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. The grass and the dirt hold secrets, he’d say. The wind and the water carry stories and warnings.

“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.”

At the last moment, I say, “The Near Witch was real,” adding a softer, “right?” But when she doesn’t turn around, I think she hasn’t heard. I walk on, when I hear her call back. “Of course she was. Stories are always born from something.”

“Don’t you see? That’s not the point.” I lean back against a tree. “They don’t care if you did it or not. How can we prove you’re innocent?” “We can’t. They don’t care about innocence.”

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.

“Everything will be all right.” There’s that stupid phrase again. People are always saying it, and it’s never true.

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.