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The prettiest girl to ever roam the halls of Eastwood High School hovered her thumb over the final black and white poster she needed to tape. She read the words enough times to have them permanently etched into her mind:
No one wants you here, go hang yourself like my grandaddy did to yours.
She ran her index finger across the clear seal, and took a step back to relish in her plot.
The morning bell chimed, and within seconds, students filled the building and roamed throughout the classrooms. Murmurs followed and a collective gasp dragged from everyone's lungs at the picture covering their lockers, the floor, doors, and the walls in between them.
A black hanged man.
Moreagan Cruz never planned the horrified looks that students sent her way. They gazed at her the way humans marveled at creatures behind glass, the ones that looked just like them.
She situated herself, fixing her hair first and then tugging at her socks, hoping to return to the feeling of normalcy she missed from that morning. Yet no matter how many times she plucked at stray threads and fluffed her flat hair, the eyes kept staring at her with looks of confusion and horror opposed to adoration.
She didn't expect this type of reaction, especially not from the students that bullied the black witch too. Her immediate expectation was praise, followed by gratification and idolization. Cruz crafted her plan thoroughly since eight in the morning. It was four in the afternoon and she began to realize that her plan felt like a bullet to the head.
As she frowned at the pale faces gawking at her, the black girl across the courtyard stared at a grainy picture of her grandfather with a rope around his neck and his body decorating a looming tree like a Christmas ornament.
Cruz wanted to see her dead, and she knew the students giving her fake sympathetic looks did too. She heard them talk about it in class every day.
Everyone's eyes gravitated from Moreagan to the black witch with faces lathered in fake pity. The type of pity someone felt when another person's dog dies. They never knew that dog personally, they never wanted to, so they just said something along the lines of, I'm sorry to hear that, and tried to come up with a story that they thought would equate to the mourner's pain.
The parents of Pinnoak forcefed their children that story, and stories like it, and then their children's children did the same. The first cry from a newborn's mouth was that story. The one that was remembered only by the feeling it gave a person and fuzzy details about things that never mattered.
The older generation in the town agreed that the black witch's grandfather was their story. They were the ones that strung him up in that tree by his neck, and they were the ones with the long-lasting bitter taste of his pregnant wife's mourning on their tongues.
The woman went into the woods after seeing her husband's eyes hemmorhage and legs kick the air in front of him. She promised to never return. Not when she gave birth, when her daughter gave birth, or when the younger generation's faces harassed her granddaughter. So they all called her a bitter black witch and everything leaving her womb a bitter black witch too.
The third generation of black witches climbed the same tree that her grandfather decorated, the one in the middle of the courtyard with hungry branches, while murmuring under her breath,
"If they want me to leave so bad then I'll leave."
A crowd of students swarmed around the base of the tree staring up at the murmuring girl. She done lost her mind, they whispered. They watched as she tightened the end of a weathered rope into a noose. The same rope they used for her grandfather. Bets started to roll from their mouths instantly.
"I bet you it's all for show. She ain't really gon' hang herself. They all like that."
More people joined the pool of faces with curious eyes. A few pointed up between her skirt and laughed about something that only made the black witch's blood burn even more. Pointing and laughing and running around like they were at a field day and not about to see a girl die.
They all liked to get a rile out of her. They tripped her, spat on her, and filled her locker with threats and empty promises scratched on paper. She tried not to pay them any attention, like her mother told her, but she wanted nothing more than to satisfy that burning ember in her gut.
She stood on a branch looking down at all of them, and suddenly the voices around her became distorted and heavy, lulling for her eyes to lower and her body to fall limp. Her stomach sunk like a weight through newspaper and the smell of burning spices and rain caused her eyes to tear up. She just barely made out the foggy silhouette of her grandmother and mother breaking the perimeter of trees. They watched, just like the white kids beneath her and the dark man in the tree beside her.
Before she could walk backwards and climb down the tree, a hand pushed her from behind, sending her body flying down to the ground with her legs kicking and a scream stuck in her throat.
They say that Moreagan Cruz died that night.
* * *
Yeah, man. I like this version way more than the original version. It's all spooky and what not.
I wrote this story to be based in an imaginary world in an unnamed time simply because I like when stories are like that. I feel like it gives more power to the reader's imagination while not lacking details.
