SUCH STORIES
“Who are you?”
The woman smiled at the wall of her
cottage. The voice was young and female, but it didn't quaver in
fear. Yet. “Who have they told you I am?” She asked the child
behind her.
The sound of shifting cotton told her
the girl had shuffled in place, probably nervous, regretting her
rashness in coming so far into the forest without friends or a plan.
“They told me you are a very bad lady who likes to steal children
and kill their parents. That you live in a cottage deep in the woods
and lure children there in order to turn them into slaves and demons
that you make do your mali... malic-” the child stopped and tried
again, “malicious bidding.” A pause. “They also told me that
you don't exist.”
“Yet here I am,” the woman turned
at last and reveled in the child's gasp of fear. “Oh now, did they
forget to tell you about my appearance? Rather careless of them, I
should think. Quite honestly, I thought how I look would be very
useful as a way to keep the easily disgusted away from here.”
“They said,” the little girl
swallowed before beginning again. “They said you had no eyes.”
The woman smiled without mirth, more a
snarl than a grin. “And so I haven't. But answer me, child: did
they tell you they themselves burned them out? Your village's
grandparents and their hot pokers made of iron.”
No response.
“Well, child? Did they tell you that
I saved three children and destroyed their parents to keep them safe?
Were you told of how your people came the next night, held me down as
they burned away my eyes after they beat the children to death? They
claimed they'd been tainted by my evil influence: become demons, no
longer fit to live? Did they tell you the eldest was but nine and the
youngest barely three years of age?”
The child inhaled sharp as a knife
flint. “No,” was all she said.
She'd been the local healer then.
The villagers had wondered at her insistence on washing wounds and
using fire to sterilize her needles before she stitched their torn
flesh back together, but as long as she took away fevers and kept
infection at bay, they let her and her cottage full of plants be.
By all rights, living as deep in the
woods as she did, she should never have known the children.
One night, the eldest knocked on the
door of her cottage, his sister's arm hung at a grotesque angle and
the youngest had a bruise on its leg. All three looked as if they ate
but once a week. “Please,” he'd begged.
She set the girl's arm and fashioned
a sling. As she slathered vinegar on the smallest one's leg, the
older boy asked, “Will that help?”
“It fades the bruises faster than
letting it alone,” she'd explained.
The boy nodded, “Could you help
mine?” and took off his sweater to reveal a torso covered in so
many bruises it seemed as if he'd been painted in angry reds and
purples, sickly greens and yellows.
Swallowing her nausea, the woman
tended the abused flesh with her gentlest touch, begging for an
explanation she already knew.
After much hemming and hawing, the
sister answered in her brother's stead. “Mommy broke my arm and
kicked the baby. Daddy beats him.”
Now it was rage that had to be
swallowed. “Stay,” the woman choked out through a throat tight
with tears and anger. “Stay here. Don't go back; it's not safe.”
She turned to the eldest, “You're brave and strong and I doubt
you're yet ten. You take the blows meant for all of you. Yet you can
see it's not enough anymore,” she gestured to the others' injuries.
“Stay here. We'll keep them safe together.”
He was swayed by her promises and
sincerity.
She didn't know then her promises
would be ash within a week.
The parents came first, of course.
The woman hid the children in the cottage, playing dumb at knowing
where they were. When the father raised his ax as if he meant to turn
the whole building to kindling with the children inside, a shrill
series of whistles brought the nearby wolf pack. It had been a hard
winter and the wolves were glad of such a nice meal as the two stout,
screaming people provided.
The woman went inside to make sure
the children didn't see what was to happen to their parents. They
were never to experience violence again, she swore.
It took only three days before the
villagers came. The day had dawned bright and clear. She'd been
making a pie crust as the children washed berries when shouts shocked
the birds from their trees.
If they'd had any mercy, they'd have
taken her eyes first. Instead they held her back and made her watch
until the little dears she already loved were nothing but a mess of
blood and hair. By the time the irons were in her eyes, she had no
screams left.
She begged for death, to be allowed
to join her children. The villagers laughed and left her there,
bleeding into the ground, unable to even cry for the bones being
picked clean by crows.
When her grief didn't kill her, it
twisted her into anger. The first villager who came complaining of a
headache was given nightshade to put in her tea. The man who sawed
off a finger lost his entire arm to the infection she helped
cultivate in the wound. Soon enough the visits stopped, the way they
spoke about her changed.
Instead of Healer, they called her
Witch.
“So, these people, your people,”
the woman waved a hand, “they lie to you and try to scare obedience
out of you with stories of the cruel Witch of the Woods. Is that
right?”
“I suppose,” the child said after a
thoughtful pause.
The woman put a finger to her lips and
tapped them. “So, if I am to be feared, if I do not, in fact,
exist, what brings you so deep into the unforgiving woods?”
The little girl shifted again, her
shoes squeaking as she took two steps forward into the cottage, the
door creaking shut behind her. “What color were your eyes? When you
had them?”
Startled at such a question, the woman
lost her smile. Her first thought was to lie, invent all manner of
horrors, but the girl had been lied to all her life. No reason to add
to the score of misinformation already a part of the Woods Witch and
her myth. “Green. A rather fetching pale green, if I do say so
myself. Though it's been thirty years since I last saw them in a
mirrored glass; I may just be romanticizing.”
“My eyes are blue. Just a dull blue,”
the girl said. A small hand touched the woman's. Wet, likely from the
river that led to the hidden house. “I'm sorry that happened to you
and the kids you saved. The people who did that to you were very bad.
Far worse than anything they said... made up about you.”
There were no clever words that came to
mind and the woman had been alone long enough to think of all the
clever things she could ever say should something like this happen.
Although nothing about this encounter went the way she had ever
imagined it might go. The girl didn't scream in fright and run away,
ready to lead the villagers to the cottage. She hadn't started crying
or whimpering, nor had she called the woman a witch, despite the fact
that could be the only title she had known before stepping in the
cottage. In fact, the little girl was thoughtful, even... kind.
“Thank you.”
The little girl wrapped her fingers
with the woman's. “May I ask you something, ma'am?”
A true smile curled the woman's lips
slightly upward at the honorific. “You may, little one.”
“After you saved those kids, what
were you going to do with them? If the people from the village hadn't
done what they'd done. I don't think you would've turned 'em into
demons anymore, but what would you have done?”
The woman sighed, her heart heavy with
the weight of a future she didn't have, a past of love taken from her
too soon. “Teach them to make medicine from the plants and how to
befriend the forest animals. They were to live in this cottage with
me and I would raise them as my own. I would have passed on my old
twig and leaf dolls to the middle child, a girl of seven. About your
age, I suppose. Once the eldest boy was a bit older, I'd have taught
him to hunt. How to respect the animals and bless them for their
sacrifice to keep us fed. The sweet, babbling baby was going to grow
up remembering little of the previous injuries suffered at the hands
of those both blessed and unworthy to be their parents.” The
woman's lips quivered, though her broken tear ducts could no longer
cry. “I had such marvelous stories I wanted to tell them.”
“Tell me. Please,” the girl said,
part question and part statement.
“Your parents will consider you
tainted. I don't want you to come to any harm, little one.”
The girl took the hand she still held
and placed it on her own face. “That's not a problem.”
“Wet,” the woman said, “with
tears? No,” she said before the child could answer. She lifted her
hand, rubbing the liquid between her fingers. A metallic tang
drifted in the air. “Blood. Yours? Are you injured?” Already the
woman's mind raced as to what poultices she'd make to stem the
bleeding, what herbs would numb any pain the child might be in.
“Daddy killed Mommy and my new baby
sister still in her tummy, beat Mommy like the children's parents
did. Until Mommy and the baby squirming in her stopped moving. I used
the kitchen knife on him.” The child sighed. “It took a long time
because I couldn't reach his heart or throat, so I had to keep
stabbing him in the leg until he fell down and I could kill him like
the butcher kills sheep for dinner. It was very messy. I wanted to
clean my hands so I wouldn't get blood on your door though.”
“Didn't he yell for help?” The
woman asked, shocked at the child's matter-of-fact telling.
A small giggle rose from the girl. “No
one cared. He always yells when he's drunk. He always swears people
are out to get him, to murder him in his sleep 'cause he had a lot of
gold. They ignored him like usual.”
The woman took in this new information
and nodded. “And you came here?”
The girl was quiet, then said, “I'm
sorry, I was nodding. I forgot you couldn't see me. Yes, I put down
the knife, kissed Mommy and my baby sister goodbye and followed the
path into the woods.”
“But why? Why did you come here?”
“I wanted you to be real,” the
child said. “I wanted you to steal me. I took care of the other
part for you.”
A laugh came from deep within the woman
and rang through the small cottage. “Child, what is your name?”
“Ramona.”
“Come Ramona,” the woman walked to
the pitcher of water she used to bathe. “Clean your face like you
washed your hands in the river. Then I will make us some dinner and
tell you my stories before I put you to bed.”
The child's voice was smiling. “Yes,
Mother.”
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