Another Run, Another Strange Encounter

It’s 5:30 on a weekday morning and quite dark, thanks to a heavy cloud cover obscuring the full moon. You intend to just run around your half-mile neighborhood block a time or two to warm up for in-home Pilates and yoga exercises. You step outside and notice a woman, mid 20s and well dressed, walking in the middle of the road in platform shoes. She’s sometimes shaking her long hair and waving her hands in the air as if singing to herself, but she makes no noise – except for the clunky shoes pounding the asphalt as she attempts to break into a run. One hand clutches a silver can most likely bought across the street at the 24-hour convenience store.

You let her get a safe distance ahead of you before you take off for a slow jog. Remember, you’re just trying to warm up the muscles for your strength and stretching session. No need to rush. But eventually the two of you meet up anyway and she smiles and asks in a thick Slavic accent for directions to a woman’s house. You know the house because it belongs to an unfriendly, vampirish eccentric who likes to give you the evil eye when you pass each other on your morning runs. For years each “Good morning” from you was returned with a wicked stare from her. Now, you just ignore her.

“She’s a little woman, like you,” the woman in the road says in a friendly tone. “But she’s ugly. She’s very ugly. She’s a witch.”

“A what?”

“She’s an American witch. You didn’t know that?”

She starts rattling on about the witch and that she knows she lives in one of the houses near here. You can’t see her eyes clearly enough to determine if this crazy talk is chemically or organically driven. You can’t read the label on the can. And you can’t just run away. Well, you can, but what if she follows? What if that old bat is watching? What are the odds of being caught in a wiccan crossfire?

So, tell me, what do you do at this point?