Words

The doll kneels, moonlight glimmering across her waxy body, glinting off the many winding wires inlaid just below her skin. For a moment all is quiet and serene, the only noise the gentle padding of her witch’s feet on the cool tile floor. Then, the click of a lighter. The doll does not see her witch approach, her closed eyes buried far too deep beneath waxy godblood to even begin to open, but she hears—the hissing static of the flame, her feet on the ground, the strange little gap as the flame touches her wick, as she begins to burn— ...

She drifts, unseeing and unfeeling, a speck of strangely dense matter wandering through her prescribed path—an arc countless centuries long, guided by the slow pulls of celestial bodies and solar fire’s angry wind. An interruption is neither appropriate or expected, and yet— She comes to ground in a storm of displaced momentum, energy ripped away from her and scattered to the eight corners, lensed into more manageable forms—explosions of light and color, bubbles of compressed time sending trees hurting far into their own future deaths. ...

Stones slipped just beneath the skin, smooth surfaces pressing against dermis, soaking up subcutaneous warmth; opals and moonstones and quartz, agate and topaz and jade all shining in the body’s light, chunky beads filling skin with texture beneath your touch. Once you asked why she went to so much effort, all those tiny cuts and carefully treated scars, all those beautiful things hidden away for no one to see. She always healed so quickly, but she still felt pain, and it always seemed like one or another of her gems was infected. ...

The city is full of ruins, though few last long—waves of construction, of revitalization, flow through it like water, like the flexing of some unseen beast. The city’s blood flows in cranes and trucks and trains, in the brutality of gentrification and the decay that follows. Trash dolls and harpies run before the wave, and feral angels slide through the cracks; but witches always find a way to protect their places, all those strangely preserved houses scattered through the hills, those otherworldly relics. Even after their deaths, they remain. ...

There’s just something about the way it growls—that hungry, needy sound. It almost makes you want to unchain it, to let it feed the need roiling in its belly with your tender flesh. But the witch wouldn’t want you to. She put in so much effort to capture this beast, this strange shifting thing; to bind its wings and cuff its many limbs. So you don’t. No matter how it growls when you blend close—when you clip another flower from its antlers, or bring the shears to its fingers to harvest another bit of the precious sap inside—no matter what that noise stirs inside you. ...

“Hey babe”, said the witch, “mind helping me with this? I think I cracked a bone the other day.” The doll looked up from her book. “Sure, but isn’t that the third this month?” “… yeah.” “Shouldn’t you have someone look at your spells? Wood should last longer, even without plasticizing it.” “No, I’m fine. I just … look, give me a hand? It’s one of the supports in my chest, I’ve already got the replacement out.” ...

Someone has left a flower in the silence between moments, that secret place where you long ago learned to go to hide from the world. A place which you had always thought only you could access. Because, well. It’s inside your mind. Right? The flower is pale, almost immaterial. It looks like a pencil sketch. You gingerly pick it up and sniff. It doesn’t smell like anything. Which does make sense—smells have always been the hardest things to imagine with any sort of accuracy—but it’s still a bit disappointing. ...

As you raise the wand above your head and scream the magic words, something already feels different. The swirling ribbons burst forth from the wand’s gem, just as they always do, filling everything around you—but they are sharp and purple, not those familiar soft pastels. The ribbons fray as they stretch, and soon you are surrounding by a sharp-edged cloud, sparkling in the light seeping from your wand—that, at least, is familiar, though it trickles forth in anemic bursts. Gone is the brilliant guiding light that once blazed around you, as warm and overwhelming as the sun; the power that settles into you is broken, distorted, just as you will soon be—for the torn ribbons which were once the flesh and bone of your other form, that bouncing skirt and frilly gloves (that ridiculous half-cape and the thin leather strap around your neck), have not remembered their purpose. ...

When she offers you the chalice, the liquid within tastes like nothing you can recall tasting before—a heady blend of hothouse flowers, their sweetness tainted by the humid decay of their growth, and thunderstorm petrichor, all shot through with a thick and hungry musk. You swirl it on your tongue, trying to understand the scents seeping up into your mind; your eyes close for a moment, and when they open she has left your side, gone over to busy herself at the stove, suspiciously nonchalant. She doesn’t look at you, but she doesn’t need to. ...

When she first took a knife to herself, she did not think to find anything more than the release of pain; so she was quite surprised, not to say a bit taken aback, when the knife’s passage through too-rough flesh was interrupted by the wholly unexpected presence of a gearbox, a plastic-sheathed assemblage quietly ticking away just before her wrist’s joint. When she was done being astonished—done listening to the gears and seeing how her fingers twitched when she poked at it—she went looking for more. ...