Hawthorn End had always been a respectable sort of strange. The hedges trimmed themselves into polite shapes, the bins rolled home without complaint, and the fog occasionally stopped to check its reflection in the shop windows. We were used to oddness, the manageable kind you can discuss at the parish meeting without losing your parking space.

Then Aurelia moved into Number Thirteen.

The house had been empty for years, a tall, narrow thing with a chimney that looked like an accusatory finger. When she arrived, the weather lost its manners. Birds forgot their songs halfway through and pretended it was jazz. Children stopped kicking balls down the street because the air around Number Thirteen hummed, faintly, like a fridge holding its breath.

Naturally, Donna from the PTA organised a welcome rota before Aurelia had unpacked a kettle. We were to deliver comfort items according to a spreadsheet. There were casseroles, candles, and wine. I logged in late and got “sugar.”

Fine by me. Sugar was neutral, decent, a simple act of kindness. My grandmother always said, “Offer sweetness first. If that doesn’t work, offer salt.”

I filled a glass jar, tied a ribbon around the neck, yellow for friendship and optimism, then set off across the street.

The door opened before I could knock, the chain sliding back with the confidence of a top lawyer negotiating entry.

Aurelia stood there barefoot, tall, all black hair and cheekbones and stormlight. She smiled in that careful way some people smile when they already know the punchline.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Marnie, from across the way. Welcome to Hawthorn End.”

“They will call me Aurelia,” she said, as if auditioning for prophecy. “Well, Eventually”

“I brought you sugar,” I offered. “It goes in everything.”

“In everything,” she repeated, tasting the words. “How very kind.”

She took the jar. The air between us wobbled like heat above a stove. Behind her, I glimpsed wallpaper patterned with eyes that blinked too slowly. A kettle rattled once in warning.

“Well,” I said, forcing cheer. “Enjoy your new home.”

“I will, and so will you,” she said, with a knowing half-smile.

The door shut with a sigh that sounded disturbingly content.

That night, the lampposts sang. All four of them leaned together over the cul-de-sac and harmonised, soft but undeniable: “She’s here.”

My grandmother’s apron, yes, the one that refuses to stay dead, rustled on its hook. “Sugar’s a vector,” it muttered. “You’ve fed something, girl.”

“It’s just neighbourly,” I told it.

“So was the Trojan horse,” it said.

At three in the morning, a small creature made entirely of thumbs crept from the skirting board, patted the counter for the jar, found it missing, and sighed like an old dog denied biscuits.

I made tea because denial always brews better with caffeine.

By morning, Hawthorn End’s group chat was aflame.

DONNA: EMERGENCY BAKE SALE—TODAY 12 PM—WELCOME NEW NEIGHBOUR!!! ❤️❤️❤️

When Donna writes in capitals, the town obeys. By noon, the green looked like the aftermath of a fairy-tale food fight. Bunting fluttered. Cakes gleamed. Children squealed. Mr Ellison grilled sausages that occasionally screamed back.

Aurelia arrived carrying my sugar decanted into a silver bowl that gleamed like moonlight on good behaviour. “A charm of gratitude,” she said. “Completely safe.”

Donna clasped her hands. “We love a charm!”

Aurelia smiled. “Think of your kindest moment. Hold it close.”

The air thickened, syrupy with memory. I thought of the nurse who braided my mother’s hair before the end, the neighbour who’d left a heater on our doorstep in winter, the simple mercy of being seen.

Aurelia tipped the bowl. Sweetness rained down.

At first, laughter. Then—the cupcakes blinked.

One yawned, revealing icing fangs. A balloon swelled to the size of a van and began interviewing guests. “Do you consider yourself a good person?” it asked Mrs Ellison, who burst into tears and confessed to stealing coriander.

The sausages on Mr Ellison’s grill knotted themselves into a noose and lunged for his ankles. The grass shivered; the earth below began to hum in a key I didn’t like.

“What did I do?” I gasped.

Aurelia’s smile didn’t falter. “You were kind,” she said. “You opened a door. It leads to everything you gave and never got back.”

The ground swelled. The vicar fainted into the trifle. Donna screamed “CONTAINMENT!” which, in PTA language, means “run.”

Cupcakes sang hymns backwards. The balloon scribbled people’s sins in permanent marker across the sky.

I grabbed my grandmother’s wooden spoon and climbed the gazebo. “This,” I declared, “is a kitchen now!”

The air stilled. The cupcakes froze mid-pounce. Monsters, like toddlers, respect kitchen authority.

“We don’t feed what won’t say please!” I told the lawn.

A worm wriggled up and spelt P-L-E-A-S-E in cursive dirt.

“Good,” I said. “Take the thank-yous we owe you, and sleep.”

The lawn exhaled. A tray of perfectly normal fairy cakes surfaced, each iced with THANK YOU. The sausages went limp. The balloon deflated with a sigh of existential disappointment.

Aurelia clapped delicately. “You’re wasted on these people.”

“I like being wasted on people,” I said. “It keeps me kind.”

That evening, I went over to Number Thirteen for my jar.

The door opened before I touched it. Inside: shelves upon shelves of jars, glowing faintly. Rainstorms caught mid-fall, whispers swirling in glass. My jar stood among them, humming softly.

“You gave it freely,” Aurelia said. “Gifts become stories.”

“I want it back.”

“Sugar remembers,” she said. “It’s a door now.”

“Return it anyway.”

“You don’t know what you’re accepting.”

“Neither do you,” I said. “That’s why you borrow sweetness from strangers.”

Something flickered behind her eyes. She handed me the jar. “Be careful. Doors open both ways.”

“I have rules,” I said. “It’s a kitchen thing.”

For three days, the jar glowed. Then, while I was baking lemon drizzle, it opened itself. Light spilt out, slow and deliberate, writing across my floor: NAMES. DATES. DEBTS OWED.

Every kindness I’d given without return paraded itself, lending Becky my favourite pen in Year Nine, cat-sitting for free, forgiving people who never noticed.

The sugar gathered into a figure wearing a coat made of receipts. It tipped its hat, courteous and cold.

“Oh, absolutely not,” I said.

It stepped toward the door.

“Wait!” I called. “You’re not collecting from them. Collect from us, the ones who forget to thank ourselves for surviving.”

The figure hesitated, nodded once, and dissolved into a single card on the counter: PAID IN FULL.

My grandmother’s apron tightened around my waist. “Sometimes,” it whispered, “you’re the maw, love. Feed wisely.”

Life resumed its crooked rhythm. The fog applied for citizenship. The lampposts practised harmonies. The coleslaw, traumatised, left town to find itself.

Aurelia began visiting for tea. She sat in my kitchen because witches trust only the rooms with rules, and returned my containers spotless.

“Why bring me sugar?” she asked once.

“Because you were new,” I said. “Because the world’s hard. Because I like starting with sweetness.”

“And to see what would happen,” she teased.

“Obviously.”

“Do you regret it?”

I stirred my tea. “No. But next time I’d bring two jars.”

“Greedy,” she said, kissing my cheek like a curse I didn’t mind.

“Prepared,” I said.

A week later, the moon hiccupped.

The tides stuttered; wolves blushed; poets fainted from misplaced metaphors. Then something enormous fell from the sky and landed in my garden, a glowing egg the size of a small sea mine, ticking softly like a polite bomb.

Aurelia appeared immediately, smelling of rain that had been edited for effect. “Oh, hello,” she said to the egg. “Not mine, but I know the family.”

“What do we do?” I asked.

“What you always do,” she said. “Take responsibility for something you didn’t cause.”

I fetched the good tea towel, the one with the geese that look like lawyers, and draped it over the egg. It purred.

“You can’t keep it,” she warned. “It’ll hatch hungry.”

“I’ll find it a home,” I said. “There’s a whale off the coast with management experience.”

“Whales don’t hatch from eggs.”

“Neither do moons.”

The egg rolled its eyes.

With the town’s help, we built a ladder of lampposts and returned the egg to the sky. The whale supervised. Donna organised snacks labelled Non-Sentient. The vicar blessed us from a safe distance. When the egg reached the moon, the hiccups stopped. The tides applauded.

Aurelia said, “A little chaos, a little kindness—it’s a braid.”

“I’ll keep pulling,” I told her.

“You’ll make enemies.”

“‘I’ll bake them a cake.”

Months later, the jar still hums when the fog presses its face against my window. It doesn’t ask for sugar; it asks for balance. I stir my tea with it sometimes, carefully.

The town is thriving in its odd way. Donna runs a support group for rehabilitated cupcakes. The lampposts host open-mic nights. The fog volunteers at the food bank.

Aurelia and I have reached an understanding, friends, or co-conspirators. She claims to be studying mercy “as a material.” I tell her mercy’s just sugar that survived the heat. She laughs until the wallpaper blushes.

Sometimes she asks, “If you knew everything that would happen, would you still have brought me that jar?”

I always say yes.

Because kindness isn’t safe, but it’s necessary. Because sweetness under pressure becomes caramel, and caramel sticks. Because chaos, fed properly, will nap.

And one day someone else will knock on a stranger’s door with a ribbon-tied jar and the best of intentions.

When they do, I hope the world remembers what I learned.

It wasn’t kindness that caused the trouble.

It was mercy, sugar. Mercy every time…