Witches

The Witch of Forgotten Sounds (such an unwieldy title! She preferred to go by “Terri, with an i”) woke to find a doll in her bed. An everyday occurrence for many witches, of course, but Terri made a point of not keeping dolls (“they’re always so busy, I can’t stand it!”). She didn’t scream. Witches are made of better stuff than that. Instead she carefully untangled the doll’s limbs from her own, slipped out of bed, and stepped into her screaming room (a converted closet) to scream herself hoarse. ...

(This story is also featured in my collection Joyous/Decay) For the last few months she’s asked you the same question every week. “Are you sure you don’t want it to be a tattoo instead? Something permanent?” Each time you answer more or less the same way. You’re sure, you really are; she doesn’t need to ask. You’d tell her if … You’d tell her. But you won’t need to. You’re more sure of that than you’ve been of anything except the need which first led you to her, back in those dreary days you can hardly remember now; back before you were really a person, just an empty shell pretending. ...

Moonstruck toys staring up at pale silver eyes, lost in wonder as the sky’s thin shell cracks and the void rushes in … Dolls can’t drown in the dark places Between, don’t fade away into dusty memories—but their gears seize up, and their screams find no purchase on the void. Worlds crack like dying bubbles and spill their precious cargo out into cruel emptiness. They do exactly what they were made to do, and the things Outside eagerly drink them up. ...

The doll, returning to her first witch’s home, finds it barren and empty; the sprawling gardens overgrown, elegant flowers choked out by thorny weeds, junk littering the gate and the path beyond it—the great fountain, once golden with angelblood, now full of stinking trashbags. The doll picks her way up along the path, looking around in wonder at the changes decay has wrought; at the places where she once sat and played, at the broken trees and sculptures—tools of discipline which she once shivered to see, now nothing more than rubble and ash. ...

Every so often a fuss is made about folk dolls, those odd little half-living homunculi; beings of distilled purpose and steady decay, straw and sticks and hollow gourds. People rediscover them, and wonder why they’re not in wider use. Listen for a moment and I’ll tell you 🧵 No self-respecting witch would let herself be seen to use one instead of a proper doll, and it’s easy to suppose that that’s the reason. It’s a class signifier, right? A power thing. ...

Once, long before, you wondered why the witch–your witch, now–was always covered in bruises, why her skin was forever a tapestry of slowly fading marks, all those purples and yellows hiding the warmth of her skin. Once, you wondered why. But then you died. When you were alive, you had assumed the obvious. She had never cared to cover them, to conceal them, and you couldn’t conceive of her as a being that anyone could hurt without her willing consent; so you assumed it was simply a kink that she didn’t care to keep secret. ...

She only went to the witch as a last resort, after years of being shuffled between doctors, of mortifying exams and racks upon racks of bloody vials. And, of course, pain. Always pain, always the ebb and flow of agony filling her and fading away with no rhythm she could hear. She wasn’t stupid, no matter how her mind was fogged; she knew that witches were a last resort, dangerous and mercurial. That’s what she had always been taught, what she’d always heard in breathless news reports about children plucked from their beds and remade into new forms. ...

(this story hurt to write; I cannot say whether it will hurt to read, but please don’t force yourself to.) The witch treasured her dolls more than anything else, more than all her wealth and power. She crafted them from the finest components, beautiful souls carefully freed from failing flesh and woven through with threads of memory and love; each one a testament to her devotion. For a time this love was even reflected in the title the world gave her, that welled up from the strength of her workings and the marks she left around her. ...

Through the fringes of the world She weaves her charms, smooth silver threads laid across rooftops and knotted umber sewn through sidewalk cracks. Each day brings with it a different color, a different place, all unremarked by the sightless things who think the world theirs. Her web weaves loosely through forgotten places and tightly through those much attended but hardly seen, enmeshed in the set dressing of lives lived without pain. So much remains unseen, unremarked, in those places; so much detail lost beneath comforting security. ...

Each layer went on easier than the last, cloying red salvation closing over your bare skin, burying you deeper and deeper. At first the brush’s rough hairs hurt, tore your skin and sent your own red welling up, but by the third coat you could hardly feel a thing. The pain brought to mind her warnings, that she would not be gentle and that this would hurt–that your claustrophobia might make this process unpalpable, that if you broke the cocoon she would not be able to wrap it around you a second time. Hurt filled you with fear. ...