They’d called me a witch. Flung it in my direction with violent eyes; a hateful heart.
“You’re such a fucking witch.”
It was supposed to be an insult, meant to take my moment of quiet contentment and replace it with sickness, with shame. Look who’s casting hexes.
But see me in my black-magic frenzy, my heart alive with flashing light. Were they wrong?
No, I am the wicked they said would come. I am the conjurer of unnatural delights. A witch, a hag, a sorceress—I am reborn in my reclamation. I am.
I scrawl sigils across my chest—spirit of the darkness, come to me. I’m calling on the ghosts of your night. Fill me, moon, with your eternal coldness. Your distance, your patience, your sight. I’ll sing you songs of Salem, the howling cries of sisters you saw crushed under the folly of man. Crushed by hysteria—the cracked ribs and spirits and viscera. I’m singing out for them.
Hear me mutter my incantations: Sim salabim—rise up, lost ones! Come and follow me. Let’s chase the wild coattails of those who could escape; the ones who screeched their witches cry, those who wouldn’t relent. Let’s enchant the name-callers, the take-without-askers, the ones maddened with no-means-what-I-make-it. There’s power there.
The power is there.
Dizzy, drunk and disillusioned—let us imbue our coven with binding strength. Let us validate their superstition—their black-cat terror, their uncovered mirrors. Let me light an inky candle and pray pray pray to the wind. Let the flame extinguish and the smoke fill us up. We’ll travel on its lightness – the gray, the wisp, the nothing. We’ll rise on our retribution. Love-fueled levitation.
Denial, denial—you must taste so sweet. With my wicked ways, I’ll turn you to dust in their mouths. They sit full and fat with hatred, I will starve it out. You’re not real, you’re not real, you’re not real. But I am. We are.
We are real.
Let us drop virgin’s blood into a bubbling pot and stir up potions that turn evil men to newts and toads. Let us dance naked in the moonlight, singing songs that lift on the wind and travel to the ears of the Devil himself. Let him choke on them; spit them out. Let them bloom on the earth above. If it’s a witch they see, it’s a witch I’ll be.
Throw me in the river—see if I float.
Author: Cory Nye
Email: [email protected]
