The Near Witch

by Victoria Schwab

A shadow twitches and steps forward, catching a slice of moonlight.

He taught me that everything has a language, that if you knew the language, you could make the world talk.

Magda returns to the table and the basket atop it. From it she unpacks several clods of dirt, a few moor flowers, weeds, some seeds, a stone or two she’s found. Magda collects her pieces of the world daily.

If the moor wind ever sings, you mustn’t listen, not with all of your ears. Use only the edges. Listen the way you’d look out the corners of your eyes. The wind is lonely, love, and always looking for company.

Wren knows a thousand games for times between. Between meals and bed. Between people paying attention to her. Games with words and rules, and games without.

That the ground and all that grew from it, all that was fed and kept and made by it, the trees and the stones, and even the animals—all of it moved for her. They say she kept a garden and a dozen crows,

Magda looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. Or I’ve grown up. It’s kind of the same thing.

I know my father’s story. I know it as well as the ones he told me, but I cannot tell it in the same practiced way. It’s written in my blood and bones and memory instead of on pieces of paper. I wish I could tell it as a tale and not his life and my loss. But I don’t know how yet. A small broken piece of me hopes I never know how, because my father wasn’t just a bedtime story.

My father used to say that change is like a garden. It doesn’t come up overnight, unless you are a witch. Things have to be planted and tended, and most of all, the ground has to be right. He said the people of Near had the wrong dirt, and that’s why they resisted change so much, the way roots resist hard earth. He said if you could just break through, there was good soil there, down deep.