Summer of the Witch

This story was accepted for publication way back in 2021. Sadly, I believe the magazine has since folded. So, I’ve decided to publish it here so people can actually read it! Hope you enjoy.

I turned twelve the summer of the witch. All these years later, I still think about it in those terms, what happened to us – me and Luis, Matty and Sofía. Matty claimed the witch was squatting in one of the half-finished houses in our developing subdivision. I still think of my brother as that sixteen-year-old leaning oh-so-casually against the frame of a wall not yet plastered off, in a house waiting for glass-paned windows and a back door to keep us all out.

            Developers christened the neighborhood Meadowcrest Estates. That summer, all of the houses within its five street figure-eight were in various stages of newness. Our families lived in the completed ones, decorative shutters shining from fresh paint jobs. Scattered between our homes, beside and behind, down the street and right across, were the frames of houses. Wooden walls without insulation. Roofs without shingles. Floors without carpet, tile, hardwood.  But all of it gleaming – if not with paint, with potential.

            We gathered in these spaces as if we owned them. A breakfast nook, or a guest bedroom, or a den with an opening for French doors. The front foyer of what would one day be a grand two-story home, where sunlight streamed through a window space big and glorious, casting dust motes across our sprawled bodies. Luis and I called it the Big House and met there almost every single day. Luis, twelve like me, wanted to make a horror film. He held a Sony camcorder between his hands and talked about it while I picked at splinters in the floor, listening. It was June 2001, and things were looming for us, though we couldn’t see further ahead than the next day, let alone that whole summer, the beginning of middle school (though we felt anxious about it), September, you know the rest. I listened to Luis talk about The Blair Witch Project, which we were obsessed with, and how we would emulate it, documentary-style, since we had seen the witch with our own eyes.

            Except, that wasn’t quite true. My brother had seen her, or said he had. Matty was going to be a junior in high school, the same as Luis’s sister, Sofía, and captain of the soccer team. Most importantly, he drew tattoo designs. Big, gaping dragon mouths that swirled into fish tails. Mermaid bodies with the heads of presidents. Aliens with third eyes. His specialty, though: witches, their robes billowing and black but their faces pinched with the cheekbones of movie stars. One design I remember quite clearly, because sometimes, in secret, I drew it too. It was a simple oblong circle the size of a thumbprint and shaded to dark, the same size and shape as the birthmark on Sofía’s left temple. In dreams, I pressed my own thumb to this birthmark to find that it fit perfectly. Even now, I wake up some days with that feeling of the familiar vanishing; of me becoming a stranger in a place that was once home.

 ***

            On my twenty-third birthday, I licked the cunt of a stranger four years my senior and listened to the soft moans that meant she was close. Before that, I had kissed her thighs, downy with hair. And before that, I had found a mole flush against her left hip bone, the size and shape of a thumbprint. I paused over it with my lips as a thrill swooped low in my belly, and my first thought wasn’t of my brother and Sofía, all those years ago, what they must have been doing together the night Luis and I snuck out to the half-finished Big House we haunted like we were its rightful ghosts. I didn’t think of their bodies, moving against one another in each room of that house, in the back of Matty’s car, in Sofía’s basement when her parents and brother weren’t home. I didn’t think of their bodies, how they must have looked after the accident: Matty’s, slumped broken over the wheel and Sofía’s, jettisoned through the passenger-side windshield only to land, bent-angled, in the ditch beyond. I didn’t even think of Sofía’s thumbprint birthmark, or the line of the stick-and-poke tattoo that sometimes swooped above her waistline when she wore the right kind of hip-hugger jeans, a line which appeared at the beginning of that summer, and that I never got the chance to see wholly uncovered. What I thought as I kissed the stranger’s mole, textured like a cat’s tongue and brown as a coffee bean, was where could the witch be now? Was I, somehow, at this moment, making her come?

 ***

            The Big House would be our home base, much like it was when we played jailbreak with the other neighborhood kids, or needed a place to shelter when it rained and the construction crews left early. The witch, we figured, wouldn’t turn up in daylight. If we were going to capture any footage, it needed to be at night. “We’ll camp outside this Saturday,” Luis told me that Wednesday afternoon from his perch on the Big House’s landing. “We’ll meet back here at midnight.”

            I trailed behind him on our way home. “Do you think the witch is even real?” I asked, but instead of answering he groaned.

            “I wish she’d stop doing that.”

            We were nearing the edge of his front lawn where Sofía lay face-down on a towel in the grass, white t-shirt folded up and over her head, revealing her tanned back: smooth, unblemished, a shine in the slight curve between shoulder blades I knew had to be sweat. Her bra was unstrapped and dangling on either side of her arms, the cups poised like little bowls on the towel. I felt, suddenly, embarrassed to see her so out in the open, where anyone could come by and stare.

            “Ma’s gonna kill you for taking that,” she said to Luis, squinting up at us and the camera in Luis’s hands. “Hi Natalie,” she said to me.

            “We’re making a film,” I cut in before Luis could respond. “About the witch.”

            Luis sighed. Right then, the banging of a screen door made us all turn toward my house. Matty came swinging off our front porch in a cut-off t-shirt, Fairfield Soccer emblazoned across the chest in crumbling yellow letters. He loped to his hatchback parked at the end of the driveway.

            “Yo,” Sofía called.

            “Yo,” he called back, raising a hand. “Nice hat.”

            I felt my face grow hot. He meant Sofía’s makeshift t-shirt sunscreen. The t-shirt not on her bra-less back.

            “Come here,” she called. And of course, Matty did. He pushed off the hatchback as if propelling himself forward and came to a stop above Sofía, his shadow stretching slant-wise over her body.

            “Where are you going?” she asked, carefully slipping her t-shirt back on.

            “Yeah,” I said before I could stop myself. “Where?”

            Matty smirked at Sofía, ignoring me. “Out,” he said.

            Luis raised the camcorder to his eye and thumbed the record button. “Wanna tell us what for?”

            “What’s with the camera?”

            Luis threw me a sidelong glance, but it was Sofía who answered. “They’re making a film apparently. About your witch.”

             I couldn’t tell, then, what expression crossed Matty’s face at Sofía’s mention of the witch. Only that it made me blush. Luis and I were too old to believe Matty’s stories.

            But Matty quickly broke into another smirk. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said.

            “It’s true,” he continued when we didn’t say anything. “You shouldn’t go looking for something that doesn’t want to be found.”

            Luis and I exchanged looks.

            “She’ll take your heart and – ”

            “Oh, enough already,” Sofía rolled her eyes.

            Matty laughed. “I’m kidding anyway,” he said. “I made the witch up.” As he said this, he caught my eye and held my gaze for a second longer than he had Sofía’s, I was sure of it. Then he looked away.

            Sofía crossed her legs kindergarten-style. “Where are you off to, then?”

            “Out,” Matty said again, not looking at her, or me, or even Luis. He was watching the sky, one hand visored over his eyes as if tracking a pop fly. “Wanna come?” he asked her.

            Sofía leaned forward and stretched her back like a cat, then bounced onto the balls of her feet just as nimbly. “Sure,” she said, ignoring me and Luis and following Matty, who was already back at his car.

            I stepped forward, as if to follow her.  “Your bra, Sofía!” I shouted, just as she shut the passenger door. She’d left it behind with her towel, the cups still upturned as if waiting for something to fill them.

            Sofía leaned across Matty’s torso and hung her head outside his window. For a moment, both their faces were suspended in a near perfect frame. Matty’s sandy brown hair, so much like mine, complementing Sofía’s dark curls and luminous skin. I hated them in that moment as much as I loved them.

            Sofía’s laugh beamed out at me. “Who needs it!” she shouted. Then Matty reversed without even looking behind him and they drove away.

 ***

            You can’t predict the future. I was still a little drunk when I said this to the stranger, after we had collapsed on her mattress, spent and sticky with sweat. Above us, on her ceiling, she had tacked those green, glow-in-the-dark stars I hadn’t encountered since the early aughts. In fact, her whole space seemed from another time. No bedframe, just the mattress right on the hardwood floor. Rickety end tables probably salvaged from the curb. A desk in the corner piled high with books, loose papers, half-filled water glasses, and a few crystals interspersed here and there. Crystals on the windowsill, too, staggered between candles both real and fake, and partially obscured by thin, gauzy curtains that loomed like wedding veils in the soft darkness of the room. “For instance, I couldn’t have predicted coming home with you when I first woke up this morning.”

            For the stranger wasn’t a real stranger, a person I had never seen or run into before. We had been flirting around the same bar for weeks, dancing to the same DJs or local bands or house music, drinking the same well whisky in our whisky sodas, waiting in the same line for the bathroom. Once, someone asked me for toilet paper in the stall next door. A pale hand materialized underneath the partition and waggled its fingers. I gave it what it needed and opened the door seconds later to find the stranger emerging. “Oh, it’s you,” she had said, looking not at me, but at my face in the mirror.

            “Yes,” I found myself confirming. “It’s me.”

            Since that moment, our dynamic changed. When we spotted one another at opposite ends of the bar, or brushed passed each other on the dance floor, we didn’t say hello, or talk, or even dance together. But we did share a look that held a promise both of us understood. On the night of my birthday, I drank until my heart rose into my throat, radiating an energy that guided me into the throng of bodies already moving and grinding to a beat, one which the whole crowd moved to as if parts of the same liquid, sinuous machine. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, the stranger was waiting for me, in the middle of all those people, strobe lights flashing in and out over her face so I couldn’t tell what expression it held. Wordlessly, our bodies connected, and we moved together like that until last call.

            “What about the past?” the stranger countered, on her mattress, below her ceiling of green stars. “Can you predict the past?”

            “Did you know I had the same ones,” I said, ignoring her question and pointing at the mismatched constellation above us. “I asked my mom to buy them for me when we moved into the new house.” I didn’t tell the stranger I had wanted them after seeing them pasted on the walls of Sofía’s room, the one and only time I had been allowed in. I wasn’t really telling the stranger at all. She had no idea what “the new house” meant, and didn’t care.

            But she nodded, and placed her hand, palm flat, on my bare navel. “You look so lost every time I see you, like you’ve suffered a great pain.”

            The stars blurred above me. “It’s my birthday,” I said quietly.

            “You were at the bar alone. You’re always alone.”

            “I have no friends in the city. I just moved here.” This, too, was true. And then, as if under a spell, I confided in the stranger my deepest darkest secret. “I did something terrible.”

            “What,” she breathed as she kissed my left temple, “did you do?”

*** 

            The Big House was quiet at midnight that Saturday so many years ago. Quiet until it wasn’t. We stood in the empty kitchen, in that empty house, when we suddenly felt the energy of the space change. We felt it at the same time, as if a switch had been flipped, and we were passing through one part of the night into another, more significant one. Slowly, like in a movie, we craned our necks upward to the floor above from which direction, so faint, we could hear the soft murmur of voices. We were not alone.

            A cold fear seized my whole body, a shadow of which has stayed with me since. Luis brought a finger to his lips to signal silence. Then, he crept to the entryway where the main staircase led up to the second floor. I followed.

            At the base of the staircase, still all unfinished wood and half-connected railing, Luis sat crouched. I came up slowly behind him, and he held up one hand to stop me from moving forward. He pointed toward the upper left-hand corner of the house. The walls had no plaster, so the floor plan on each level was completely open, just a series of vertical two-by-fours delineating one room from the next. Where Luis pointed, in the far corner of what would one day be a dry-walled bathroom, flickered a light cast by a flame.

            The light was small and warm, and as Luis and I quietly climbed the stairs, on all fours, I could smell something so familiar, it made my throat ache; a floral scent that undercut the sawdust musk of the new house and reminded me of home. I think my body knew before my mind could make the connection that the scent was home, it was the scent of my mother drawing a bath for me when I was upset, or sad, lighting a lavender candle on the counter and turning off the light so that the candle’s flame became the room’s only illumination. Calm flooded through me as we crept closer to the light, as if I was entering our bathroom on one of those sacred nights.

            A low murmuring came from the room with the candle, and the murmuring seemed to time itself with the rhythm of the candle’s flame; as it flickered, the voices dipped up and down. Luis held his camcorder up to his eye, and blinked its red recording light to on. We tiptoed down the hall, flush against the outer wall, as the voices grew louder and more distinct, and the light from the flame cast its surroundings in an ever widening ring. The room, and the people inside it, were blocked from view by the shell of a ceramic shower. The source of the light flickered from a corner opposite the tub, which neither Luis nor I could see.

            But as we inched closer, a thrill of recognition shot through me. I could see it pass through Luis, as well, in the way his shoulders stiffened. The voices were louder now, and the cadence of them pulled apart into two separate voices. One belonged to a young man. The other, a young woman. The young man was talking now. He was saying, “Hold still, or it will be messed up.” The young woman laughed. “I’m ticklish right there!” she said through her laughter.

            Luis stepped forward, and the camcorder knocked against a wall-bearing with a dull but unmistakable thud. At the sound, the woman’s laughter cut off, as if by magic, and the flickering light went dead.       

            “What’s going on,” Luis whispered. Then, louder, tentative: “Sofía?”

            Because it was Sofía we’d heard. She and Matty were here, in the Big House with us. Luis ran the last few steps to the doorway, pulling out his flashlight and beaming it into the room, camcorder held high to capture the two of them in whatever grossly intimate thing they were doing together.

            He stopped as if clothes-lined, and the camcorder clattered onto the floor.  He made a noise of confusion, then took a step back. “There...there’s no one here,” he said.

            I approached the doorway then, peering beyond the tub shell at the open space beyond. It was utterly empty.

            “But you heard them,” Luis turned to me, his tone almost accusatory. “They were just talking two seconds ago.”

            My heart pounded at the base of my throat. I moved past Luis, over the threshold. Moonlight filtered through the glass-less window, bathing the room in a soft, ethereal glow. I clicked on my flashlight and scanned it across the outer wall, the floor, the corner where the flickering light seemed to have emanated. I knew before I saw it that I would find a scalloped candle there, a thin trail of smoke still wafting from the orange eye of its spent wick. That was our mother’s candle. It confirmed my worst fear. Matty had been here.

            “But you heard them.” Luis’s dark eyes looked darker in the night, the whites of them whiter. He was whispering now, and I could feel his panic like heat. “You heard them.”

***

            “What happened?” the stranger breathed and it was at this point that the room’s edges started undulating like air over asphalt on a searing day. Somehow, the myriad candles perched precariously all over shimmered with light when I could have sworn they hadn’t been lit before, or that neither I nor the stranger had gotten up since arriving to do so. But maybe we had? Maybe they had been shimmering this whole time. I couldn’t remember, exactly, the sequence of events that took us from the dance floor to here, this mattress. Suddenly, I felt like crying. The candles were lavender-scented. Surely, I would have noticed that smell if they had been burning earlier.

            “Why are you crying?” the stranger asked, but her voice hinted no alarm. It sounded hollow, as if she knew the answer already and was merely following a line predetermined.

            I was naked and sweating, and tears blurred my vision. I found it hard to breathe. The stranger’s hand moved up my navel, past my breast, to the hollow of my neck, and I imagined my pulse as she must have felt it through the pads of her fingers: hard and fast. She pressed two fingers against my pulse until it slowed to a steady drip. She held me like that for an eternity. Then she asked me the question I had been yearning toward for just as long: “Do you want to take it back?”

*** 

            She looks like any other woman, but in form only. A terrible power flickers behind her eyes and if you get close enough to see it, you’ve passed beyond the point of no return.

            She’s lived in the town for many years, or at least, she’s shown up at the edges of its history for just as long. You could find her, if you knew where to look. Archived news stories, strange rumors, urban legends passed from campfire to campfire.

            Historical Record, 1899: Methodist Church on Broad Street burns down, Sunday before Pastor’s daughter’s wedding. No survivors save one; she buried her father and his congregation, her mother, sister, and fiancé, with no help from the other sinners and Catholics left in town.

            The Tribune Democrat, September 16, 1978: Wife of local steelworker charged with his murder. Throat slit in sleep. She pleads self-dense, but the jury tries her to the full extent of the law: life in prison without parole. The slit in his throat looked too straight and too true.

            Channel 4 Action News: Mother Drowns Daughter in Bathtub. Then she cradles the body, dresses it carefully, lays it in the middle of her bed. She is taken to an institution where she writes letters to the daughter asking for understanding but not forgiveness.

            Matty drew as he talked. Soft, charcoal lines both subtle and bold. A dark figure with dark hair, face obscured. He really was a beautiful drawer. She simmered on the page as if he was conjuring her with his pencil and when he was finished, she’d be real. Alive, and close enough to touch.

            She takes your deepest, darkest desire and makes it real, he told us. But she’s not a good witch.

***

            Twin lights, like distress signals, beamed once across the window. Luis and I peered out, scanning the dark forest that lined the edge of Meadowcrest. The beams reached out to us from that direction. Then they blinked off.

            Luis started running before I could grab him. He flung himself down the stairs and I lost sight of him as he turned and ran toward the back door, which was still just an open hole in the wood. Fear pounded in my throat. I had no choice but to follow him

            Where were they at this point? All I’m sure of now: they weren’t yet dead. As we ran the two-football-field lengths from the Big House to the small wood beyond, Matty and Sofía might have been any number of places. Sitting on swings in the park, drinking Coors Light stolen from Sofía’s dad. Getting high in the hatchback, legs covered by the red- and yellow-checked afghan made years before Matty’s birth by a grandmother we’d never meet. Breaking slowly apart from each other, their lips still tingling. Or maybe they were on the road already, weaving down forest-lined highways, taking the hairpin turns a little too fast. But god, the night was still young, and so were they.

            Maybe none of the above. The autopsy report stated that neither Matty nor Sofía had any level of alcohol in their systems. No weed, no narcotics. It was inertia that killed them; that and one lapsed second of Matty’s attention on the road. Maybe when Luis and I got to the woods, Matty was bent over Sofía’s bare midriff, both of them sober, scrupulously etching another beautiful, tiny, private tattoo on her skin. The last one.

            I’ll never know for sure. When we reached the woods, I thought we’d run into them there, amongst the dark trees, their flashlights appearing every few seconds like strobes on a dance floor. That’s what we saw, I swear. Those lights, getting farther away the longer we stood at the forest’s edge, afraid to go in.

            “Come on,” Luis said boldly, but it wasn’t until he took my hand that I could enter. Maybe by this point, Matty and Sofía were on the road. But how could they be on the road and also just ahead of us? Because we were gaining on them. The trees started closing in; it became harder to find a path through ever thickening underbrush. Gloom settled over us as the canopy above grew dense enough to block out the moon. Finally, after we’d been walking for a solid fifteen minutes, the lights ahead seemed to stop. They stayed in place, shining in our direction for a long second. Then, nothing. The lights turned off.

            Then, the moon turned off. It wasn’t covered by tree or cloud. It simply ceased to exist. I can’t explain it better than that. The darkness was whole and complete and I was alone in it. Even my flashlight had gone dead.

            “Luis!” I called, but it was barely a shout. “Luis?”

            That’s when I saw it. One small circle of light to my left, bobbing up and down with a cadence that suggested someone walking fast but steadily away. The circle started to grow smaller and I started to follow it.

            I can still taste the fear I felt, like a coat of bile on the roof of my mouth. I can still feel my heart throbbing with adrenaline, radiating energy, propelling me forward. Blind in the dark, my cheeks and hands stung where low-hanging branches whipped me in passing. The small circle of light had vanished at this point, but that didn’t matter because the moon had turned back on. Suddenly, the trees started thinning until they fell away completely and I was standing at the edge of a clearing, bright with moonlight, empty. I felt a stitch in my side, like I had run a long time.

            A shadowy something moved on the opposite side of the clearing, a dark shape like a person that split itself from one body into two the longer I stared at it. The taller body leaned toward the smaller and they touched and became one again.

            A noise caught in my throat. It came out like a croak. “No.”

            As if my voice had summoned them, two lights clicked on where the bodies were. Flashlight beams. They shown at me like eyes. Hypnotized, I started walking toward them.

            I had sensed, even before this moment, that the feelings I had for Sofía were different. Something happened to my body when I was near her. I felt warm, which made me terribly shy. Yet, I couldn’t stay away. All I wanted was to place my thumb against her left temple, that birthmark. I couldn’t think further than that. I didn’t allow myself to.

            But Matty... he was just ahead of me, doing with Sofía the kind of thing I couldn’t even dream about. Those dreams I woke up from with a feeling of deep embarrassment and shame. How could it be so easy for Matty, to just exist in the world so confident and cocksure? How did that happen? And why hadn’t it happened to me?

            I know what jealousy feels like now to name it for what it is. But, at twelve, what came over me in that clearing, under that gaping sky, was a sensation too overwhelming to have such a simple name.

            “No!” I said again, like I meant it this time. The lights stared back, unwavering.

            I stumbled forward, then broke into a run. The stitch in my side seared with each breath I took. The flashlight beams bore into my eyes, getting brighter and less focused the closer I came to them.

            Why were they here, and why weren’t they stopping? Did my brother think this was funny, that I wouldn’t tell our parents?

            I was close to the lights now. They were blinding. I heard voices, more than one, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the lights, apart from the deep blackness of the night. The moon felt like it had been snuffed out again.

            “Matty!” I shouted. My voice sounded wild. The lights stayed, lasered at my face. That’s when I said it, unbidden but desperate, the first thing that came to my mind.

             “Please just don’t be together! Please, anything – ”

            A flash. I tripped and fell hard onto my hands and knees. Spots flooded my vision. It took me long seconds to realize that the lights had gone away, and that my eyes were adjusting to their sudden absence. I blinked furiously, struggling upright. I staggered toward where I thought the lights had been, feeling out the space in front of me with my outstretched hands. My fingers grazed the rough bark of trees. They scrabbled at nothing.

            “Where are you?” I whispered, to no one. “Where did you go?”

*** 

            My mother ran me a bath that night, one of the last I’d take in the house before we moved. That’s what I told the stranger as I let her lead me to her own tub, an ancient clawed-foot beauty of a thing, deep and long enough for the both of us to fit. The water was hot, almost scalding, and my mother lit a new candle on the counter and even stayed as I undressed and slipped in. I didn't see her cry, but I knew that she had been before she, my father, Luis’s parents met us on the road in front of the Big House to tell us what had happened. They found Luis and I sitting under a lone street lamp, its orange light syrupy and strange – scared out of our minds, playing back the footage on Luis’s camcorder to see if we had got the witch on tape. Because she had been there, in the forest with us. We had no other explanation for the lights, or the figures I’d seen. Luis clicked the playback button and we leaned in to watch the miniscule screen show us nothing but night-vision-green rolling shots of wood and pavement and trees. The moon and nothing much else. It didn’t matter. We learned the truth soon enough. Kids could die. Everything could change. There would always be forces working against us, outside of our control.

            “After the funerals, I never saw Luis again. My family left town.”

            I looked across my submerged body, at the stranger’s calm and lucid face. I suddenly felt so tired. But I had to say the words out loud, if I really meant what I thought I did.

            “Of course I want to take it back,” I began. “But what could I possibly give you, in exchange for all that?”