The Changeling

by Victor LaValle

But when he looked around, he could still see the old platforms, and down on the street level, the old Jamaica, Queens. If his mother had been with him, would she have seen a third Jamaica, the one she first encountered when she was a young immigrant in the United States? How many Jamaicas might there be? If you were a thousand years old, you’d remember when all this was marshland, and Jamaica Avenue was the Old Rockaway Trail used by the Rockaway and Canarsie Indians. And before that? In the 1800s city workers dredging the bottom of nearby Baisley Pond found the remains of an American mastodon. A mastodon sculpture had been raised in Sutphin Playground. All those tales were told right here, one after the next, each informing the one that came after. History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions. Would it be so surprising if once there had been witches here, too?