House of candy

The weekend had arrived and I decided to go for a walk in the local woods. The weather was lovely, the air scented with the new life of spring.

Ten minutes into my walk I heard the sharp sound of a cardboard box being ripped open. Curious, I turned and walked towards the sound. A little way into the undergrowth a woman in a long gown was lifting a big slab of ginger biscuit out of a box. While I approached she slotted the slab into a hole in the wall of a little house. So far only the lower wall had been constructed. Large boxes lay scattered around the construction. I peered into an open one as I passed; it contained candy sticks as long and wide as my forearm. Looking up, I noticed they had been used to frame the windows, which themselves appeared to be made of a thin translucent sheet of sugar.

‘Are you building a house made of candy?’ I asked, incredulous.

The woman jumped and exclaimed, ‘Shit!’. She whirled round and fixed me with an accusing stare.

‘Forgot the wards,’ she muttered to herself, almost too soft for me to hear. In fact, I wasn’t sure that that was what she said. She was a tall, dark-haired woman of about forty.

The annoyance left her face and she smiled, which immediately put me at ease.

‘You made me jump there, love. Yes, it is a candy house.’

‘Why are you building a candy house?’ I asked. ‘Will there be some sort of festival?’ Would the woods be flooded by orcs, elves and knights in a few hours? I hadn’t heard of any activity taking place in the woods. Ours was a small town, if you could be as generous to call it even that, so the news of anything exciting coming our way usually travelled fast.

The woman seemed to be contemplating my words, her eyes darting to the cardboard boxes around her.

Then she smiled again. ‘Oh no, nothing as grand as that, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s just a little something for the children. You have any?’ There was a keen interest in the question.

‘Children? No, I’m just on my own. But Mark and Ally up on the hill have three, and there’s the gang of five over at Andy’s,’ I motioned towards the fields beyond the woods.

‘How lovely,’ the woman smiled, looking genuinely pleased. ‘How about you send them along this afternoon, when I’ve finished putting up the house?’

‘You’re not going to eat them, are you?’ I joked.

The woman seemed affronted. ‘I would never! Everyone always immediately thinks of the fairytale, but Hansel and Gretel’s version of the facts was downright slander, if you ask me.’

‘Then what really happened?’ I grinned, amused by her playing her role solely for my benefit.

‘Why, the witch didn’t try to eat them, of course. Where’s the sense in that?’ the woman replied, perking up. ‘No sense in wasting all that manpower. One would keep them as slaves. Have them do all the chores around the house, collect wood and food from the forest, so that the witch could focus on developing her magical powers.’

She beamed at me. ‘I daresay a few of them actually enjoyed the experience.’

I laughed. ‘The children will be delighted to hear that version! Hard graft instead of quickly being gobbled up!’

‘Oh, one does not tell them in advance,’ the woman good-naturedly waved my remark away. ‘There’s nothing like sudden captivity to make one accept the prospect of lifelong servitude.’

‘All right,’ I smiled. ‘I’ll send the children along then. Around four, would that do?’

‘That would be lovely, dear, thank you.’

‘I was just wondering,’ I said, ‘how do you make sure the ants don’t eat all the candy?’

‘Oh, I treat the candy before I put it up,’ the woman replied. ‘Otherwise they’re at it from the moment I put down the first piece.’

‘What with?’ I asked, glancing around. There was no solution to be seen in which she could dip the candy.

The woman looked put out for a moment. ‘Oh, I treat it before I pack the candy. Otherwise the little buggers would be squeezing their way into the boxes before I could even open them.’

‘I see. Well, good luck with the performance tonight. I’m sure the children will love it.’

‘Thank you,’ the woman beamed at me as I turned to leave.

‘People are so fucking gullible,’ I thought I heard her mutter as I waded through the undergrowth.