eatin' crow

I was twelve when the witch stole my soul.

I'd just gotten off the bus and was walking toward my house. My mother, in those days, worked with a social services agency, and my sister was in play rehearsals at her high school. I saw a small stray cat, gray and white and orange, lurking in the shade of a small copse dividing my house from our neighbor's. I loved cats.

Paganism, too. My parents were by-the-book evangelicals, which chafed me. No limits on the infinite! I cried inwardly while suffering through yet another hymn. My silent protestation against the oppression of the Almighty. I had a small spellbook with me, one that had survived a great purging the week before which had swallowed up my favorite book on tea-leaf reading, palmistry, and the history of the Tarot, and had ended in a savage lecture on Jesus.

I bought it at Barnes & Noble. The spell was for making someone come to you, a potential boon for a shy child. I offloaded my backpack on the front porch, got out the book, and read it. The spell consisted mostly of snapping a blade of grass (which the intended walks on on his or her way to you), imagining that the summons had already worked, and believing with positive force. Years later, I would scoff at the "Made in China" label that looked nearly apparent on those spells. Fakes, they were.

I didn't know this back then. I believed. The cat lost one of his legs, his fur turned a funny color and got stuck somewhere between hair, feathers, and scales, and a small trumpet extruded from his mouth, turning his mewling into something like an air-raid siren. Terrified, I kicked out at it and ran away, fumbling my house key out of its pocket, grabbing up my backpack (which I had left open; papers spilled out and blew away, but I no longer cared), and bursting into the house.

A few hours later, I emerged from my room, having convinced myself that I had daydreamed it all, ate dinner without a word, looked sick, and went to bed. My parents said nothing, perhaps thinking I was still learning my lesson from the last book-bonfire.

As I lay myself down to sleep, I closed my eyes, but opened them again when I heard a great rattling and repeated pounding at my window. Paranoia took over, and I rolled away from the window, curled up small, and tried to think myself gone, no longer a target for whatever thief was trying to break in. It didn't help; in my mind's eye, I saw a giant crow, beating itself against the glass in a terrible fury.

The next night, I dreamed it was in my room, its great claws on my chest, and it spoke soothingly about resting my eyes, keeping them safe and tender.

The third night, I was chained to a desert. Or the desert was chained to me. The crow was over me, picking at my intestines. I could hear the pelvic slurp as it used its great beak to lift the whole mass out and throttle it down its gullet. This went on for a hundred years, and I never ran out of innards, and the sun never set, until finally it did and night fell. There were giant, cold stars above me, thousands of them, streaming with rage, and the sun rose again and I was inside the witch's house.

The little cat was there, back to normal, and it stared at me stoically. The witch grabbed my face and said, "That was mine. You had no right."

I tried to speak, but couldn't. She smiled grimly (an old lady with curled silver hair, she looked like one of the old ladies you see playing golf sometimes) and held up a small book. The cover was a glorious blue, made of what looked like gemstones spun into thread and woven together.

"This is your soul," she said. "It's mine now. And you'll work for me. You understand." It wasn't a question. And I did.

She showed me to her backyard, where she kept a farm. Hundreds of acres of cropland. "All of this is your job, now," she said. "When the sun sets, come inside. That closet will be your room. You will sleep until the sun rises, then go out there and work some more."

And that was what I did for three months. No food or water. Apparently the soulless need no sustenance. I ventured forth, plowed acre after acre in the burning sun, sowed, harvested, weeded, irrigated. The crow was set to watch on the witch's roof; if I stopped working, it would swoop down and pluck out my eyes. If I started working again, it would return them to me. This happened only twice. The first time, I was picking a stone out of my shoe, which had grown tattered with the passage of time and with hard work. Hardly fair, but there was little I could do.

At night, I slept in the closet, which had a small blanket on the floor for softness. It was half as wide as I was tall, so I had to sleep sitting up. After the first month, my back began to ache without stopping, growing worse in the afternoons as the long day hours went by.

One day, near the end of the third month, my back locked up entirely. I couldn't straighten up, couldn't move my legs. I stopped. Before long, I saw the crow's clawed feet on the ground in front of me, and then the sharp tip of its questing beak. And then nothing but burning as the blood gushed forth and I was blind.

My back stubbornly refused to loosen. I stayed that way for four hours, until the sun finally set. Once total darkness had fallen, I heard distantly the opening and closing of a door. Then quick footsteps.

"What's this?" a voice said softly. Something touched my back, and I sprang loose again and stumbled headlong into the dirt. She rolled me over, and I felt the weight of her foot on my chest. "Do this again, and you're done. You'll be cast into the outer darkness, among the Old Gods, and you will never find your way back again. Do you understand?"

I tried to explain that my back had gone out, that it was a consequence of sleeping in the closet, that it hadn't been deliberate, but I still couldn't speak. Her foot lifted off my chest and came down sharply on my throat. Red spots appeared in the darkness, and I gasped for breath.

"Do you understand?" the voice said again, softly, gently, caressingly. Dangerously. Still gasping, I nodded, and she grabbed me by the hair and began to drag me back to the house. Most of my scalp came off with a great tearing before she was halfway there and I screamed soundlessly, but I heard only an exasperated sigh before I was hauled up to my feet and prodded along. My weight, pulling my spine downward toward my feet, was agony. I could say nothing still.

Finally, we reached the house and she threw me into the closet by the back of my shirt, the top of my head crashing against the back wall and renewing my pain. Then I felt something being thrown at me--two small somethings--before the door slammed shut. She had given me my eyes back. Sliding them back in, I curled up into a ball, and wept silently. Before long, I heard a rustling sound, and a low voice.

"Crying?"

I gasped without a sound.

"Be calm, child. I am the cat."

The one that had gotten me into this. Blind anger and fear rose. Then he spoke again.

"You shouldn't cry. It makes her very angry. You understand?"

I didn't care.

"Well, it's bad, especially if there are tears. I wouldn't cry in front of her or she'll kill you for sure. She hates tears because they're salty."

What was wrong with salt? I liked salt.

"Eh," he said. "It's the only way to kill a witch, so of course--"

Silence.

"I shouldn't have said that."

For another three months, I went into my closet at night and cried until morning. I saved my tears in the fabric of the jackets that hung above my head. The moisture evaporated and left the salt behind. One night, I silently took down jacket after jacket, squeezing and rubbing every inch of fabric into a corner. The total darkness made it impossible to see whether I had had any success.

When morning came, and the witch woke and turned on the lights, I could see a small mound. So precious, it looked like diamonds. I gathered it up and hid it in a waterproof jacket's pocket. After suffering through that day (being careful not to strain my back more than absolutely necessary), I went back into the closet and hunted for the pocket in the darkness. I found the pocket, but not the salt, and panicked, scrabbling my way across the fabric. It turned out that I'd gotten left and right mixed up, and it had been in the other pocket.

Silently, silently, I opened the door and crept into the kitchen. I knew the witch took sugar with her morning coffee, spooning it out of a small silver dish. My six months of silence had been a boon: I had become acquainted with the utter lack of sound, and made none. After pouring my small handful of dried tears into the sugar dish, I crept back into my closet and slept.

The lights came on, and I could smell her coffeemaker brewing. Then I heard the pot clinking as she took it out and poured the contents into her morning mug. Another ting and that was the sugar bowl. Then silence. Then a shriek that tore at the walls around me, shredding them into tatters, and I stood exposed to the witch.

She wasn't melting. I had been expecting that. Instead, she appeared to be rotting, and a hot, rancid wind washed over me, and I vomited. She reached out to me, her left hand, but it decayed and fell to the floor, turning into a mass of worms and evil-smelling sludge. She was still screaming, the sound multiplied by walls of stone, but becoming attenuated, echoing, moving farther and farther away until only the echoes were left.

I searched the house. Ransacked it. Tore it to pieces. No book. Then I thought she had hidden it somewhere in the fields. When I opened the back door and stepped outside, the only thing that greeted me was a bare patch of sand enclosed by a fence and tall trees and other houses. The farm was gone. Perhaps the spell binding my spirit had also broken. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. Nothing at all.

I ran back inside, and discovered the cat sniffing interestedly at a large rat that appeared to have formed out of the witch's remains. I spread my arms and looked at him, and he said, "What? Your soul? Don't look at me."

I tried to kill him, but he was too fast for me. Got the rat, too. The book was nowhere to be found. There was nothing more I could do.

I left the witch's house.

Wandered for a while, until something rang a bell. I didn't recognize anything; the loss of my spirit had cost me my memories, and everything I could think of was strained by gray. It was a front porch, with a backpack on it, lying open. I picked it up and rummaged through it, thinking vaguely of food, when I came across a small blue book and opened it.

Everything came flooding back. I opened my mouth and a warm, deep, wonderful "Hello?" came out. I looked around and realized that this was my house. I had returned after six months in the witch's home. I looked down at myself and discovered nothing had changed. I felt in my pocket and found my key.

Letting myself into the house, I went to the computer and checked the time and date. Only several minutes had passed since I had first seen the cat nosing around the trees next door. None of the last six months had happened.

Then I thought of something, and opened my backpack. The spellbook I had bought from Barnes & Noble was there.

I rummaged through the family's all-purpose drawer for a few minutes, then brought the book into the backyard. I doused it with gasoline from the lawn mower's gas can and lit the matches I'd found in the drawer. The ashes were still smoldering by the time my parents arrived from work.

They said nothing.