CW: death.
Her fingers, then, had folded around the clay, her mind entranced. Her fingers traced the soft wetness, pressed gently, pressed firmly, bent, rolled, pulled, pushed. The clay yielded to her rough-skinned hands like a willing lover. She had bent closer to the orange-red clay and closed her eyes, trusting her hand to shape what her mind saw. When she finished, her mother had looked at the shape and sucked her teeth. “What did you make?”
She didn’t know. Her eyes opened again; she’d studied the figurine her hands had molded. It looked like a girl. It looked like a tree. It looked like a girl as dead as a tree, which is to say, alive and silent, unmoving, voiceless. She loved how it unsettled her, how it fragmented her desire: how she wanted the girl-tree to dance, how she wanted it to lie in a grave so she never had to look at it again. She loved that she was capable of such an enigmatic creation. When her mother saw her daughter’s loving expression, her mother had thrown the clay figurine into the hearth fire.
“Useless,” her mother had said while the figurine burned. She knew her mother was frightened, but she’d been only a child then and didn’t understand why. Her mother had not let her shape clay unsupervised again.
Now, in this house in the trees, with a girl who is dead, the witch thinks of that word: useless. A terrible word to use for a person. A terrible way to say a person doesn’t matter if they aren’t giving you pieces of themselves to chew up and swallow.
The dead girl says, they were quick to cast us out when they no longer needed us to banish their omens.
Yes, says the witch.
• • • •
Who can describe an omen? They are gaping wounds foretelling their own festering. They are storm clouds that hide a sunset, making it impossible to tell when night will arrive. The witch flees through the forest where the omens now live. She nearly stumbles on a red-eyed snake eating eggs in a nightjar’s nest. By her foot, a fox swallows a hare whole, muzzle gaping and pupils slitted like a viper’s. Above her head, a screeching bat is tangled in a colossal spider’s web, the individual threads as thick as rope; the bat’s screams sound horribly like an infant’s. She runs and runs, eyes closed so she does not see the blood-red crystals hanging from branches like stalactites in a cave, lichen rippling like ocean waves as it tears apart an oak’s desecrated trunk. If she meets the eyeless gaze of an omen, the omen’s spirit will cling to her, and she will die.
By the smell she can tell when she has reached a clearing—the dampness has lessened, so has the dying leaves’ oppressive insistence on rotting. Without a tree canopy to block the beams, the sun has finally reached her face. She peels apart her eyelids. There is a house built in the narrow space between two lofty oaks. It is an illogically constructed house: three stories high, each story no wider than the meanest room in a villager’s hut. Each story has two small round windows, empty sockets in three stacked skulls. The lowest story has a small door.
She ought to approach carefully. But she is a dying woman, pursued by the worst curses ever conjured on this island: there can be nothing worse inside that house than is outside of it. So she hurtles toward the house. The door is unbarred. After she enters, it swings shut behind her, enclosing her in darkness. The house embraces her as an old friend whose intentions she can no longer parse.
• • • •
The year the witch was born, the small god arrived with an army from the mainland and said he would banish their omens. He did as he said he would: he sent the omens deep into the forest on the southernmost tip of the island and with powerful warding magic sealed them there. No more ominous forces inducing still-births, causing strife between old friends, no more unwarranted jealousy of lovers, no more warring clans, no more feuds lasting generations, no more deaths from strange disease. All was well. The small god banished the omens, and then he banished everything that might divide the islanders. He banished their ceremonies and rituals, their way of marrying and dying and birthing, he banished their language and their stories and their dances and their prayers, he banished the way they tied their hair into three braids and their three-thonged sandals and the way the elders would smack their lips and say ay ay ay before they spoke admonishment.
First, though, the small god banished their witches.
• • • •
The witch lies helplessly on the floor of the house until she stops crying. She stares up at the open hatch above her and the ladder descending from it. The house is still and quiet; she senses no omens inside it. There should be omens: they should have infested this place, sucked on the walls like termites, crawled through the cracks in the floorboards like cockroaches, spread in the dampness like black mold. Instead, it is quiet and still. A predator preparing to spring, she thinks dully, but she can’t make herself care about the possibility of being prey. The witch is the last of a dying breed already marked for death; she has run through a forest foretelling her demise, omens sticking to her clothes like burrs. She sits up and cranes her neck, her curiosity stirring despite her misery.
Whose house was this? Only a witch would live alone, and there are even few witches who would live buried this deep in a forest. Even a witch needs people—and before the small god came, people needed witches. Or so the untrained witch thought. She stands to test the lowest ladder-rung with her foot. The half-rotted wood creaks but manages to survive her weight. Her fingers grasp the rungs, splinters prying open her skin as she climbs. The next room has no furniture, only a small box made of wood, the top inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She studies the box for some time, turning it this way and that by the window, sunlight flickering on the iridescent lid. She likes how the lid looks; it reminds her of a spring’s surface on a clear day, like a surface she can dive into and disappear beneath. When she opens the box, she finds six teeth. Two incisors, two canines, two molars. Her fingertips brush the surface of an incisor, and she is surprised to find it still smooth and clean. She puts the teeth in her pocket and returns to the ladder, climbs up one last story.
The uppermost room has a straw tick in the corner, the blankets covering it musty but still soft, the yellow and red threads only a little faded. She lies down and falls asleep.
• • • •
When she was child, the witch was always putting things in her pockets. Her mother would empty them out whenever she’d come back from wandering. Shells, stones, interesting-patterned leaves, snakeskins, spider-egg sacs, acorns, crow skulls, starfish, broken eggshells. “What do you need these for?” her mother would say, and the witch could never answer. In the corner with the loom, her grandmother’s bony hands would pause on the flax while she watched closely.
Her grandmother knew what she was. She never told the witch’s mother, but she would warn the girl away from anything that looked like it might be a ritual.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” her grandmother would say when she saw the girl drawing odd shapes on the floor with limestone chalk. “You could hurt yourself. You could invite an omen inside yourself. I’ve seen omens do such terrible things to a person.”
She’d never known how her grandmother could tell she had that sort of power, the power to invite or expel omens. She’d never been able to explain how she knew she wouldn’t hurt herself, that the bones and shapes and feathers felt like colors to her: hot red, passionate and dangerous (be wary), white for blank emptiness (steer clear), blue for solemn serenity (yes, take this and use it to soothe your burning soul). She listened to her grandmother because she was lonely. She wished it was all gone: the secrets she could elicit from the tide pools, the language she deciphered in the birds’ chatter, the colors her extrachromatic eyes added to the rainbow. She longed to be ordinary only for the miraculous experience of being understood. But she knows now that when you hide yourself away and keep your secrets, make yourself small and quiet like your grandmother told you to, then no one’s love for you is real, because they love only this little shadow slipping between the trees like a child who pretends she’s a ghost haunting everyone she wishes would look her way.
• • • •
The witch dreams of the ocean. In her dream it is night, and the two moons hang low in the sky, nearly touching, one yellow and one white, two lovers in an almost-kiss. Their light casts two paths on the black water, and where the paths converge is a black-haired girl, waist-deep and naked. The girl is too far away to see but in the dream the witch can feel the girl’s spirit, the way it claws at her, desperate as a scream and full of red rage.
• • • •
When the witch wakes, she finds a scorpion settled on her chest. She stills, peering down her nose at the small red thing, tail curled elegantly into a circle above its flat body. Her muscles tense, tight as flax on a loom, as she holds in a ripple of fear. Please don’t sting me, she thinks as calmly as she can, which is not calmly at all. The scorpion’s stinger-tipped tail twitches once, and then it crawls away. She watches the scorpion skitter up the wall and out the eye-socket window. When it’s gone, the house feels as empty as a skull in an ancient grave.
• • • •
When the small god cleansed the island of witches, most of the clans were glad to see them go, despite everything the witches had done before to protect their people from omens. It is not hard to understand why: witches are too strange, too elusive, too esoteric. Witches take no counsel from the Matriarchs of the clans; witches have no one to hold their leash. The small god said, “I can protect you,” and he kept his promise to everyone but the witches. There were still witches born every year. The small god killed them as infants when he found them. He couldn’t always find them. Some of them had grandmothers who hid their witch-rune drawings and made sure the witch-children kept their mouths shut when they tried to speak the language of the spirits.
Yet even the ones with clever-minded grandmothers could not go unnoticed forever. The small god roamed the island, seeking the last of them, the girls with constellations hidden in the whites of their eyes, the boys with hands that could trace birdsong in the sand with their fingertips. The children who saw the spirits dancing on nights when one moon eclipsed the other, who knew the meaning of the choreography. They did not know the rituals of their ancestors, but they were dangerous anyway. So the small god gathered them, cuckoos in a vulture’s nest, and sent them to the omen-infested forest to die, body and soul. A sacrifice, the small god said, to keep the ominous forest satiated, though the forest had never felt hunger before the small god told it to feast.
• • • •
The witch takes the teeth from her pocket and arranges them into a smile on the floor. She lies down next to the white half-moon. In her mind, she puts the teeth in a skull, and sets the skull on a spine; with her imagination, she draws out ribs from the vertebrae and fixes a pelvis to the tailbone. At the last, she adds four limbs in a stunning crescendo of bone and marrow. Then she fleshes the skeleton with soft olive-brown skin like her own, teases out shiny black hair from the scalp. The face’s features are delicate and unfamiliar.
The witch smiles softly and whispers, do you live here?
I used to, says the girl whose teeth were in a wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
I slept in your cot, says the witch, apologetically.
I don’t need it anymore, the girl says. You’re very beautiful.
No one has ever said the witch is beautiful. She is surprised. Witches are rarely either beautiful or ugly. Her grandmother told her once that witches don’t live long if their appearance attracts too much attention.
“Attention from what?” she had asked her grandmother. “Omens,” her grandmother had said, and then added quietly, “Or small gods.”
The witch says to the dead girl, you’re lovely, too. Will you stay with me?
The girl smiles with her perfect teeth.
• • • •
The small god had made the witch stand before her village while he pronounced her banishment. His pink, plump lips caressed the consonants and stretched the vowels—dangerous, he said. Capable of the greatest evil they had ever seen, this witch, he said. Most of the villagers couldn’t look at him directly, at his handsome face, at the brightness of his luminescent white skin; they shielded their eyes with their hands as if from the midday sun. But the witch looked at him. She held his gaze in her own, a challenge, a refusal to go away as one who is ashamed, as one who has done wrong.
She had lived as instructed, kept herself small, tied bonds on her own two hands and gagged her own mouth, yet like her grandmother, the small god had looked at her and known what she was. She was to die for a craft she’d been forbidden to learn, and because the village did not need her any longer to protect them from omens, not one protested her execution order. Her people shielded their eyes from the small god but freely stared at her, small and undignified in comparison. She sensed their contempt. And she hated them for it, tied that hatred into a small bundle like it was a fragrant herb and tucked it under her ribs where she could keep it safe and cherished.
• • • •
The dead girl is always present now. She begins to teach the witch forgotten rituals. Her ghostly hand guides the witch’s as they sketch runes onto the floor of the uppermost room. Here, outlined in gray ash traced by fingertips, is the Fox constellation, teeth bared and sunk into the three-starred tail of the Marten. The ghost’s hand is cold and blurred at the edges, barely solid yet firm enough the witch does not question the lines her fingers are led to draw. Hands in furtive tandem, the witch begins to crave the dead girl’s touch, how it makes her shiver, makes her wonder, makes her piece together all the implications of this ghost, this house, this night under this arrangement of stars. Makes her want to believe her banishment means more than just the fruits of rampant hate.
The wards keeping the omens out of the house are tied to the haunting girl. The witch’s rituals strengthen the wards. The witch’s rituals induce birds to leave her food at the eye-socket-windows, grain and dates and almonds, not enough to fill her belly but enough to keep her alive. She drinks water from the well just behind the house, just within the wards. I could live here always, she says to the dead girl.
The dead girl does not answer. Their rituals grow stranger, stronger. The birds begin to leave other objects, entire murders of crows making gifts of broken shells and crystals, vertebrae from vultures and lynxes’ femurs, scraps of grave-cloth dug up by wolves. The bones are burned to ash, the ash used to write runes on the shells, the shells wrapped in the grave-cloth, which the witch soaks in her own blood from a slice to her arm. The dead girl holds the witch’s lacerated wrist tenderly in her translucent hand until the bleeding stops. Their gazes lock over the bloody limb. The witch feels as if her ribcage has suddenly shrunk, squeezing her lungs until her breath is a tiny, rasping, elated gasp on her lips.
• • • •
The witch never asks herself, Should I take these cloths stolen from my people’s graves? Should I take these eggshells the crows have broken for me? Should I shed my blood for a ritual I don’t understand? The dead girl sips from the witch’s spirit, less than a nibble, less than the least ravenous omen, only enough to keep herself present in the three-story house stacked between two oaks. Parasite, not predator. If the dead girl asks for more, the witch will give it.
The witch will give the dead girl anything to keep that cool touch upon her skin.
• • • •
Avenge me, the dead girl asks one night. They lie on the floor before the fire, the dead girl with her head on the witch’s shoulder. The witch caresses the dead girl’s hair, the strands lighter and thinner than the threads of the smallest spider’s web.
We could stay here, the witch says. We could forget what has been done to us and live for ourselves.
The dead girl says gravely, I am a memory. How can I forget?
The dead girl presses her hand to the witch’s cheek, and the witch feels the weight of the dead girl’s memories. There is the dead girl’s own banishment, twenty years ago when the witch was still an infant, when the small god chased the dead girl’s coven into this forest. The coven survived long enough to build a three-story house together and ward it from omens. Despite their efforts, the omens kept coming, and one by one the witches died, until the dead girl was the last alive. The witch feels those final days in the tremor of the dead girl’s touch, how anger had rooted in her soul so that she died with the small god’s name a curse between her teeth.
When the memories fade, the dead girl asks again, how can I forget?
The dead girl says again, avenge me.
The dead girl says, avenge yourself.
The witch presses a tender kiss to the dead girl’s brow, afraid.
• • • •
The dead girl says, why should you fear death, when you are so intimately acquainted with it? Why do you cower and hide from your enemies? Once, omens trembled when they sensed the press of a witch-foot in a nearby dune; now they circle ever-closer, more curious than afraid, pressing, pressing, believing your life belongs to them. They have taken so many witches: don’t you care?
Don’t fear the omens, my darling. Do not fear the small god. Look how fast your power grows. Look how strong you are when you cup your chin in your hand and close your eyes and taste the ash of talismans burning in sacred flame. Look how you love even a dead girl. Come gently, now. Come gently out of the forest with me and banish those who dared banish you. Cradle flames in your palms and draw lightning with your gaze. Do it softly. Do it quietly. Haunt the villages at night until you can no longer tell if you are dead or alive.
They will say you are a monster, and it will be true, and you will smile with blood coating your teeth when you hear them say it. You can ravage the night. You and I can find the small god and take him with us into the bowels of the earth.
• • • •
When the witch leaves the haunted house in the forest, the dead girl’s teeth are in her pocket. The dead girl holds her hand as they walk under the trees. The omens follow in their wake, cursing, predicting, foretelling, teeth-gnashing, unable to kill what is already dead, unable to shape clay that will not yield to the press of hostile fingers.
