The Witch and the Kind Girl

The stories we tell about "bad women" say more about us than about them

When I was seven, my grandmother skipped the happily-ever-after.

We were sitting at her kitchen table, the vinyl chair sticking to the back of my legs, while a pot of something herbal and suspicious simmered on the stove. Instead of the usual princes and enchanted forests, she leaned in and said, almost conspiratorially:

“They only call her a witch when they’re afraid of her.”

She didn’t mean the cartoon crone with the green nose and the cackle. She meant the neighbor who lived alone and didn’t smile enough. The aunt who never married. The woman at church who spoke up too sharply and then got labeled “difficult.”

Years later, I started to notice how the fairy tales I grew up with sounded different when you turned the volume up on the wronged women in the background. The stepmothers. The old hags. The girls who were “too much” or “too clever” or “too loud.”

So I rewrote one of them.

Not on paper at first, but in my head—every time I caught myself judging a woman a little too quickly, or letting someone get away with a cruelty because they wrapped it in sweetness.

This is that story: a twisted fairy tale about a witch, a kind girl, and the quiet ways we decide who the monster really is.

Once upon a village that needed someone to blame

There was a village pressed up against the edge of an old forest.

You know the kind of village, even if you’ve never lived in one. The kind where everyone knows your business. The kind where roles are set early and you’re expected to stay inside the lines for the rest of your life.

In that village lived a girl everyone called Kind.

Not her real name, of course, but titles are powerful, and once the adults started saying it, it stuck to her like a blessing and a curse.

Kind helped carry water for the older women. She braided younger children’s hair. She smiled when the boys teased her and laughed it off when they took things a little too far.

“That’s our Kind girl,” the baker would say proudly, handing her the slightly burnt loaf instead of throwing it out.

In a cottage at the edge of the forest lived a woman everyone called Witch.

Not her real name either.

She grew herbs in clay pots and talked to her cat as if it were a person. She walked into town twice a week, eyes sharp, back straight, and never apologized for taking up space.

“She thinks she’s better than everyone,” the butcher muttered once when she corrected the weight on his scale.

“Ungrateful,” the innkeeper’s wife added, though no one could remember what exactly the witch was supposed to be grateful for.

People said she lured children into the forest. They said she cursed crops. They said she made husbands stray and wives bitter.

No one could point to a single instance of this. But fear doesn’t need proof. It just needs repetition.

And the story repeated often.

The kind girl and the witch finally meet

One autumn, the rains didn’t come.

The river shrank, fields crusted over, and the cracks in the ground began to look like veins in a tired hand. The village needed a villain. The drought couldn’t just be a drought. Something—or someone—had to be to blame.

It didn’t take long.

“It started when she moved to the edge of the forest,” someone whispered at the well.

“It’s her herbs,” another woman said. “They’re not natural.”

Heads turned toward the tree line.

Toward the cottage.

Toward the witch.

Someone suggested sending the kind girl to talk to her. Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? When we want to soften a blow or deliver an accusation wrapped in sugar, we find the nearest “nice” woman and ask her to carry it.

“She won’t hurt you, Kind,” the baker’s wife promised. “You’re too good. She’ll listen to you.”

So Kind walked the cracked path to the forest’s edge, clutching a basket of bread like a peace offering and a question knotted in her chest.

Up close, the witch’s cottage looked less like a villain’s lair and more like a place someone had built with their own tired hands. The garden was wild but tended. Flowers shouldered up against medicinal plants. A line of herbs dried under the eaves like green laundry.

The door opened before Kind could knock.

“You’re late,” the witch said.

Kind blinked. “I… wasn’t expected.”

“Everyone is expected,” the witch replied. Her eyes were not cruel, just unsentimental. “You brought the burnt bread?”

Kind looked down at the loaf—the one the baker had tossed toward her that morning with a joke about how “even charity has standards.”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

The witch stepped aside. “Come in, then.”

Who we call a monster when we’re afraid

Inside, the cottage smelled like honey and smoke.

Jars lined the shelves—labeled in a sharp, practical hand. There was no charmed cauldron, no bubbling curse. Just a pot of soup on the fire and a cat that eyed Kind like it had seen a thousand girls like her.

“You came because they think I cursed the sky,” the witch said matter-of-factly, slicing the bread as if they were discussing the weather.

Kind flinched at the directness of it.

“I came because they’re afraid,” she answered, surprising herself with her own honesty.

The witch snorted softly. “They’ve always been afraid. Drought just makes the fear louder.”

Kind had to admit that was true.

When the harvest was good, people tolerated the witch’s presence the way they tolerated the cracked stone in the village square—annoying but not worth fixing.

When things went wrong, the village remembered the stone and the witch all at once.

“They say you lure children into the forest,” Kind said tentatively. It felt strange to speak the rumors aloud. They sounded thinner in the air than they had in the safety of group whispers.

The witch laughed—it wasn’t a pleasant sound, exactly, but it was real.

“Child, I haven’t lured anyone anywhere in my life. The village sends them to me. Quiet ones. Strange ones. The ones who don’t fit. They arrive with baskets and questions, just like you.”

Kind felt heat rise in her cheeks.

“I choose to stay,” the witch continued, eyes softening for a moment. “They go back. Most of them do. The village likes its misfits returned, but not too changed.”

Something in Kind’s chest tightened.

There it was—that small, dangerous question: Which one am I?

The girl everyone praised for being kind, or the girl who might, one day, choose to stay where she wasn’t supposed to?

The cost of being “kind” when kindness means disappearing

If you’ve ever been called “nice” your whole life, you know there’s a price tag hidden on the back of that compliment.

In the village, Kind’s sweetness greased the gears. She smoothed over arguments, absorbed sharp words, and stepped aside so others could step forward.

The thing no one said out loud: her kindness was useful.

It meant others could be careless, thoughtless, even cruel, and the village would stay quiet. Because Kind would find a way to make it okay.

“You don’t have to defend them,” the witch said quietly one afternoon, when Kind found herself justifying the baker’s temper, the boys’ teasing, the villagers’ fear.

“I’m not—” Kind began, then stopped. Because she was.

She was doing it again.

The witch stirred her soup.

“I know what it is to be the salve on everyone else’s wound,” she said. “Until you’re bleeding out and they still ask for more.”

Kind looked up sharply. “What did they call you, before?”

Before witch, she meant.

For the first time, the older woman hesitated.

“Useful,” she said. “They called me useful.”

The word dropped between them like a stone.

Kind realized, with a quiet chill, that “kind” and “useful” weren’t as different as she’d always believed.

Both meant: you exist to make things easier for us.

The difference was what happened when you stopped.

The useful woman became a witch.

The kind girl became selfish.

Monstrous, even.

Not because either one hurt anyone. But because they started to draw lines around their own pain and called it a boundary instead of a burden.

The moment the village decided who the monster really was

The drought got worse.

Crops failed. Tempers snapped.

People stopped being polite about their fear.

One afternoon, a boy from the village—one who used to throw pebbles at Kind “playfully” and hide behind jokes—arrived at the witch’s door with a small crowd behind him.

“What have you done to us?” he demanded. “Why won’t the rain come?”

Kind happened to be there, learning the names of plants that healed instead of hurt.

The witch didn’t flinch.

“Rain doesn’t answer to me,” she said simply.

“It answered before you came,” someone shouted from the back.

“That’s not true,” Kind began, but her voice was swallowed by the swell of anger.

“You bring the strange plants. The strange ways,” another villager said. “Nothing was wrong before you.”

Kind thought about the village before the witch.

Before the drought.

She remembered boys cornering girls behind barns. Husbands raising hands and everyone pretending not to notice. Old women dying quietly in their beds because no one thought their pain was worth easing.

Plenty had been wrong before.

It had just been normal.

“With respect,” the witch said, and there was no respect in it, “the sky isn’t punishing you because I dry nettles by my door. If anything is punishing you, it’s the years you spent pretending your cruelty was just ‘the way things are.’”

The crowd bristled.

There it was—the line.

There is nothing more threatening to a community than someone who refuses to play along with its favorite lies.

“You see?” the boy said, pointing. “She curses us. She thinks she’s above us.”

“She thinks she’s allowed to speak,” a woman snapped, and that, Kind realized, was the real crime.

Not magic.

Not herbs.

Not the forest.

The crime was a woman who would not bow her head and say thank you for the scraps of tolerance she’d been given.

The crowd moved as one, the way crowds do when they’ve decided what the story is and who the villain must be.

Someone lit a torch.

Someone else grabbed the witch’s arm.

And then something happened that the village had not scripted.

Kind stepped in front of her.

When “kindness” finally chooses a side

“Stop,” Kind said.

Just that. Not shouted. Not whispered. A simple word, spoken from somewhere deeper than habit.

“Move, girl,” the baker muttered. His eyes were unfamiliar—less like the man who handed her extra bread and more like a child hiding behind his own fear.

“This isn’t you,” Kind said.

The words felt strange in her mouth, because for the first time, she wasn’t using them to soothe someone. She was using them to confront them.

“If she’s a witch, then what are you?” Kind asked, voice steady. “You starved old women before she came. You broke your children’s spirits. You called it discipline. You called it tradition. What do we call it now?”

Silence rippled out.

Not agreement. Not yet. Just the crack of a story starting to split down the middle.

“Don’t let her twist your mind,” the innkeeper’s wife said, but her voice wavered.

Kind looked at the faces around her.

These were the people who had praised her for years.

Kind girl, they’d said, every time she forgave what she shouldn’t have had to forgive.

Kind girl, when she swallowed her anger so they didn’t have to feel uncomfortable.

Kind girl, when she tended wounds they had inflicted.

“Is this what you meant by kindness?” she asked them now. “That I should stand here and watch you hurt someone because it makes you feel safer?”

No one answered.

The witch stood very still behind her, as if watching a storm she had predicted but never expected to see.

“Maybe I’m not your kind girl anymore,” she said quietly.

The sentence tasted both like loss and like freedom.

The boy with the torch shifted his weight, suddenly unsure.

Fear of the witch was one thing.

Fear of seeing themselves clearly was another.

No lightning struck. No miraculous rain began to fall. This wasn’t that kind of fairy tale.

What changed was smaller, but in some ways, more dangerous.

One by one, people lowered their eyes.

Someone dropped the torch and stamped it out, as if the fire had been an accident all along.

The crowd didn’t apologize. Crowds rarely do. They just slowly, awkwardly, dispersed, rewriting what had just happened into something more comfortable on their walk back to the village.

“We were just worried.”

“It didn’t go that far.”

“Everyone overreacted.”

Almost everyone.

Kind stayed.

The witch, the girl, and the truth about monsters

That night, Kind sat at the witch’s table, hands still shaking.

“You were brave,” the witch said, pouring tea that smelled like something in-between grief and relief.

“I was scared,” Kind answered.

“Those two things often arrive together,” the witch replied.

Outside, the sky stayed dry and indifferent.

Inside, something small but seismic shifted.

“Are you… really a witch?” Kind asked, more curious than afraid now.

The woman across from her shrugged.

“I’m a woman who stopped apologizing,” she said. “People needed a word for that. ‘Witch’ will do as well as any.”

Kind thought about the labels she carried.

Kind. Sweet. Good.

Names that sounded gentle but cut sharp when she tried to step outside them.

“Does it get lonely?” she asked. “Out here, being what they’re afraid of?”

The witch considered her for a long moment.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But loneliness is a quieter ache than the one you get from abandoning yourself over and over so other people don’t have to feel discomfort.”

Kind stared into her tea.

She knew that ache intimately.

“Will they ever see you as anything but a monster?” she asked.

The witch smiled, a tired, knowing thing.

“Some will,” she said. “Most won’t. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then?” Kind pressed.

The witch reached across the table and tapped the center of Kind’s chest.

“The point is who you become here,” she said. “When you stop living in terror of what they’ll call you.”

And that, more than any curse or spell, was the magic the village had always been afraid of.

Because a girl who is no longer afraid to be called selfish, difficult, witch, or monster is a girl they can’t use as a shield anymore.

The version of the fairy tale where you’re the one holding the torch

I think about that story whenever I catch myself joining a pile-on against someone who doesn’t fit the script.

The coworker everyone calls “abrasive” because she insists on fair pay.

The mother labeled “cold” because she sets firm boundaries instead of bleeding out for everyone else.

The friend people describe as “dramatic” because she refuses to swallow hurt quietly.

It’s easy to spot the witch when you’re not the one holding the torch.

Harder when you realize you’ve been part of the crowd, nodding along while someone gets pushed to the edge of the forest for refusing to play their assigned role.

We all like to believe we’re the kind girl in the story.

The truth is messier.

Some days, we’re Kind before the forest—smoothing things over, calling it kindness while we betray ourselves.

Some days, we’re the villagers—angry, scared, grateful for anyone we can point to and say, “There. That’s the problem. Not us.”

If we’re lucky, we get a few moments in a lifetime when we’re the girl at the witch’s table, realizing “monster” might just be another word for “woman who stopped letting you eat her alive.”

Those are the moments that count.

Not the miraculous rain, not the big public reckonings, but the quiet decisions:

To stop calling cruelty “tradition.”

To stop calling self-erasure “kindness.”

To stop mistaking other people’s fear for your responsibility.

We inherit so many fairy tales about good girls and bad women, about princesses and witches, about who deserves saving and who deserves the fire.

Maybe the twist isn’t changing the ending.

Maybe the twist is finally asking, whenever someone points and whispers monster:

Who taught you that?

And what are you so afraid she’ll do if she remembers she’s allowed to be more than kind?