Andy and Kate

"Help! Help!" The two screaming children ran out from between the trees. Crying, disheveled, terror etched in their faces.
"We killed her!"

"She tried to eat us! So we killed her!"

The woman looked on in horror. "Oh heavens, what a horrible thing to happen," she thought as they approached, "I have to speak with children."

But she saw that this was inevitable. She could not escape. There was no one else around to help. And she had given up running years ago for spiritual reasons.

"This is how I die." she thought. There was a certain comfort in knowing this. Dying at the hands of tiny self professed murderers somehow seemed a suitable end. 

She reflected on her choices. But she soon tore herself away from her introspection and said, "Breathe, kids. Calm down and tell me what happened."

And so the children told her their story. A story of horror and evil, betrayal and death. Or at least it was so to them. To everyone else the story was one of tedious children.

The children suffered from selective attention, overactive imaginations, and were masters of the dramatic arts.  

Their mother was very tired.

The children were called Andy and Kate.

These were not their full names.
Their real names were Handle and Kettle.
Their mother had many regrets.

The evening before, they had overheard her saying, "We need someone to take the kids while we go to the market tomorrow." 

What the children understood from this was very different.

"Oh no!" said Kate. "We have no food! It must be a famine!"

"We are going to starve and die!" screamed Andy

"They are giving us away. But to whom?" Kate asked.

"Hopefully someone with food." said Andy.
Then the children hatched a plan.

The next morning Andy snuck a loaf of bread into his backpack. He planned to leave bread along their route so they could find their way back home.

He thought he was being sneaky. 

He was not.

His mother had noticed this and was about to ask him what he was doing but decided against it. They could get out of the house much faster if she did not ask questions.

Andy left the whole loaf in the middle of the sidewalk. "That should work," he thought, satisfied with his handiwork. "We will be able to see this big bread from a mile away."

He quickly recognised the folly of his ways as he soon lost track of the bread.
"We have walked more than 2 miles." he thought.

They had not.
Their babysitter's house was 3 doors down.

Aunty Jean was a lovely but eccentric woman. She had covered the entire house in a textured, white exterior. The children felt drawn to this house. They decided that sometime in the future they should lick it. It reminded them of frosting.
They were idiots.
The texture was called 'popcorn'.

"She lives in a cake?" whispered Kate. "She must be mad. I love it."

Aunty Jean had answered the door and squealed cute-aggressively, "Oh my goodness, look at you two darlings. I could just gobble you up. Just munch on your chubby cheeks. Om nom nom!"

"Oh no!" said Kate, "She IS mad. And she wants to eat us!"
"And so specifically." said Andy, with a good grasp on the english language as well as his own cheeks.

Aunty Jean, like any good aunty, waited until their mother left before breaking out with the snacks and candy.

"Have another samosa or another piece of cake," she repeated regularly to the children as though it was her duty, which, being an Aunty, it was. 

"Let's put some meat on those bones, you're so skinny." She stated in complete disregard of her earlier cheeks related statement.

"Oh no," Kate whispered to Andy. "She wants to eat us, and is trying to fatten us up!"

"Haaila!" exclaimed Andy, who proceeded to fake faint spectacularly.

Soon after he sighed wistfully, "Why am I just bones? I wouldn't want to eat me!"

Later he would remember this moment as the start of his body image journey.

At lunchtime Aunty Jean said, "Shall I make you something? Let me just go put on the oven."

"Oh no," they exclaimed together. "She's going to make us into something right now?"

Yet again the children hatched a plan.

Their plan was murder.

They ran into the kitchen and pushed Aunty Jean into the oven.

It wasn't an oven.
It was a toaster.
It was not on.

"Die Jean!" They exclaimed, like their father did after a heavy meal.

And then more confusingly, "I hope your house melts."

They ran out into the day. They would have run out into the night. But it was not night.

The children were immediately lost due to the lack of bread. Many know this experience but for different reasons.

"This forest is too big. We will never get out." said Kate.

They were still in the garden, having circled the same basil and tomato plants 3 times.

"I am so hungry" said Andy, "I haven't eaten in days"

He had last eaten 10 minutes before.

Finally they stumbled into the street where they encountered the unwillingly kind woman.

"...So that is how our parents abandoned us because of the famine with an evil witch who tried to feed us her house to fatten us up so she could eat us so we killed her and ran away but got lost because we couldn't see the bread and have been roaming in the forest and haven't eaten in days." they finished explaining to the woman.

The woman took a few moments to gather herself. "Someone fed these children mushrooms," she thought to herself. But mushrooms or murder, she needed to investigate.

"Is this the bread you were looking for?" she asked pointing 6 feet away.
"No, that's a different bread," said Andy.

It wasn't.

The woman was confused. She was left with the choice of moving towards bread or murder.

While she pondered this over Aunty Jean came out of her house. A house, the woman noted, which if squinted at really hard, had a vague hint of edibility.

"Children please don't leave the garden. Don't worry you can go home very soon."

"We can? Oh ok." They immediately went inside in a very well behaved fashion.

"Are you alright?" the woman asked Aunty Jean. "The children said they had murdered you."

"Oh it's fine." responded Jean. "They fail to murder me every week."

"My favorite so far was electrocution by a potato battery. And training my chihuahua to attack in the night. But all it led to was ruined groceries and a very nervous Rufus."

They both laughed.

It was not comforting.

Aunty Jean wondered at what point the children would succeed in murdering her.

She would be proud. 

But also dead.

The woman wondered what kind of parents' would name their kids Handel and Kettle. 

She was glad she had been named a far more respectable 'Bain-Marie'.

As she walked away from Aunty Jean's house she licked it.

The police wondered what happened to the neighbour, Uncle Harold, who had gone missing 2 weeks earlier.