'The Witch who Was and Wasn't' by Maria Thomas

 

Once upon a time there was a witch. Well, there was a girl really, but many people thought she was a witch, and she didn’t like to tell them otherwise. So, we’ll say she was a witch if that’s ok.

So once upon a time there was a witch. What made her a witch?

Well, she lived alone, had a black cat and liked to pick herbs to dry in her kitchen. I mean that’s such obviously witchy behaviour that it’s surprising she ever objected to the word witch.

Oh, she didn’t? Object that is. Well ok what else made her a witch?

She liked dancing you say. Dancing under the starlight, howling at moons, familiar twisting and writing around her legs? No? You mean she liked going to nightclubs, dancing on podiums wearing nothing but diaphanous sheaths and gold bikinis. She liked the boom of the base as it reverberated through her body, used the rhythms to cast incantations with her spine.

“Did they work,” you ask, “the incantations?” Well, if amorous alchemy was her aim, they worked extremely well. She was beset with boys, and sometimes girls, and sometimes those who were neither one nor the other. They swarmed to her like hummingbirds to nectar, like beetles to dung, like ants to the scattered remains of sandwiches and scotch eggs on red chequered cloths.

Was that her intention, did she want that, to find true love’s kiss?

Well, no that wasn’t her intention. She liked living alone with her black cat and her drying herbs. She just really liked dancing. She liked the way the dry ice shrouded her body, she liked the bleep of techno and the blink of strobes, the lift of the podium and the way everyone’s hair looked different from above, she liked the freedom to expand without the press of other bodies, the jab of elbows and the jar and jolt of dancers around her.

And at the end of the nights, like the witch she is, she casts off those acolytes entranced by her charms, slips into starlight, takes the first broomstick home.