Witch

I'd heard the word witch before. Creeping in the shadowed whispers, hiding behind cupped hands and hanging tendrils of hair. Escaping like puff blown winds from ruby lips and traveling through the empty spaces before curling in the soft white cartilage of ears.

When I was younger, we'd walk hand in hand. Hanna's bony fingers tight and dry wrapped around my smaller pudgy one. Her nails weren't black then, before it all started. She would put her long blonde hair up in a scarf, the kind that matched the tight belt cinched around her tiny waist, contrasting the sundress below it and fluffing out the bottom in waves that swooshed in the wind. That stopped when the wind blew in the sickness. It stopped for lots of people, but I didn't notice, or care. I just cared about my hand empty as I ran through the streets for the first time with a fist balled up at my side and a knife in my pocket.

It was morning, that I remember. Cold and crisp in October, pumpkins lining fences, and people wrapped in jackets with scarves that matched the colors of the turning leaves. The night before it started, we had sat on the stump outside in the yard. Me waiting to go in and get out of the crisp night and Hanna crowing about Sally again, how she always had time for Jenny and Danny and never for making time for her. She called Sally a sow, and kept groaning on about how people let you down. I remember being bored of hearing it, and cupping my hands over my ears wishing she would stop repeating the same boring things over and over.

I picked up a stick and made an X in the dirt, putting a circle around it and spitting right in the middle. "There, it's done. I cursed her to the pigs and now she won't be bugging you again. Can we please go inside now, you promised I could work on your hair."

Her mouth stopped moving and she looked at me like I broke mom's favorite plate, the one with the tiny green vines climbing around the edges. Her foot shot out and rubbed away the circle, the bright full moon glaring off her black heeled boots. "Don't do that Mary, and don't say things like that. It's never wise to curse a person, it comes back to you, don't you know that? Take it back."

I could tell by her wild animal eyes and open mouth she wasn't mad, she was afraid. I'd never made anyone afraid before, and I felt somehow bigger, taller, and a little tickle traveled up my inside and crawled around my brain moving things around like furniture. I crossed my arms, and looked down at the scruffed up dirt, letting the moment wiggle around like a candy you pop in your mouth before you know it's flavor, letting it slowly make its presence from your tongue to your mind, that's usually the best part, that moment of mystery.

"I'll take it back," I said, "if you stop talking about it all the time. Everybody knows you like Danny, he doesn't like you back or else he'd stop having moon eyes over Sally and start paying attention to you. So tell him, or tell her, or move on, but stop whining all the time, I'm sick of that boring old talk."

The fear left her eyes then, and a fire lit up somewhere deep in them, even without a light but the glow of the moon I could see it, her face turned whiter, and before I could back up, or take my words back, she smacked me across the cheek and stormed into the house.

I stood there cupping my cheek, feeling the sizzle of slapped skin against the cool night air. Wondering how I'd managed to get myself from being taller in one moment, to feeling so much smaller the next. The cool wind was a sharp contrast to my rising heated anger, and I stomped my feet into the house and into the safety of my bedroom. Staring at the red puffy outline of fingers on my cheek I cursed Hanna, and Sally, and Danny and Jenny. I cursed my mother for raising her, and my father for dying. In haste, I threw the hairbrush at the mirror and felt even angrier when it spidered and fell into triangled splinters reflecting my face as they clashed to the floor.

I left them there, those jagged shards, swearing to never clean them up. As long as my anger burned I'd leave them there to remember, and no one could make me clean them. I threw myself on the bed, inhaling the smell of my sleeping sweaty night self as I wiped my falling tears upon the pillow.