Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

by Rivka Galchen

I observed to Susanna—and this was maybe my first clear thought about my case—that though I was glad courts existed, and I was eager to have my case heard—if it would ever be heard—and to have my name cleared, I also thought that sometimes the courts were there mostly to make money for the court scribe.

Why didn’t God leave the world as frank and easy to understand as a cow? Instead, it’s all a puzzle, for us to tease out which points of light are planets and which are stars, and who can be trusted and who cannot.

What Hildegard told me is that Katharina answered her by saying that there is no heaven and no hell. She said that people die no differently than an overworked ox in the road.

Love is one of the lowliest reasons for courtship. In its best form, a marriage is a contract of guardianship. But no one asked me.

I am astonished at all the expense and effort given to the useless work of books. Each party forbids the books of the other party. It’s a vanity.

I suspect the only thing I would be interested in reading would be a history. But I’m told histories are hated, which is not surprising. People prefer to make it up themselves.

When someone loves you, they stand by.” But why did I say that, when I knew that wasn’t true? Hearts and alliances shift all the time, for reasons no better than the weather.

trusted him, because he told me that the seeds of the butterblume delphinium are the swiftest cure for lice, even as the same seeds fermented in honey water can be a poison if used too often on the gums, or for epilepsy. He saw delphinium as I saw delphinium. As a plant capable of good and evil both. As a plant that required the knowledge and good intentions of man.

Now that I was denied church, however, I felt an overwhelming need to attend.

And, thirteenthly, it is true that Katharina’s own son Heinrich said that Katharina rode a calf to death and then roasted it, a common practice of witches.

And, fourteenthly, it is true that Katharina’s own son Heinrich called his mother a witch.