​Once there was a barber with a magic pair of shears: the hair he cut would never grow back. Though the barber never cut the same head of hair twice, people came from far and wide to see him, and thus he prospered.
 
One day a man asked him, “Do your magic shears work only on hair?”
 
“I’ve never tried them on anything else,” admitted the barber.
 
“If you cut my nails,” the main persisted, “will they cease to grow?”
 
“I don’t know,” said the barber. “Shall we see?”
 
So they tried the barber’s magic shears on the man’s fingernails, and, lo and behold, his fingernails ceased to grow.
 
“What about my journey home?” asked the man.
 
“What do you mean?”
 
“I traveled from far away to visit you, from a kingdom across the sea. Would your magic shears work on my return voyage?”
 
“I don’t know,” said the barber. “Shall we see?”
 
So they located the man’s kingdom on a map, and the barber’s kingdom, and the wide sea in between. Using his magic shears, the barber cut the map in two and moved the kingdoms closer together, and, lo and behold, the man’s destination was no farther away than a bird could fly.
 
“What do you do with it all?” the man asked.
 
“I’m not sure I understand,” said the barber. “What do you mean?”
 
“All the extra? Where does it go?”
 
The two men looked down at their feet, and, lo and behold, there it was: all the hair he’d ever cut, and all the hair he wouldn’t cut, and all the fingernails, and all the seas of the world, and all the kingdoms, and all the people of all the kingdoms, there at their feet, and the two men realized, feeling very foolish, that the barber’s shears weren’t magic after all.

Two maidens imagined there was a witch living in their woods.
 
“We should go see,” said the first maiden.
 
“Yes!” said the second maiden. “But we should bring a snack, in case we get hungry.”
 
“Do you think we’ll be gone for long?”
 
“I don’t know,” said the second maiden. “Possibly.”
 
So the two maidens made a snack.
 
“I just had a thought,” said the first maiden. “What if there really is a witch? What if she’s hungry and we look absolutely delicious to her?”
 
The second maiden put down the hunk of cheese she was holding. She thought for a moment.
 
“We’ll bring a snack for her, too,” she said.
 
“Yes!”
 
“A snack even more delicious than us. So if she’s hungry the witch will eat the snack instead of us.”
 
“Yes!” agreed the first maiden. “Do they like cheese? Witches?”
 
“Excuse me?” said a little voice. “Pardon me? Can we please go? Can we leave? We’re very sorry. We didn’t mean to disturb you — we only wanted to see. We can go home now, if you don’t mind. We won’t tell. We won’t ever come back, I promise. Please?”
 
The two maidens were silent for a moment.
 
“What we should do,” said the first maiden, “is eat them first, I think, and then go.”
 
“But still bring a snack?”
 
“Yes.”
 
So that is what they did.

An old woman came to see the blacksmith. “This kettle you sold me stopped working,” she said.
 
The blacksmith inspected the kettle she held out to him. Its bottom was sturdy. He didn’t see any holes or cracks in the seam.
 
“How is it broken?” he said.
 
“It doesn’t whistle!”
 
“But the water still boils?”
 
The old woman scowled at him. “I am occasionally forgetful,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t remember if I began to make tea. If the kettle doesn’t whistle, how will I know?”
 
The blacksmith nodded. “I can fix it. For one gold piece.”
 
“When you sold this kettle to me,” the old woman reminded him, “you said it would last for a hundred years. You said you were a master craftsman.”
 
“And it still boils water, doesn’t it?”
 
“But it won’t whistle!” she complained.
 
So the blacksmith grudgingly took receipt of the kettle. When the old woman returned the next day, he gave it back with a smile. “Good as new,” he promised. But that was not the end of it. The following morning, as he was feeding his forge, the old woman came back.
 
“Now it screams!” she said. “It doesn’t whistle, it screams! I can’t use this for tea. I can’t use it for anything! Anytime the water gets hot, it screams so loud I think that someone is dying!”
 
“It boils water,” the blacksmith protested, his arms tightly folded across his chest. “It makes a sound when there is steam. Take it and go.”
 
That night, when he went home, his wife greeted him at the door. “There’s something wrong with our child,” she said. “Come and see.”
 
Together they went to the child’s crib. The babe was awake. She was crying — her face was red and contorted. Tears were streaming down her face. But though her mouth was open wide and her stomach convulsed, the babe didn’t make a sound.
 
“What is wrong with her?” his wife said.
 
“She’s hungry,” the blacksmith replied. “Feed her.”
 
So she did, lifting the babe to her breast and letting her suckle. The sound was like a pig at its trough.