Everyone in the village believes they are witches because their roosters lay green eggs in milking buckets and there are no hens. The only cow they own is purple and when milked she produces a rich buttery ice cream like nobody has ever tasted before. You see, the sisters live in the house with the pulsing green eye that has forecast the future of each generation that has lived here before them. When the green eye quivers, the third eye in the middle of their forehead begins to open and they can see the thoughts of those who are gossiping about them and can look into their dreams and change their thoughts. On the night when the veil is thin, the people of the village go inside early. They are afraid of the darkness that dabs the air with magic when the quarter moon rocks against the milky sky and a goose named Mother recites a nursery rhyme. At the hour of midnight, the eldest sister Bess drums her bucket and begins to sing all the barnyard creatures home. Her voice rises above all the stars and she smiles as she hears the cats begin to fiddle and watches as her cow jumps over the pines and empties her udders into the minds of the villagers now dreaming of purple cow ice cream instead of the wicked things they accuse the sisters of doing. Bess winks back at the house with her one green eye and chuckles as she stands under the rocking moon. As she heads inside, she knows that these magical events are as prosaic as simply milking a cow.

—Inspired by the painting The House with the Green Eye (1944) by Marc Chagall

Karen VandenBos

Once upon a time, Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She has a PhD in Holistic Health where a course in shamanism taught her to travel between two worlds. She can be found unleashing her imagination in two online writing groups, and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Blue Heron Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, One Art: a journal of poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ekphrastic Review, Southern Arizona Press, and others.