Small, I imagined me-sized houses. I always liked a story that featured a cozy cottage with a fireplace.  Even the witch’s house in the Hansel and Gretel forest didn’t seem frightening to me.  It was more like a consolation prize for having the kind of father that, on the word of his new wife, would lead you into the woods to kill you, and never mind that he felt bad about it later.   

My imagining of that house, and how I'd come to live in it, merged seamlessly with the stories of my childhood, unfolding in a story as clear as memory itself: 

Imagine that, the uneasiness of that, following your grim father into the silent woods, all around you the snow gone quiet and gray in the late afternoon light. The fear when he hoisted the axe.  Wathing him whirl with the blade still aloft and walk quickly away,  the realization of what almost happend. The relief that is not cool and celebratory, but hot and complicated.

How the sweet smell of the woods is suddenly apparent though of course it was there all along, following the father even now as he strode home to claim his reward.

The witch who is not old and ugly, they are never old and ugly because if they were think how easy they would be to avoid.   No, the witch is more like a Which, as in, which person can you trust, the pretty lady with marshmallow blonde hair and bubblegum pink  smile who lives in a sweet candy house in the woods, or the father who would rather kill you, gimlet-eyed, than go without sex?

The Which would laugh a lot and say things like, you gorgeous children you! Look at your mouths, your sweet mouths, I could make a meal of your sweet little raspberry mouths! Things that sounded nice until you really thought about it, until you collected up all the things she said like that and looked at them all in a row and realized they were like individual teeth that, when together, formed a great big grinning  sharkbite mouth.