The Near Witch

by Victoria Schwab

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

“Fear is a strange thing,” he used to say. “It has the power to make people close their eyes, turn away. Nothing good grows out of fear.”

My father taught me to chop firewood. I asked him once if he wished he had a son, and he said, “Why? I’ve got a daughter just as strong.” And you wouldn’t guess it by my narrow frame, but I am.

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.

It is a strange thing, the way the world goes quiet when we hear our own name, as though the walls grow thin to make way.

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

Funny how when we start to tell a secret, we can’t stop. Something falls open in us, and the sheer momentum of letting go pushes us on.

“I don’t feel like a person. I want to feel pain, and joy, and love. Those are the things that connect humans to each other. They’re much stronger threads than those connecting me to the wind.”

The words have scraped my throat raw. Maybe one day the words will pour out like so many others, easy and smooth and on their own. Right now they take pieces of me with them.

I throw my arms around her and then crouch down and slip them on, while my mother eases her window up with silent fingers. She gives me a tight hug before she turns and glides away. I step through the open window and drop silently, my legs bending and my boots sinking into the tangled earth. And then I run.

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.