A Suffering Witch

**Well ladies and aliens, here's my first post, and it's a short story! If you like witches and escaped convicts, read on good people of the internet.

“. . . And in other breaking news: today marks the two year anniversary of the Exodus Doctrine. Since its induction into law, there have been over three-hundred arrests made for the crime of witchcraft alone. Hard to believe, Diana.”

The female news anchor next to him with the artificial nose nodded. “Yes it is, Tom. To think that just a couple of years ago hundreds of these people were among us--”

I clicked off the TV with a decisive press of my thumb, then turned to my children seated around the disorderly kitchen table and said, “I don’t want you two watching that dribble.”

The boy kept horsing down his soggy cereal, not caring because he hadn’t been paying attention to the news anyway. The younger girl with a floppy, purple ribbon in her hair whined, but she was too excited to get to school for show and tell to make a big fuss.

I walked them out to the car and began my daily battle with the rusty, old engine in my mini van. It was a vile color somewhere between puke and burnt oatmeal, chunky and smelly looking. Twisting and turning the key viciously, thoughts of sports cars and motorcycles danced through my head. The piece of junk started, more’s the pity. Those dreams would have wait until tomorrow. Or the next day.

Pulling up to the school, I treated the screaming kids like neon cones, weaving through them with the utmost care, protecting a paint job I hated. My own two rugrats bid me a lackluster goodbye as the hoped out of the still moving van to see their friends. It made me sigh, but I wasn’t one to waste oxygen by telling them not to unbuckle until I had hit the brakes. At least not for the second time that morning.

Calling my husband on the way to the grocery store, I put her foot to the floorboard, crushing a candy bar wrapper under the gas pedal.

“You’ve reached Kevin--”

“Obviously, I haven’t,” I muttered into the disconnected line.

The local grocery was filled with people like me--moms like me. They wore their elastic waisted jeans up to their navels and wandered around the store with a bad perm, buying anything fatty or sugary that got in the way of their shopping cart. I watched them with a mixed pallet of disgust and self loathing.

My cell phone rang, an awful little tune from some Disney movie--my daughter’s doing, and I picked up on the first ring without glancing at the screen. “Kevin, I’m at the store. Do you need....”

A woman’s voice was on the other line. “Is this Melissa Bradley?”

“It’s Shaw now,” I said slowly. For the moment, anyway.

“Oh, right. Of course. You’d think I’d remember that; I was at your wedding, after all.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Victoria Lang,” she said as if it should mean the world to me.

It did mean something, however. “Tori? From high school?”

I could picture her turning her beak like nose up. “I prefer Victoria now.”

“Oh, right. Of course.” My lips twitched a bit, then I remembered my manners. “How have you been?”

“Everyday is a blessing,” she said, and I wondered if that was how other people really felt. “But I called to ask if you were coming home for the funeral.”

“Who died?” I asked, not at all sure I was interested in knowing. I hadn’t spoken to anyone I’d grown up with since graduation. I didn’t call, write, or attend reunions--come to think of it, I didn’t know how Tori had gotten my number.

“Well, nobody. Yet,” Victoria said, laughing as if she had uttered something extremely clever. “Are you coming to the execution, then?”

I stopped my cart in the middle of the aisle, and some lady bumped into my rear end. I barely noticed. “Execution?”

“Has no one told you? Oh dear, I’d have thought--I mean you two were so close in high school! Things change, but surely someone should have told you. It’s in two days for God’s sake.”

“When’s the visitation?” I barked at her.

“Tomorrow, but--”

I left my pile of items right where they were, running out of the store. One missed meal wouldn’t hurt anyone in my family, and surely my husband could be trusted to order pizza, at the very least.

I slammed the car door behind me, dialing Kevin with the hand that wasn’t fighting with the engine. It was a nine hour drive to Albany, more if I had to stop. And Rita closed the Inn around five on Tuesdays. If she hadn’t changed her routine--and she hadn’t in the eighteen years I’d lived there--and if she was still alive, she’d still be doing that.

So I wouldn’t make any stops.

“You’ve reached--”

I took the phone off my ear and slammed it against the glass. Feeling better, I left a message. “It’s me. I’m going out of town for a couple of days. There’s a...family emergency; call me later and I’ll explain. Don’t forget to pick up the kids.”

With that short message, I left my life behind to go watch a very old friend take his turn in the electric chair.

_____

“You have vacancy’s coming out of your ass, Rita. Always have, always will, so just get me a room, okay?”

A woman with cateye glasses frowned at me from behind the desk. Silver hair that used to be red was stacked in a matted pile on top of her head, and there were ink stains on her fingers. Her wrinkles were deeper than I remembered, but it’d been thirty years. No doubt I looked a little rougher around the edges too--and I was no beauty in high school.

“You’re wrong there, Mel. With this whole...execution business, a lot of people have come into town.”

“Vultures,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I was any different.

She nodded emphatically and did some clicking on her keyboard. “That boy....He always was trouble, but I’d have never figured him for a witch.” She looked up. “Magic is the devil’s work.”

I forced a smile, but inside I was groaning. Welcome back to small town America. I just hoped I’d survive the experience with my scientific mind intact.

She stopped clicking. “Alright, I have something, but it’s going to be a bit pricey.”

I forked over my credit card without comment. Rita took her time entering the information, the system as outdated as her. I waited patiently from the waist up, but my foot was tapping against the crack linoleum. The clack clack sound echoed in the small, furniture lacking office, and I quit the movement as quickly as it had started.  

Though all I could do was wait, I could think of a lot better things to do with my night than stand here and chat with Rita. Death would have been preferable.

Rita handed me the key, and I swiped it out of her hand. Heading upstairs, I put my stuff (just a small bag of spare clothes I kept in the car) in my room but didn’t stay. The musky smell of sheets and curtails that hadn’t been disturbed in a long time set me on edge. So did the ancient, threadbare furnishings. It was all too familiar and awful to allow me any peace.

There was one bar in this tiny town--and it stayed much to the chagrin of the local Stepford wives. Their main grievance apart from the fact that it served alcohol instead of Shirley Temples was that it was stationed right next to the ballet studio.

Despite the constant complaints and threats from the husbands of those wives (some of whom held significant influence in this town), Flannagan’s rusty doors stayed open. Its rotten siding and awful smell was like one big middle finger to most of the town.

Which made it my favorite place in the world, right now.

I expected scruffy Hank to be behind the bar when I plopped my butt down on a cushioned seat, like he had been my whole life. Instead, a boy who didn’t look much older than my son was cleaning a glass. He had a slight softness to his chin, and I guessed that he couldn’t be out of high school yet. But if he could pour a whiskey straight, I didn’t really give a damn.

I told him my poison of choice, and then watched him over the rim of my glass. “You know, I used to know a boy that mixed drinks here back when we were in high school.” I smiled. “He’d get badgered behind the bar for watering down the already crappy alcohol, and I’d be out here, waiting tables with the all-hands customers.”

The kid was still cleaning a glass that hadn’t been without stains for thirty years. “How long you do that for?”

“Not a day longer than it took me to gather the money to get out of this dump.”

He understood. I could see it in his eyes. He was probably just like me: not smart enough or athletic enough to be given a helping hand. I wondered idly if the kid kept a savings jar under his bed where his father wouldn’t find it. Then I shook my head. That would be just uncanny.

“What about your friend? The one who worked behind the bar.”

I down the rest of my drink and slapped down the money to cover it and a generous tip on the counter. “He wasn’t so lucky.”

_____

My dreams were filled with visions of screaming people and earth shattering bangs, shaking the foundation of my mind and jolting me out of a fitful rest. Rubbing my eyes in the late morning light, I blamed the proximity for my nightmares.

I sat up in bed, stretching my arms behind her and hearing the pop pop pop of weary joints. I froze mid stretch, eying the scrap of newspaper on my bed stand that hadn’t been there when I’d nodded off. It was ancient and yellowed, the ink barely readable after all this time. The scrap had its own wrinkles that someone had tried to smooth over, like a brush to a tangled rats’ nest.

I read the caption, “School property blown up, suspect in custody.”

Eyes widening, I sprang from the bed and ripped the scrap of newspaper into a million pieces, throwing as many as I could hold onto into the waste basket.

I was paranoid. It must have...been on my dresser all along. And that was why I’d dreamed of it for the first time in over twenty years. Still, if that was true, how had it gotten there? Maybe Rita had put it there, because she thought I’d be interested in the history I was a part of, not because she knew. Yeah. Likely. But in any case, Rita wasn’t the type of woman to hold onto to this for all these years. She wasn’t even the type of woman bright enough to connect the dots.

I hadn’t brought a spare pair of pants, so I was stuck with yesterday’s jeans and a loved t-shirt older than my high school diploma. Rita was talking to another customer, making it easy to breeze past her and pretend not to notice her attempts to call me over.

Checking my watch, I realized I had just enough time to grab a bite before the visitation. But I didn’t take it, jumping into my car instead and heading a few miles outside of town to the local jail. I didn’t want to run the risk of running into anyone--particularly Victoria-- or being late.

The guard waved me on in after checking me for weapons and ID. I blinked a the dirty room with a few rusty, foldable chairs and a cage with iron bars. On TV, it was all plush couches and a glass box to keep the prisoner silent and contained. Somehow, this seemed a lot less humane, like we were at a sporting event.

Tori was one of the first people in after me, and I was even more surprised at how she’d changed than I was at the room. In high school, she’d hung out with the rough crow--like me, drinking, smoking, wearing the names of bands that her parents disapproved of. Now, she had donned a bright pink pants suit and was surrounded by a bunch of women holding crossed.

The next second, the guard announced that they were bringing in the prisoner to the slowly filling room. I shuddered with relief, because Victoria had been making motions about me coming to join them. Symbolically, I believed who they stood by said a lot about a person, so I didn’t want to be caught within 500 feet of them.

All that was put from my mind, however, when the back door inside the cage swung open and a man stepped out. He was tall, taller than I remembered. His dark hair was streaked with grey, and there were laugh lines around his nose and creases around his eyes. He had the same easy going air about him that had attracted me to him in high school, but some of it was diminished, worn down by the years like running water on rock.

The room got impossibly louder as they all raced each other to say what was on their mind. But no one got any closer to the bars as the prisoner sat down on a seat inside. I looked around and then made my way forward, keeping on eye on the guard. He let me get right up to the bars before warning me, “Ma’am, be careful. This here is a dangerous criminal.”

“Thank you, officer. I’ll keep that in mind.”

The subject in question whipped his head up at the sound of my voice, whistling through his teeth. “Well look who it is. Melissa Cheyanne Bradley. Come to throw fruit?" He nodded toward Victoria. "Or have you turned into one of the cross wavers?"

“Jason Rose Carlson.” His name felt rusty on my lips after all these years. “Neither, actually. I just came to see you locked up like the rabid dog you are.”

He grinned. “They’re going to put me down like one too, Mel.”

I leaned against the bars, feeling the cool, hard metal against my flesh. “How’d you get yourself into this one, Jay? When I left...I thought you were right behind me.”

“It was a little hard to ditch this town from behind prison bars.” His tone made me flinch. “But as soon as I did my time, I was gone.” Jason leaned back in his seat, balancing precariously on two legs. “Saw everything I wanted to, traveled everywhere we talked about when we were kids.”

I was glad he had. He deserved that after all he’d been through--at my hand, no less. But I couldn’t help the cold hand that squeezed at my insides. He’d gone on to see the world while I’d settled for a two car garage and a white picket fence. It’d been my choice and good things had come of it. Still, regret was alive within me.

“So why are you here,” I asked. “Why come back?” The next part I said very quietly. “Why start practicing again after all these years and after what happened?”

He shrugged. “I never really stopped. Never was much good with money--not like you. So my magic took me around the world. You didn’t used to turn your nose up at that.”

“I grew up,” I said dully. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why here? You hated this place as much as I did--maybe more.”

He got closer to the bars, speaking softly. “A couple months ago, some strange incidents here made national news: blind man getting his sight back, spike in stillbirths in the area--”

“I know. Those are the specifics of what they convicted you for.”

He nodded. “But I wasn’t even in the area at the time-- not that they’d believe me. I came when I made the connection between the incidents. It was geographical. Everything that happened occurred within a perfect, little radius of the old high school.”

“It’s not that big of town,” I said, my fingers feeling cold and numb. “Coincidence.”

He smiled grimly. “I thought so too. Until I looked into some recent construction that they’d been doing... out by the football field.”

Shaking my head, I stumbled back from him. “No.” My tone was very final, and I often used it on my kids for that reason. It told them that there would be no bending on the subject.

“You didn’t used to be so closed minded; you used to have a lot more imagination.”

“Funny. You used to have a lot more freedom.” I glanced meaningfully at the bars surrounding him.

He was suddenly right against the bars, gripping them with white knuckled fists. “Until it was taken away from me,” he hissed.

“I’m sorry.”

Jason seemed to forcibly get a grip on himself, sitting carefully down in the chair once more. “No apologies. We both made our decisions, and I don’t regret mine--either time.” The corner of his mouth tugged up. “You’re worth the cage, Mel.”

He got up then both I could ask what he meant “both times”. Jason called over the guard, and that quickly, the visitation was over. I stared at him while the rest of them piled out, watching him move towards the exit until the door through which he had entered obscured him completely from my view.

I hopped in the car and drove without having a destination in mind. Before long, I was at the ruins of the old high school. And ruins was the appropriate word. The foundation had been destroyed all those years ago, collapsing in the force of the explosion even though it had originated hundreds of yards away by the field.

I walked past the shattered glass doors, imagining as I had frequently during high school what it would have been like to walk across the stage and grab my diploma. I lost myself in the fantasy of turning and facing the crowd with a one fingered salute, showing them that with that piece of paper, I was free and moving on to bigger and better things.

None of that happened, of course, they had mailed everyone their diplomas, canceling the festivities in light of recent events.

Ground zero was once just a tiny shed with groundskeeping equipment. Now, it looked like an earthquake had started right in the center where, thirty years ago, Jason and I had knelt. The brick path had exploded in a circle outwards, rising and falling in a tidal wave towards the high school.

I knelt down right in the middle, feeling the sand bite into the palms of my sand. And then I was right back there.

The power. It was like a forest fire within me, raging through and burning everything that it touched. Changing me. I arose from the ashes.

It was intoxicating.

I let the literal fire dance around on my hands and around my body. Now that I had summoned it, I alone controlled it. It made me feel strong. Invincible. The fire grew in intensity till I could feel it in every pore on my body. The fire missed no crevice. I was consumed.

“Mell!” Someone tugged on my hand. “You gotta stop, Mel. Put it out.”

Put it out? It was me, and I was it. We were one and the same, the power and I. I would not go back to how I was before. I would not separate myself from this feeling. I couldn’t.

“Mel, please, there’s--”

The world was blasted into darkness.

“There’s gasoline,” I said, finishing Jason’s warning.

I stood up and eyed the construction equipment, remembering Jason’s words. Magic could certainly have a lasting effect, but thirty years? And why now? This place had been abandoned for years....

Maybe that was Jason’s point, though. The workers were probably the first people to spend any time here since the day before my graduation ceremony. If the magic had managed to stick around that long-- a big if--wouldn’t it be more likely to set someone on fire, though? I’d never heard of a spell mutating after a long time dormant, but I hadn’t been listening for decades.

I went back to my car, putting my face in my hands once safely inside. What was I doing? I’d driven hours--leaving my family without notice-- to see a convicted felon I hadn’t spoken to in thirty years. Now, I was taking that criminal’s word as law. Who was to say Jason didn’t just want to have me muck around and take the blame for his actions?

He wrapped the blanket the EMT had given him around my shoulders. “Don’t say anything okay? I’m gonna...I’m gonna take care of this.”

I trembled. “How, Jason? I--oh god, I blew up the high school. How am I....This isn’t just going to go away.” I sniffed, smiling weakly. “And to think in just a couple of hours, I would have been out of here.”

He gripped my shoulder so hard it hurt. “You’re still gonna be out of here, Mel. You’re gonna go to college and do great things. I just know it....You’ve just gotta let me fix this.” Jason squeezed harder. “I can fix this.”

And he had fixed it. I’d gone to college the next fall, and Jason had spent five years in a cage. It’d seemed like the answer at the time, the only answer to a scared girl about to lose everything she’d ever worked for. Thinking of it now, though, it made me physically ill.

I let my only friend, the love of my young life, take the fall for something I’d done. And now, if Jason was right, I was about to do it again.

_____

The next morning I woke up less rested than I had been when my head hit the pillow. I’d been tossing and turning all night, fighting with myself. I knew what had to be done, but I wasn’t sure I could do it.

Not bothering to change clothes, I sped all the way to the jail, arriving twenty minutes early to the execution. The whole town a had shown up, all in different degrees of formal wear. I saw the sheriff--still the same jerk who’d tipped horribly and put his hand all over me during my waitressing days. Unsurprisingly, the mayor was also there, looking a vision in his purple suit that was straining at the buttons.

I paced around like an agitated animal, glancing over at the cage every once in a while. They’d replaced the chair from yesterday with the electric one. Seeing that only made me walk faster, burning through my shoes and the cheap linoleum.

They brought him out without chains, obviously figuring he wouldn’t need them where he was going. His skin was pale, like he’d spent the enter night floating in a tub of bleach, but he smiled when he saw me.

And that sealed it.

Before they could strap him to the chair, I cried, “Ferrum effodiunt!”

The steel bars exploded outward. One flying so precisely as to smack Tori Lange in the forehead. I couldn’t help but smile at that even as the warmth leached out of my body.

“Witch!” The mayor screamed, his face bulging and the color of suit. The officers turned their rifles on me, and I felt my mortality. I was out of juice, and they had big guns.

One of them, a large fellow with a lopsided mustache, pulled the trigger. The next moment, I hit the ground and the air fled from my lungs.

Jason grinned down at me. “Thirty years and you’ve still got it, Mel.”

And then we ran.

It was a mad scramble to the door, hiding behind as many civilians as we could to keep the bullets zinging around the room to a minimum. One went right by my face, so close I could feel the air displacement as it rushed by me. I gulped audibly and kept moving.

“Hope you brought a car,” he panted as we dove behind vehicle after vehicle to take cover from the heavy fire.

“Uh--yeah. But I wouldn’t call it a car.”

He balked when he saw the puke color mini-van. “You’d be right about that.”

We sped away from the jail, taking a few to the bumper as the fired on us. I found myself laughing as he took sharp turns and detours to lose our tail. He glanced over at me, probably thinking I’d lost my mind, but kept driving.

“So where to Mrs. Shaw,” he asked, exiting onto the highway once we were alone. “Your husband expecting you home for dinner?”

It was a sobering moment. “Probably.”

“You should probably go back to your life, then.”

“Probably.”

We lapsed into silence for a few minutes, watching cars as we zoomed past. It seemed almost as if they were moving in reverse.

“You should definitely go home. Shame to leave that nice life you’ve got.... But, you know what I hear is beautiful this time of year?” Jason finally said. “Croatia. Nice climate. Cheap. No extradition treaty with the US.”

I grinned at him. “Maybe just a quick detour.”