Agatha the Witch

Almost every kid in the neighborhood had a friend of a friend who had, swear to God, seen Agatha performing incantations and cooking up strange concoctions at night.

In all reality, she was just a bitter, anti social old woman who didn't want contact with the outside world, but to us kids she had become something of myth... A powerful sorceress who could turn a child into a frog or a cat into a heavily muscled, mutant soldier who would protect her at any cost.

As children tend to do, my group and I became curious and began to try to find ways to infiltrate this witch's sanctuary. Detailed diagrams were drawn, fake blue prints of her house, formed from assumption and legend had been plotted out. Eventually, through plotting and planning all the neighborhood kids had a pretty good idea of exactly where her mutant cat men were posted, their shifts and where the traps and danger areas were.

We lay in wait, the neighborhood kids and I, waiting for a good time to strike. We knew Agatha never left her house but we also knew that she couldn't possibly be awake twenty four hours, seven days a week. Even witches had to sleep, right? We would play in the streets and watch her house most of the day, waiting for an opportunity to ambush.

The problem with our reconnaissance was that her windows were so dirty and cobwebbed that we couldn't ever see into her house to know what she was doing. The only way to ever see Agatha was to wait for the meals on wheels kids to show up or to throw a ball into her yard. After a few weeks of scoping out the joint, we became dismayed. She was always home and from what it seemed, always awake.

Then one day, something amazing happened. Like clockwork, the meals on wheels kid pulled up to deliver her her daily ration of food, Only this time, Agatha was not waiting outside, waiting to fire a barrage of insults. The kid rang the doorbell holding her box of food and she didn't answer. He rang a second time, still no answer. He then pulled out a note pad and attached a note to her box of food, left it on a dusty table on her porch and drove away.

Perhaps this was just a fluke? Perhaps she was busy concocting one of her spells or giving birth to yet another mutant cat guard and just happened to lose track of time. After all, old people are forgetful, right?

After three days of the same occurence, however, the neighborhood kids and I began to suspect that this was no coincedence. Not only had she not been answering the door, she had not come out to claim her food rations either. To test our theory that perhaps she had left on official with business, we purposely threw a ball into her yard.....

Nothing...

It was then that together, we made a command decision that it was now the time to infiltrate Agatha's lair and find out what was really going on with the Hudson street Witch.

Together, five of us made our arduous trek across her dirty, dead yard, shooing away any of her demonic cats that got too close. Her door was not unlocked, however her window was open just enough for the smallest of us to get through and open the door from the other side.

Upon entry into her house, we were hit with a strong rancid odor, causing some of us to gag.

"Who farted?" I asked, causing the five of us to laugh.

Agatha's house was covered in cob webbs. It looked as if it had been abandoned for years, the only signs that anyone had actually been living there were the fresh bowls of cat food scattered around her dark, cluttered living room. The strangest thing about the cat food bowls was not the fact that they were so high in number, but rather that almost all of them had spoons and forks sticking out of them.

Why, we wondered did she feel that her cats needed human untensils to eat their meals? This provided further proof of the existence of her anthropomorhic super soldiers.