The unbroken circle

Revising

Emily Martin

Salem, Massachusetts April 1692

The pig-faced wretches gather round like flies to a carcass. They point, they jeer, they chant "Kill the witch!". But, Emily was not a witch. She was but a victim in the torrent of lies and false claim for purification. The festering of village people soured the land with their blood thirsty cries .

Aye, Emily could gaze past their guises of Godliness. Emily caught sight of him first; Thomas Abbot stood beside his villainous wife, Goodwife Anne Abbot. Her clenched, chubby fingers wrapped around her lecherous husband's upper arm possessively, as if Emily were poised to bolt into his greedy arms. Hunger glistened brightly as a fire in the depths of his brown eyes. This yearning had once been directed solely on Emily.

As James Webb and Eduard Hobbes guided Emily up to the noose, she cocked her head in her seducer's direction, a plea lodged in her tight throat. But he must have read it in her eyes.

"Witch," he mouthed the word, condemning her to the fate they should have shared- a fate he had placed upon her all too willingly, only as a means to appease his wife

Eduard Hobbes, Anne Abbot's brother shoved the damp noose over Emily's face, scraping the frayed rope across her cheek. A man would do anything for the love of a sister, and Emily knew very well what this brother prepared to do for his. Eduard's fellow jailer, James Webb was a sallow sort. His grim face and blank stare freeze her to the bone. He must have known of Eduard Hobbes' plan.

"Hang witch!" Eduard Hobbes hissed in Emily's ear as he began to tauten the noose about her neck.

"I beg you harken to me, Salem, for I speak of a debt owed." My voice is a strangled call. but the fervency in her tone cut across the crowd like a knife, silencing them instantaneously. "He accused me," Emily thrust her chin toward Master Abbot. " He accused his lover of witchery. For his treachery, I shall be granted revenge. I may die, but those of my blood shall reap my due. Onto this day, I invoke a curse. I bestow unto my decedents, a task. In a time unknown, my decedents will collect the debt owed by Abbot and his kin." Emily's voice echoed in the ears of the stricken onlookers as her sharp, gray gazed lit with malice. "Thomas Abbot, You will pay. You have set an irrevocable curse onto your bloodline. Before this day, I was not a witch. But now," she paused, raising her fists, be Kooning the darkness that encroached around the edges of her wavering vision, " I embrace it. I am a witch in every sense. So mote it be!"

And, just before the blackness consumed her, Emily Martin savored a final glance at her infant daughter, Eleanor, cradled in her aunt's quivering arms. The future laid upon her tiny shoulders. And with that, Emily gave in to her fate.