The courtship between Little Karl and the witch was practically nonexistence. A few hand holdings, precipitated by the application of Ben Gay to a withered hand; the adjoining of lips by sheer accident (one of them had dropped something–a shoe–although most likely it was a toe–for both had diabetes by then–and when they both bent their heads down, their faces were close together and one of them stole a kiss from another.) Very simple. And practical! Government checks to the same address; coupled shopping excursions to to the same pharmacies, clinics and grocery stores. Marriage made sense.  

    Hard to say who proposed to who. Easy to wonder who had the most power. The witch who by now was called Meef (no longer Tarantula, but something more close to her real name–but being a woman who’d lost all her teeth her and could not pronounce her own name very clearly and signed her name with an “X”–she was probably a Margaret or Bethanne, or something of the sort). And her spells had mostly dwindled. Mainly because they were trouble to conjure too Macbethian in nature. But there was one spell that was easy.  That of marriage proposal. And she’d chosen him, Little Karl–Now Big Karl–out of the thousands of men she’d known over the centuries.

    Their honeymoon was horrendous. Harrowing. Pus-filled. Full of aches and pains and many naps in between. By that time, there there was very little age difference between them. Both of them were old and haggard. But she was a bit stronger. “You belong to me forever,” she said. “Or else you die.”

   Nothing that alarmed him. He’d been hearing that from her since kindergarten. He found this mildly amusing. She didn’t like that. She wanted him to take her seriously.

   So she said, in a more ominous voice. “If you ever try to leave me, I’ll garnish your wages with parsley.”

   This made him chuckle. “Garnish my wages?”  he said, shifting in his seat, on that same glider of hers, of yore, now rusty and creaky, further hampering their hearing. “I’ve never had a job in my life” The government has always supported me.” It was true.  Apparently, back then at least, the Deal was that if you were ugly enough you got a check from Uncle Sam, from some obscure government-sponsored program bestowed to the descendants of people from the Pacific West who’d developed deformities because of the Goldrush.  It was a very short-lived program, after it concretely concluded that Gold or any other riches–or the lack or hunt or want or need of them deformities (although they really do, some people will argue) and so it seemed odd that Little/Big Karl was able to get these checks.

  Ah, and as if hit by a lightning bolt, he jolted upright from the glider and and turned with mouth slack with shock. “It was you wasn’t it?” He told his witch-wife on that quiet, cool, November afternoon. “You’ve been sending me money this entire time.”

 She smiled toothlessly. “What are witches for?” She said.

 And if he’d just kept his mouth shut, or maybe just thanked her, he might have lived another few more years. 

“You turned me into this. Into an ugly toad. The opposite of a fairy tale. A kiss that turned me into an ugly toad”

   “But you are my prince.”

   Another aaaah, this one deeper inside, rumbling his chest with its gravity, something unspeakable.  Searing emotions. Unfathomable regret spurting up, bursting forth like a heavy storm cloud. The glider shook. The porch shook. The whole house started to rock.

    People looked out of  their windows in order to make out the commotion coming from the witch’s house. They withdrew their attention from the highly rated television show Dallas on the night it was revealed “Who Shot J.R.?”–in order stare at the rocking sprigs of clematis over at the corner of the street. They thought they heard growls.

   There were growls. The retired witch who’d been a dutiful wife was now pissed.

   But so was Big Karl. Equal pissosity on both sides. No mystery here, who would win this argument.  Winning wasn’t really the issue. Payback was.

   “I don’t want to owe you,” he said.

   “Too late,” she said.

   “There’s one way I can pay you back,” he said.

   “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

They’d begun to sound like Dallas. Within a shew-fart minutes she decided to kill him. He’d served his purpose, she reasoned. He’d kept her company, gotten old with her.  She shifted in her seat and said. “I hereby garnish your wages with parsley” and she threw a few sprigs on him. Yes, actual parsley she’d carried on her person all this time. Which was now brown and crumbly. But she was still powerful.

   Could such a thing be wrapped up after years of matrimony? Of course. That’s how many, many marriages ended in–death. If not murder. Big Karl shat and peed in his pants and keeled over. And that was all.

     But there’s more.