Bitch Witch (4 page)

ON THE WAY home Sarah stopped by a gift shop in Sudbury to pick up more stationery for her obscene collection. Since it didn’t involve dark matter, she couldn’t resist a small cast that made other shoppers hurry out of the shop.
A witch needs her space.
If she had to stand in line too long listening to people complain, it would be a lot worse.

Another stop at a local café netted dinner. It took a full fifteen minutes of debate before Sarah made a deal with her fat cells and ordered a low-fat green smoothie and a ciabatta sandwich with sun-dried tomato and raw mozzarella, minus the trademark fresh basil. The idea of fresh basil made her mouth water. She’d been alone for three years now, but it still grew thick in the gardens at home, somehow self-perpetuating despite being an annual plant. Herbs were as bad as baking. It made her want to dance naked under the moonlight and listen to the secrets of the universe.

“Anything else?” asked the cashier.

Careful to avoid eye contact, Sarah shook her head. With the fading delight of two big casts exiting her body, the temptation to cast again slid up and down her torso like strong, tattooed hands might. “Wait. Yes. I’ll have a shortbread cookie.” Cookies felt good, and they had the added bonus of not escorting her soul to the dark side.

“Dipped in chocolate?”

Well, duh.
“Sure. Make it two.”

Parking the Jeep along the street in front of the house, Sarah ignored the overstuffed mailbox that no longer closed from all the unopened mail crammed inside. Several plastic-bagged newspapers lay in the street. The grass needed to be mowed. The two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house sat in the middle of a five acre corner lot on North Street, two stories high with an attic big enough to stand up in. The ivy-covered porch sprawled the length of the house, so deep no light came through the south-facing windows shaded by it. Wicker tables and chairs had once decorated it, but Sarah had gotten rid of them. Not even a rocking chair remained to tempt her into a trance. She’d left the ivy growing over the structure, intertwined with sapphire blue morning glory that bloomed from dawn to dusk in summer.

The antique lead glass in the double doors had changed; once a floral design, it had taken on a spidery look after everyone died. If the forces of evil were into metaphors, and Sarah figured they were, this said:
We’ve claimed the blooms in our web and await the next blossom.

“Oh, fuck you,” said Sarah, shoving the unlocked front door open and locking it behind her. Inside the thick walls and heavy glass windows, silence prevailed. Home sweet home. No matter that she should sell the monstrosity and get one of those steel and granite condos she lusted after. No matter that this place held horrific memories that no one should have. Like Sarah’s oddly dexterous fingers, chubby arms, and dark Archer hair, it was part of her.

There were rooms in the old house Sarah didn’t go into. Her mother’s room. Her grandmother’s room. The basement. The attic. The greenhouse out back. The garden. There were parts of her existence she denied: the dark side, what happened to all the women in her family, and the fact that there were no men. But Sarah knew cutting herself from the fabric she’d been born into wouldn’t work. She had to change it. She had to weave a new pattern into it.

That meant a trip to the attic, before the fiasco in the Target parking lot caught up with her. “Tomorrow,” she said aloud. “Or Wednesday. This week for sure.”

Kicking off Aunt Lily’s bright purple Italian leather pumps, Sarah traipsed toward the kitchen. She tossed the bag from the stationery store on the floor next to a bureau littered with other bags. Entering the kitchen, she slid onto a high stool at the marble topped island. Lifting the lid on the old laptop that always sat there, she resumed play on
You’ve Got Mail.
She ate her sandwich while Tom Hanks did perfectly normal things with Meg Ryan, like put her out of business and realize love didn’t come along for everyone if they were stupid.

Sarah imagined her father had been perfectly normal. Despite her Archer witch genes, his were clean. Her mother had claimed he’d been an Olympian, having always attended the games with Aunt Lily. They liked sex with athletes, especially once they’d decided to have daughters. Sarah glanced down at her full breasts, well covered beneath the print dress, her soft arms fully exposed, and her short legs dangling from the high stool.
Yeah, right. He must have been a jockey.
When she’d been stupid enough to ask more about the
donor
, as her mother and Lily had referred to the men who’d unwittingly given them babies, her mother had shrugged and said she never bothered to find out which one did the job right. “What difference does it make, Daughter?”

Giving in to the lure of Cherry Coke over the healthy smoothie, Sarah went to the refrigerator and grabbed the last one. Maybe Amazon delivered soft drinks. She wasn’t going back to Target anytime soon.
I wonder if he’s at Target today. He should be drawn to find me.
The sudden urge to go there hit her like an unexpected wave of salt water in the desert.

Sarah coughed, tasting salt instead of Coke. “Dammit! I’m not going! Do you hear me?” she shouted at the empty room. “I don’t care! I will not! I don’t care how tempting he is. I’m holding out for the real thing, so fuck off!”

Turning her attention once again to the stupid movie, Sarah crammed the second chocolatey shortbread into her mouth and ignored the temptation touching her like a well-muscled man beneath a full moon.

I
f Sarah were a regular person she’d never go to church. For starters, getting up early on Sunday morning was for the birds, and for another thing, she hated it. She shoved open the back door of Our Lady of the Light church ten minutes after Mass started and stood there, feet crammed into heels, sans pantyhose, wearing a short summer dress and makeup
on the weekend
.

She hesitated next to a bowl of holy water. She hadn’t worked up the courage to go into the attic all week. It was time to man up and embrace penance for the spell cast last weekend. She thrust four fingers into the water, up to the second knuckle.

Searing pain lit through her hand as though the water were boiling. Sarah yanked her fingers out and stuffed them into her mouth. Fingers throbbing with pain she crept into the back of the church to choose a seat.

The last row had already been claimed by loners looking for redemption themselves. Second to last row proved practically as good a place to show the light she was trying to be part of it, but still hide from the priests. This was the place where she usually sat, or stood, or knelt, depending on the parishioners’ actions and her mood for mimicry. Sarah didn’t understand Mass or Catholicism, but nobody bothered her at this church.

And she’d been to them all.

Evangelicals scared her. They had that look in their eyes. It kind of said
maybe we’re crazy, or maybe we know the light intimately
.
Figure it out
. People at the Baptist church were too damn friendly, in that
are you friends with Jay-sus
way. Too many of them were anxious to die and hang with him. Methodists wanted her to stay for pancakes after, join a committee, or go on a mission’s trip. Presbyterians wondered where she lived and who her people were; answers they didn’t really want any more than she’d dare give. The Lutherans had been very welcoming, so much so that Sarah had initiated hot nasty sex with the minister while the rest of the congregation focused on an Easter egg hunt. It had been the highlight of her church-going career, but common sense told her not to return. Besides, that minister had enjoyed it way more than she did.

Sex was only fun before she had it. It was more the
idea
of it that was fun, and Sarah worried that’s the way it would always be. It was a witch problem. Aunt Lily had always said to
try try again
. Her mother had said casting was far better than men anyway.

Sex wasn’t an issue at Our Lady of the Light. These priests didn’t do the hot nasty, and from the looks of the people, neither did they. They didn’t even talk to each other.

It was perfect.

An entire hour free from the temptation of dark matter.

Even if it was deadly boring.

During the lone moment in the service when everyone shook hands with their neighbors, Sarah stuffed her hands under her armpits and stared at the stained glass windows. Nobody seemed to mind. Most weeks she dodged out when everyone went to communion—something she’d never dared participate in. Not that Sarah respected tradition. She didn’t worry that coming from a long line of witches who practiced ritual sacrifice, where souls were offered to the dark side, might make her unwelcome here. Sarah just didn’t like suffering and figured the little wafer would torch its way through her body like a tablespoon of drain cleaner.

After doing the sit-stand-kneel-half-burpee routine for a half hour, Sarah decided it was time to go for the big guns in the penance department. She had to atone for all the casting. When an usher backed his way next to her pew and gestured for the row to line up, she stood with the others.

Sarah’s heart sank as she inched toward the altar and discovered a serious rite taking place. This really was big guns. The light emanating from these people pushed against the dark matter flowing through her. She didn’t have the lady balls to repel it and continue forward. She looked around, anxious for an escape.

A priest stepped in front of her and offered a wafer. It glowed with a light far different than dark matter. Sarah didn’t know what it offered to the congregation, but she knew what it offered her.

Penance.

She snatched it with her fingers and stuffed it into her mouth.

Fire.

Time seemed to slow, and the light in the church dimmed.

The priest paused and Sarah realized that the candles lighting the altar had all gone out. He shivered but turned his attention to the next person.

Sarah took three quick steps toward a young woman holding a wine goblet in one hand and running a cloth over the golden rim with the other. She nabbed the goblet out of the woman’s hand and sucked down two swallows. Instead of relieving the fire, it scorched her mouth and throat worse and landed in her belly, white-hot. The woman wrested the cup back, glaring, and Sarah ran.

FOR HOURS SARAH lay face down on an old-fashioned, gilt-trimmed sofa. She wondered if kosher food or fasting during Ramadan would cause as much damage, and made a mental note never to find out.

She sensed rather than heard the tune of the ice cream truck three blocks away. Shoving to her feet she didn’t bother with shoes, pausing only long enough to grab her credit card.

It took a moment of fumbling with the old lock on a back door to get out of the house. Sarah jogged across the wide back porch, down the steps, and then full-on ran across the grassy backyard. It took her short legs a few minutes to cross the property and cut through trees in the side yard. The grass stood high on this end of the property, and no one maintained the woods. There were no paths, not even deer trails.

No one crossed the Archer property unless forced, except the old guy who maintained the grounds, a casualty of one of her aunt’s spells from a couple decades ago. Sarah assumed it had been a love cast, because the man had never once asked for payment in the years since everyone else had gone.