The Witchling’s Familiar

When you first met her, running to catch the bus on a crisp autumn day, you hardly thought to notice her. Just another artsy witchling walking to the park to sketch the sigils falling leaves trace and listen to the world’s voice.

Good fashion sense.

Way out of your league.

Heavens know that the city is full of witchlings just like her.

(You’ve read that the archetype has power, that conforming to a mold makes some magic easier, but that always seemed silly. Surely divergence is a better way to get attention? Maybe that’s why you’re no witch.)

Cocoon & Bloodbath

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.

The Lake In Your Basement

She hears the water dripping, deep below, just at the edge of her senses. The rhythmic tapping of something that’s not rain, not an unquiet faucet, down where there should only be silence and the low wooden sounds of the house rearranging.

If only she could stay asleep.

The door to the basement sticks, doesn’t want to open, wood swollen by damp and grown willful with disuse, but she still makes it open.

Ritual, Parasite, Eyes

You welcomed it in, eagerly brought it into your body; all that foggy liquid that flowed from nothing into your chalice, hardly contained by the force of your bindings, the strength of your spells.

It shone so brightly in the sputtering candlelight.

You hardly waited for the last of the spell to fade before you brought it to your lips, gulped it down in a single mass; it tasted so right flowing down your throat, thick and rich and savory, the chalice never seeming to empty.

In The Air & Candy Gore

Each slash of the knife, each thrust of the blade, sends great gouts of sweet red goo splattering across the floor, pouring down to fill the punch bowl below; celebrants clamber up on unsteady chairs, dirty shoes tearing at the paper tablecloth, to reach inside–

Eager hands press inside deeper than seems possible, tear at tender tissue, come out sticky-red and full of treats–individually wrapped candies and plastic toys, squishy organs making such silly noises as they deflate on the ground, the spurting mass of a sugary heart–