you so much for that, but I gotta go soon.”

“Hoping to leave before you run into Chad?”

“Yep.” Dave grabbed some clean clothes, ducked into the bathroom to put them on, and left the house as quickly as he could.

The sunlight illuminated many of the villages flaws- the clear cracks in roofing, the vines eating away at the foundations of buildings, the dirtiness of the dirt roads. Rodehills had stood for many decades, and its structures and systems needed constant repair to combat the slow wearing-down of time. Still, Dave admired how well it always seemed to work together. 

Many villagers were already up and working on whatever they needed to get done, whether that be fixing a home, laying piping, or turning wool into yarn. He stopped on the road outside his home to let a shepard and his flock of sheep pass by on their way to graze. The sheep never seemed to respond as well to Dave as they did to many of the other villagers, but they still looked adorable. When they passed, he headed toward the clearing which overlooked the valley. His house was on the edge of the village, right before the hills became too steep to practically build on. Though the distance between the village and the woods was mostly grassland, the hill would make the trip there difficult and the return even moreso.

Dave gingerly crept his way down the hill. If he lost his balance, an easy thing for someone his size to do, it could be a long tumble to the bottom. With short steps, inch by inch, he made it into the valley. A few more miles of wading through knee-high grass that itched through his clothes, and he’d make it to the woods. He very much regretted not just telling Chad to let him go back to bed.

In the valley he finally noticed that he couldn’t see smoke rising from the woods any more. Perhaps the lad’s witch had already left. Or, more likely, she had never existed, and Dave was merely tracking down a trick of the light in the night sky or a small fire that burned itself out.

He approached the woods and entered right away. He’d explored this forest with the lads his entire childhood and had no fear of getting lost. The smoke had seemed to be coming from the center, and that’s where he was headed. If nothing was there, perfect. If something was, then he’d have to come up with a plan that didn’t involve assaulting someone.

The forest consisted of massive evergreens, far taller than any other thing Dave had ever seen in his life. Though their trunks were thin by comparison, their branches reached nearly the length of a house. The branches started low to the ground as well, most having branches below Dave’s knees. Many tree’s branches would interlock with another tree’s, making some paths impassable, unless someone wanted to push against a tree branch while being poked by thousands of pines. As such, getting to the center of the forest involved navigating a naturally-grown maze. Smell of the pines filled the entire forest, and attached itself onto anyone who entered. Dave’s mother had always used that smell to know when he was off playing farther away from the village than he should.

As he passed another row of trees, he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. An octagonal wooden cabin sat right in the forest’s center. Dave had been to this very spot dozens of times, but had never seen this cabin. Despite that, it looked as though it had been there for decades. The logs it was made of seemed to have begun rotting. Moss and vines covered the surface. The wooden roof looked splintered and worn. Though each one of the eight sides had a window, he couldn’t see through them.

He circled around the house, and soon came across an equally dilapidated door. Dave had never encountered a witch, nor a witch’s hut. But building looked as much like his mental image of one as it could have. Suddenly Chad’s story seemed far too realistic. Dave took a deep breath in. If there was a witch in there, and they had any intent to do harm to Rodehills, then he’d just have to convince them to leave. Slowly, watching for any movement and listening for any noise, he made his way to the front door. He knocked.

No one answered.

He tried again. Still nothing.

At this point he knew the best move would be to turn around. He had technically investigated and had confirmed that somehow a building had appeared in the woods. But he knew that would only lead to further questions, more investigations, more prodding, and potentially lead to whatever Chad could or would do to this house. If he didn’t investigate as thoroughly as he could, then the lads certainly would, and that wasn’t good news for anybody.

Just to check, he knocked one more time. Then, when again no response came, he twisted the knob and opened the door. A lantern, dim but still lit, hung on a hook beside the door. If nobody was home, they had been recently. He picked it up. It barely provided any light, but the inside of the house was so dark that he had to use it if he actually wanted to see anything at all. 

He couldn’t see much of the hallway in front of him, but was glad to be able to see at his feet. The main hall was covered in stacks of books, some he might have only kicked over and others that would have sent him tumbling to the ground, or perhaps into a different stack of books. Loose paper scattered itself from the force of each of his steps, no matter how gently he tried to walk. On top and around the books sat dozens of glass bottles. Most were empty, but some had traces of strange liquids. Potions, he corrected himself. His desire to not touch anything grew even stronger, and he slowed even more. All of this mess kept his eyes on the ground.

Believing that the witch, if she was even here, wouldn’t just be lying in the hallway, he turned and walked into the first open door he saw. The room seemed just as cluttered but much more livable. Comfy-looking but worn-out chairs and handful of wooden tables and nightstands, all covered in books and papers, surrounded the center of the room. Dave moved cautiously toward the center. The light of his lantern glinted off black metal. A few more steps and he found himself looking at a caldron, half full of a dark green fluid. If he still had any doubts that this was a genuine witch’s house, they were gone.

Finding nothing else in that room but more chairs and more mess, he walked back into the hallway. He made it all the way to the end, coming to a solid, undecorated white wall. He’d passed by a couple shut doors on his left, and now turned back to open them. There was no way he was going to get out of this without either confirming that the place was abandoned or having a conversation with this witch.

The door creaked as he opened it, so he opened it even slower. After a few inches, it hit against something. A white, cotton pillow. Dave reached down, picked it up, and set it against the wall. When he moved to do that, the lantern illuminated two more identical pillows. Still hunched over, he reached the lantern out. The entire floor appeared to be covered in hundreds of pillows. He stood up and began wading through the fluffy room, dragging his feet on the floor to push the pillows aside rather than step on them. Not knowing the size or the shape of the room, he kept close to the wall and planned to circle around.

The dim light caught a glimpse of something besides a pillow; Dave saw a hand. He moved closer, revealing a young woman, but one who was not altogether human. She had cat-like features, including large, fuzzy ears, a small pink nose, and fangs. Her hair was long except on her right side. Where it was short it was black, but where it was long it was a deep red. Beside her head sat a large, black, pointed hat. Dave had found the witch.

Out of sudden concern, he moved the light over her torso to check if she was still breathing. He sighed. She was. But the light caught something else. Draped across her stomach laid something large, and scaly, and moving. The instant he saw it, it slithered off of the witch- he whipped the light around as he heard it move behind him, then he heard a snap.

Lanterns high up on the walls suddenly came alight. Dave’s eyes blurred for a moment to adjust. When they did, he still wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. The creature before him had the head of a cow, with a dark patch of fur over their left eye, but it also had human hair. The torso was human as well, but despite the creature being clothed in a black jacket he could see it they were still covered in fur. Their arms were held next to them, fingers that were both fingers and hooves held in a snapping motion. Below the torso, the body transitioned from furry to scaly, leading to a long snake-like tail that extended all the way around Dave without touching him. Not since he was a child had any living thing he’d encountered made him feel this small.

“Hi.” The cow-snake said in a sing-song voice. They waved at him.

Dave very slowly raised his arm to wave back. He managed to squeak out a “hi.”

Behind him, he heard the witch move. And yawn. He didn’t turn around.

“Melody? What’s up?” the sleepy voice behind him asked.

“Nothing, sweetie. We have an intruder. He says hi.” The cow-snake circled back around Dave and over to where the witch was now sitting up. The two embraced and rubbed their cheeks together. Dave wasn’t sure if he should leave.

After a moment, the witch opened one eye and looked at dave. It was green, with a vertical pupil. Still looking at him, she said, “Mel, honey, why don’t you make us and our intruder friend some coffee?”

Melody nodded enthusiastically and slithered through the pillows and out the door. She stuck her head back in. “Hey, do you want cream and sugar? And also what’s your name?”

The tightness Dave felt in his throat had yet to go away. All he managed to say was “Black. And Dave.”

Melody nodded and went back out the door.

The witch stood up, swooped up and put on her hat, and delicately strode over to Dave. He saw now that she also had a long, spotted cat tail.

“I’m Millicent, the Evil Witch of the Forest. Nice to meet you.” He couldn’t tell from her tone of voice if she was being sincere or sardonic.

“Dave,” he sputtered out.

“I’ve heard. Why don’t we take this conversation to the living room?” She lead the way through the door. He thought it best to follow.

The house looked even filthier in the light, now that he was able to take in the full extent of the mess all at once. There were still the mountains of books, papers, and glass bottles, but also shelves full of hundreds of glass jars containing different things. Some held hair, others teeth, several had varieties of plants and fungi that Dave had never seen before.

When he fully entered the hallway, Millicent waved her hand. The front door slammed shut. Millicent turned back to him and grinned, showing her fangs in the process. “I think you and I need to have a chat. It’s not locked and you’re free to go, but I would say that leaving right now is discouraged.”

Dave, his stomach churning with fear, nodded. With delicate steps, she glided over to the main room, and he followed. 

He rounded the corner, and saw Melody standing over the caldron with a spoon, stirring the liquid inside. Hot coals were alight under the cauldron, which he now noticed sat in a small stone pit. Millicent flicked her wrist, sending some books flying from out of a chair

and crashing on the floor next to it. Dave sat down. The chair was really too small for him, and he had to squeeze himself between the armrests. Be he didn’t complain. Millicent continued to another chair, where she gently picked a large book up out of it, sat down, and delicately placed it on the table beside her. 

Just then, a mug shot up out of the cauldron. Melody caught it. A second after, coffee popped out and landed directly in the mug, somehow without spilling a drop. Melody slithered over to Dave and handed it to him. 

“Here you go! Want anything else with it?”

“No thank you.” Dave sat with the coffee in his lap. It smelled amazing, but there was no way he was going to actually drink it.

Melody made two more cups of coffee this way, handing one to Millicent and keeping the other for herself. When she finished, she slithered over to Millicent’s chair and coiled her tail around both the witch and the chair. Millicent held her hand out as Melody encircled her, stroking Melody’s head, back, and the majority of her tail in the process.

Dave looked around the room a bit more. Despite the bottles of potions and ingredients, and the general clutter, the living room looked like a much more comfortable space than he’d initially thought. The walls also had pictures of Melody and Millicent in many different locations. Sometimes they were alone and other times they were beside a handful of other strange beings and people with animalistic features. The messiness still seemed like a major issue. One part of the ceiling appeared to have an entire cake smashed against it.

“Is, umm, that a cake?” Dave asked, a bit nervous to be asking any questions.

“It was. Don’t worry about it,” Millicent said before taking a long sip of her coffee. Looking down at her cup, she continued, “A more important question is ‘what are you doing in our house?’”

“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “A friend of mine said he thought a witch had moved into this forest and seemed really concerned that you were going to hurt our village. I came up here to see if that was true. When I got to your house I thought it might have been abandoned and I walked in without really thinking things through.”

“Is your friend the one with the really thin eyebrows?” Melody asked.

It took Dave a second to realize she meant Larry. That wasn’t the first way he would have thought to describe him. “Oh no, that’s a different guy. He pals around with our friend Chad, who’s the one who seemed really concerned.”

“If he’s so concerned, why didn’t he come himself?” Millicent asked.

The last thing he wanted to tell them was that he was sent here to beat them up. “I convinced him to let me go first. Chad’s not the kind of guy who, to put it gently, excels at productive problem solving.”

“He’s a jerk?” asked Melody.

“Yeah, basically.” Dave absent-mindedly took a sip of his coffee. Fear coursed through him when he realized what he’d done, but he tried not to let it show on his face.

“Well I can assure you that I’m not here to bring any harm to your village. If I had wanted to do that I wouldn’t have teleported our house into the middle of difficult-to-navigate piney woods miles away, would I?” Millicent had started to sound upset.

“Probably not.” Dave wasn’t convinced this self-described “evil witch” was harmless, but he couldn’t fault that reasoning. 

“If I had wanted to mess with your town, we could have just made the house fly, rain down potions that turn into vapor when they hit the ground and turn everyone there and everyone who enters there for the next hundred years into adorable sheep-women.” Millicent then finished her coffee and put it on a book beside her.

Dave’s attention snapped away from the coffee back to the witch. That threat made him feel very strange. A mixture of fear and curiosity, he assumed.

“Actually.” Millicent said, turning to Melody with a lilt in her voice, “That sounds like a lot of fun, can we try that sometime?”

Melody scratched behind the witch’s cat ears. “No, sweetie.”

“Aww,” Millicent said with a smile on her face. She rubbed her head against Melody’s hand. 

“Well, I’m glad I can go tell the lads that.” Dave set his coffee down on a book next to him. “I hate to rush, and I’m so sorry I entered without your permission, but I do have some things around town I should also get done today.”

“Okay,” said Melody.

Millicent looked at Dave, but began stroking Melody’s head. “Before you go, you should know that you’ve been cursed.”

Dave sank into his chair. Tension filled every ounce of his body.

“Sorry,” said Melody. She sounded genuinely concerned.

He stammered for a bit, before managing to ask, “Was it the coffee?”

“No the coffee is fine, and delicious,” she scratched the back of Melody’s head. “You got cursed the moment you entered the house. We’re developing a sort of magical security system, set to automatically curse anyone entering without permission.”

Dave, barely able to fit in his chair, still somehow managed to hunch more in it. “What is the curse going to do?”

“It’s not meant to be harmful, just kind of scary,” said Melody, “all it’s meant to do is turn you into something small and cute right when you enter, like a fox or a bunny. You pass through, get scared, run out and turn back in an hour or so.”

“And hopefully tell everyone else in your village not to mess with us.” added Millicent.

“But, why hasn’t that happened to me?” asked Dave, his hands shaking but his eyes brightening.

“Because the hex is very complicated and in the very early stages of development. You happened to enter on the first night we activated it, but before we actually had any chances to refine it.” Millicent stopped scratching Melody. “Essentially, we had it set to activate and to have broad parameters of making the intruder smaller and cuter. But we don’t have it set for any specifics, such as when it activates, how long it takes, or how exactly the transformation will manifest.”

Dave’s hand stopped shaking. That didn’t seem like that bad of a curse at all. “But all it’s going to do is make me small and cute? For only a hour or so?”

Millicent looked down, shame in her eyes. Her ears drooped. Melody held onto her. Millicent said, “Making a curse temporary is the most difficult part of curse-building. This is dark magic, it doesn’t like to go away. It’s very difficult to handle, and I’m sorry I messed it up.”

“But we can reverse it!” Melody interjected, seemingly to reassure both Dave and Millicent. 

“Yes!” Millicent’s mood shifted back, and she regained her confident posture. “It’s all reversible, the only difficulty right now is that we don’t exactly know what you’re going to transform into, so we don’t yet know what to reverse. Sadly there’s no such thing as a generalized curse-removal spell, so we’ll have to customize the reversal after it hits. It’s our mistake and we absolutely will fix this, but we’ll need to wait until it actually activates.”

“But it’s going to make me cute?” Dave asked again.

Melody nodded. “Yep.”

“Well, uh, that doesn’t sound bad.” Words started flowing from Dave’s mouth before he could really think to stop them. He didn’t know why he suddenly found these strangers so easy to talk to. Maybe because they were strange themselves, maybe because they seemed so reclusive and likely would never tell anyone, and maybe because it seemed like they might actually help him out. “I mean, I’m a very big guy, and I’ve never really been comfortable with that.”

Millicent’s large cat ears perked up. “Really? This is a complicated question and it’s entirely fair not to have an answer, but do you know what, if anything, you’d want changed? Just height?”

“I think probably height, but also becoming cuter sounds really appealing.” It felt simultaneously gut-churning and relieving to say that out loud. Dave saw Millicent and Melody smile, exchange a look, and nod before turning back towards him.

“I understand.” Millicent stood up as Melody slithered off of her. She began walking to a corner of the room, and started digging through some strange trinkets. “There’s actually not too much we can do for you right now; adding curses on top of unknown curses is very unwise. So once it becomes clear what is happening, basically you can see if your current curse works for you or not. If so, great! If not, you can come back here. We’ll remove it and set you up with something a little more to your taste.”

“Would I owe you anything for that?” asked Dave, surprised the the Evil Witch of the Forest would be so willing to help.

“Cuteness is free of charge,” Melody beamed.

“Everything is free of charge. This is our house, not a store, and don’t let anyone in your town start to think it is.” Millicent flicked her tail back and forth, still pushing aside more junk. Soon, she pulled out a small, radiant blue crystal. She walked over and handed it to Dave. “This is a warp crystal. Smash it on the ground and you’ll instantly warp back to our front door. I’d recommend knocking next time.”

“I knocked this time.” Dave replied.

“Oh,” said Melody. “Knock louder?”

Millicent walked back over to Melody and they rubbed their foreheads together. 

Dave slipped the crystal into his pocket, and stood up out of the chair. It all still felt unreal. “Well, thank you both, I suppose. Sorry about breaking in.”

“Sorry about the curse.” Millicent said, stroking Melody’s head. “Maybe, I mean.”

“I think I’m going to head home now. It’s been nice meeting you.” Even though the wholeness of his experience with them hadn’t been that positive, the fact that they were willing to help him change filled him with excitement. It felt like so many wonderful possibilities had just opened up.

He continued, “Oh and I think it’d be smart to watch out for Chad? He’s- how should I put it? He’s a tool.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Millicent grinned. “We’re big girls.”

“And getting tools to stop bothering us is kind of our speciality,” Melody said with a smug grin. Millicent gave her a side-eye before petting the back of her head.

Dave waved. They waved back. In the hallway, the front door was already open. He walked a bit carefully through this cursed doorway and back into the familiar woods. The scent of pine felt stronger than ever. 

He walked home without even thinking about the path back. His mind was still filled with the strangeness of that encounter, as well as the fear and excitement of what his curse could be. It might turn him into an animal, which would be inconvenient, but he could fix it. There was a possibility it could not change him much at all, which would be disappointing. But what if it made him small and delicate, like the dainty and very cheesy heroines of his books? A blush rose in his cheeks. 

Further along though, he began to worry. What if they were just messing with him? It’s possible they could somehow see his thoughts, and were simply taunting him. Maybe they sent him home without a curse at all. This worry filled his head from the trip to the valley, all the way to his house.

He suddenly turned around. The hill behind his house had always been a struggle to go down, and a bigger struggle to go up. For the first time in his life, he’d made it up without even having to worry about losing his balance.

“Huh.” That was all he had to say.