[Issue 2024.68]

‘A Witch, a Wakening’, Laura Blackwell

Art © 2024 Sarah Salcedo

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I lie in a hillside meadow dotted with small, peppery-smelling yellow flowers. Overhead, the clouds shift in a blue sky, and I breathe in the fresh scent of greenery and the stillness of noon. I know, with the certainty of dreams, that I am dreaming.

A small distance away, a figure sits in the grass. I rise and walk to speak to this person, who turns out to be a teenage boy with a sweet, open face. He wears a tracksuit with some kind of symbol on the chest, possibly a school crest or a brand logo unfamiliar to me. Scrambling to stand, he brushes dirt and dried grass from his clothes. Then he introduces himself, repeating his name until either I am saying it well enough or he has decided to accept my attempt as the best I can do. We understand each other, although we do not speak a common language.

Atop the hill perches a small house of unfinished wood planks, gray and weathered, standing between the meadow on this side of the hill and the forest on the other. The door is propped open with a rock, welcoming us. Almost in step, the two of us climb the hill to this cottage—little more than a shack, but clean and seemingly maintained—and stare at the painted sign over the door.

“I cannot read it,” says the boy in a regretful tone. “It is not in my language.”

“It’s not in mine, either,” I say, and because this is a dream, it does not seem strange that I add, “but I can read it. It says ‘Witch’s House.’”

“If you can read it,” says the boy matter-of-factly, “you must be the witch.” He smiles sunnily and motions for me to precede him inside.

Small windows light the interior, but dimly; it seems inevitable that we will have to light the tapers that sit in wavy hurricane glass. The fireplace lies cold, the hearth swept clean, and an assortment of cast-iron pots of varying sizes hang on hooks above and beside it. Labels not in my language tell me that the pots are not for complicated meals, but for various foods and medicines. “Foxglove” says one, “monkshood” another, and then names I have never heard, “love-lies-bleeding” and “red-moon root” and “for betrayers.”

The boy examines the items on the shelves, notices that the levels of herbs in some of the jars run low. “I can read this one,” he tells me, pointing at a small urn of uncoated clay. “It says ‘fresh magnolia petals.’”

I run my hands along the workbench until my fingers touch a hand-bound book, its irregular pages protruding in all directions. I turn the crackling pages until I happen across one with crisp, legible lettering. “This says they’re in season.” A large leaf falls from the book, and the boy dives to catch it before it reaches the dirt floor.

“This is a map to find the trees,” he says. “It fell into my hand, so this must be my work, like being the witch is yours.”

It seems reasonable, so I send him away with a tightly woven basket and ask him to return before dark. I don’t know when night will fall—I have never been here before, and this is a dream—but I don’t want him to get lost.

While he seeks the magnolias, I continue to acquaint myself with my new workplace, opening drawers and peering into jars and boxes. The carving on some labels, and the ink on some of the grimoire’s pages, swims before my eyes, refusing to give up their secrets. Other words spring forward—and more than words: the image of a pink blossom, the sharp and bitter scent of a leaf, the rustle and crunch of a certain bark being ground in the mortar. I take up the pestle, find the bark, and work until a shadow falls across the door.

It is a man, young but weathered, with a worried expression carving lines around his mouth. I have the impression he is a country person and not well-to-do. “The baby has an earache,” he says. “Can you help, my witch? I have brought you a hand’s measure of pine nuts.” He digs them out of a pouch, sets them warily at the edge of a table.

I flip through the book until a recipe stands out. “Yes, I can help,” I tell him. “We’ll need a fire first.”

He lights the fire and then fidgets as I grind bark and mix ingredients. I teach him a song to chant over the baby. It won’t make a difference to the medicine, but it is a soothing sound, and it will give him something to do while he waits for the baby to show signs of improvement. Perhaps he will feel he is working magic.

Boiling down the ingredients into a syrup and cooling it takes long enough that the boy returns with the magnolia petals with their heady fragrance of lemons and musk. I send the man away with not only the potion, but also a leaf-wrapped charm for his wife, who is not sleeping well. I warn him not to breathe it in himself, because its magic is for her. The true magic is not in the magnolia’s scent, but in her belief that someone is doing something for her alone and not for her as a mother.

A few others straggle in, all dressed in loose clothing of rough fabric, something like peasant garb from a period film. The boy and I help them with poultices and charms, and then he suddenly disappears, just blinks away. I suppose he has woken up. Although I wait until after sunset, no one else arrives to assist me or ask for favors, and I read from the book by the light of the fire. The next day, I will have to gather wood.

Another time—I cannot be sure how many nights later—I arrive to find the cottage well-stocked with wood and an old woman stirring a pot by the fire. She’s naked as the day she was born. Witches can be like that. I introduce myself by name, which I can remember, but not where I live or what I do during waking hours, which I can’t.

“I suppose I am the assistant today,” I say. Although it was certainly night when I fell asleep, the sun shines through the green leaves of the trees, and it seems polite to refer to the place and time I currently inhabit.

“Oh, no,” said the old woman, sending frizzy hair dancing in all directions with a shake of her head. “I am always the assistant. I don’t like being the witch.”

Far be it from me to tell someone they have to be something they don’t want to be. I don’t mind being a witch, so I examine the contents of the workbench to figure out what the ingredients in bowls and bottles might be. The book atop the closest stack—the last person here was untidy, or perhaps interrupted—cues me with a bookmark, and that leads me to a recipe to paint on fence posts to keep coyotes away.

I do not remember so many books in the house, but the house’s contents change.

I read through the finicky recipe and begin the work set out for me. It requires all my attention, and I barely register when someone arrives at the door. Two young women in jeans approach my assistant and ask her for help persuading their parents to let them wed. Clearly, they believe she is the witch, and neither of us does anything to disabuse them of the notion. If they put their faith in her, then she can do the work. That is the way of this house.

They sit by the fire holding hands and talk to her for a long time, long enough for me to make a double batch of a salve for bruised feelings and to fill a vial with a scent for opening the mind. My assistant, who has been listening all this time, gives them back their words in ways that should be easier for parents to hear. I have time enough to make them luck charms for themselves and some for their parents, as gifts. This assistant and I work well together, and we never bother to tell them which of us is the witch.

“It’s visits like that that keep me coming back,” the old woman says comfortably, stretching her arms and cracking her neck. She seems comfortable in her soft folds of skin, more comfortable than I am in the worn-out pajamas that accompany me every time (as far as I know—memory is unreliable) that I arrive at the witch’s house. If she can be at ease naked in front of strangers, I can stop chastising myself for never thinking to put on nicer sleep clothes before going to bed. Since I am unaware of my waking self, that waking self must be equally unaware of me.

“Why don’t you like being the witch?” I ask. She seems a natural for it, and clearly somebody takes on the witch role when I am absent. “Have you ever tried it?”

Her face clouds over—not literally, although someday I may see that happen—and she says, “I tried, and it shook me up when—”

She blinks out, as people do when they wake. My assistants often do this before I do, and it must be the same when I depart. I have never seen any of the witch’s clientele disappear. This must be their world, I think, which we visit in our dreams. I am not certain that it’s always the same world—the scenery changes subtly, the clothing more obviously—but I am certain that it is real, because don’t people say there is no sense of smell in dreams? The ingredients I work with are heady and fragrant, the fire smoky, and my own perspiration heavy and wholesome.

Another time I arrive in long-sleeved pajamas, although the days in this world are full of sun and the grasses sway tall in the meadow. I sweat as anyone would, and sometimes I take my cue from the old woman and remove my sleep clothes so I can work in comfort. No one treats me any differently for it, and the pajamas always return on me another day.

As time passes, I learn more of the witch’s ways. Sometimes the books and the tools do not need to suggest the remedy because I know it already. There are requests I do not fill, outright refuse, because I will not hurt anyone. No poisons, no curses. Nor do I honor requests for love potions; love is work that none can do for another.

Some of my assistants become familiar, too—a tall woman with an Adam’s apple, a dark-skinned girl barely more than a child—and I find that each of them has a different way of helping. Some brew tisanes for the supplicants, and some leave for what must be hours to collect ingredients. Some sweep out the house, and others simply sit and keep me company.

My heart gladdens when I see the teenage boy again, the first assistant I remember. He wears a slightly different tracksuit, and he is taller and thinner in the face, but his smile is as radiant as before. He approaches as I examine the nightshades in the garden and asks, “What do we do today?”

Movement and noise from the right catch my attention before I can answer him. People are on their way, more than I have ever seen in this place at once, and their voices hiss and bubble, boiling over the containment of their good sense. A pitchfork gleams, and rough hands—hands that grab roughly, though the skin on some is soft—assail the boy and me both.

His eyes widen in alarm. He did not know that this is a thing that happens to witches and those who stand by them.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask of a weeping woman. “What have I done?”

“You have aided my secret enemy, who burned down my home with my life’s work inside!” she cries.

I have done no such thing, and I doubt any witch in that house did, either, but I know with the certainty of dreams that there is no reasoning with her fear or her grief.

I lurch forward, straining against those who hold me, and scream at the boy, “WAKE UP!” He blinks out, leaving angry hands empty behind him. He is safe.

I exit the dream world in fear and anger, but I do not discard hope. Perhaps there is yet a world where witches are welcome, and I can do things better next time, nurture minds and hearts and make sure no one distrusts the wise. I have at least two worlds to work in, after all.

I wonder if I will remember I was a witch here.

I hope I will remember to be one when I wake.

© 2024 Laura Blackwell

[Issue 2024.68]

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