The Near Witch

by Victoria Schwab

“She was very old and very young, depending on which way she turned her head, for no one knows the age of witches. The moor streams were her blood and the moor grass was her skin, and her smile was kind and sharp at once, like the moon in the black, black night…”

He told me witches were like people, that they came in all shapes and sizes, and they could be good or bad or foolish or clever. But after the Near Witch, the people in the village got it into their heads that all witches were bad.

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.

My father had lessons and he had stories, and it was up to me to learn the difference between the two.

Because I loved the little boy you were, and now you’re growing up to be something else.

My father used to sit up with her, tell her stories until dawn, because he knew she loved the sound of his voice, thick as sleep around her.

Stories are always born from something.”

“Now her skin really is made of moor grass,” adds Magda. “Now her blood is made of moor rain.” “Now her voice is made of moor wind.” “Now the Near Witch is made of moor.” “And she is furious.”

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.

But the land is messy and wild, and it’s hard to tell what’s untouched, really, in a place where everything looks tousled.

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.

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.

And then, a skull. He passes it to me, and I gasp as I take it, the half-crushed face blossoming with moss and weedy flowers. It’s like a horrible flowerpot, roots escaping out the eye.

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.