Breakdown One Shots

Diary of an Old Witch Woman

(This is the entry of an Old Witch who remembers the witch hunts quite well.)

I spat into the wood floors this morning as I listen to the old, orange man talk of his witch hunts and racism. Duchess hissed at the television before I turned the busted thing off and returned to my cauldron.

I remember those witch hunts. I remember the terror all those years ago.

I was young then, too young. Living with my grandmother in a small town after the English descended into their own madness. I was troubled, but my grandmother was kind, and the village seemed so too.

Then the madness spread.

My grandmother hadn't started me on my journey through the arts. She said I was to young, too passionate, too bold. She promised the day I turned 25. That was three years away.

I'd been sent to the edge of the village for daisies, a small horseshoe sewn into my shoes, salt and lavender in the pockets of my dress. My grandmother warned me to be careful, she had a bad feeling of the day.

When they began calling out names, it wasn't my grandmother (a known and beloved witch,) who'd been called. It was Margaret Peace, Sue and Mary Grace, Sister Anne. It was the young women like me.

Margret was the Constable's wife. The two were madly in love, and Margaret was the kindest soul in town. Much higher than the station of most woman, if she said something, people believed it.

Sue and Mary wouldn't marry. Yet the two most beautiful young women in the village would take no man, only the same name. Mary had once been Mary Thatcher, but wouldn't let anyone call her that anymore.

Poor Sister Anne. She'd come from England after her sisterhood had been burned to the ground. So much had been done to the woman. The same woman that looked at me with soft eyes and scolded the young boys in town for picking on me.

I wondered why they'd been tortured. My grandmother wouldn't let me go outside once they'd been stolen away. Yet I'd snuck out when I heard that they planned to throw Sister Anne in the lake and see if she'd drown. I cried in silence as she floated and gasped for breath before they shot her dead.

I remember the way her blood infected the water as she slowly sank back down.

"She's a witch!!"

They'd screamed. The crowd roared. Or at least, the men in the crowd roared. The ones without wives, or the ones who'd bullied theirs.

Sister Anne was not a witch. They knew that. They knew that because it had never been a bad thing. It was only because my grandmother wouldn't say anything, wouldn't fight, didn't argue. That's the only reason she was still alive.

I'd made a mistake that very day when I pushed through the crowd.

"She was not!!" I cried in front of the whole town.

Diana Mclaren tried to reach in and grab my arm. She was stopped as her husband gave me a sad look and pulled his wife back. He pulled her into a tight hug and whispered softly in her ear as she began to cry.

It was almost my birthday when they'd begun stabbing me with needles. Their hungry eyes and hands roamed my naked body, looking for an evil something that wasn't there. I preferred the hot pokers to what they did themselves.

Things I will never forget.

It was only on that last day, as they announced my execution, that my grandmother found her strength. She saved my life, and in return they punished the old woman.

It's been many years since those days. I took what I could carry of her supplies. I learned myself the ways of magic. Yet it's always the same.

They don't come for the old women who dress in black with their pointed hats. They don't care about the ones that rhyme and cast their spells. They don't care about magic and curses and black cats.

No.

Time and time again I've seen the witch hunts.

They come for the black men that walk peacefully in the streets.

They come for the women that cry out for safety.

They come for the ones who lived here first and were forced from their homes.

They come for the young. The bold. Those who wear flags tied around their necks and paint their faces.

They come for the children ready for war.

THOSE are the witch hunts. Those are the same as I saw when my grandmother died.

I curse the orange man on his pedestal. I curse him that, for his lies, he shall suffer the wrath of a thousand witches. The real ones.

I'm an old woman now, like my grandmother. I will pass one day just as she has.

But not until I see the day that the cruel will burn.