The Lighthouse Witches

by C.J. Cooke

She had a beautiful Scottish brogue and spoke fast, as though the words were too hot to hold in her mouth for long.

They knew that magic came in two forms—the good kind, which was used by healers, and the wicked kind, which belonged to Satan.

He doesn’t get that truth and memory can be too complex, too tentacled, to boil down to a linear narrative. That sometimes, silence is a form of survival.

Life continues outrageously, she thinks, in whatever form it can. An unstoppable circularity, the past always in the present.