David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

And those were the ones he’d passed. The others — the ones he spent a moment with, said hello to or spoke of this or that—

— there would only be one word for those:

Inconsolable .

Swamp witch was set to figuring now that the tea-drinking man wasn’t just a carrier of the bug, like she’d first thought. He was guilty as sin. He was a caster.

And swamp witch was starting to think that he might not be alone. He might not, he might not…

She closed her eyes and took a breath.

When she opened her eyes, swamp witch headed across the downtown with more care. Her dragonfly hid in the curl of her hair and she kept underneath awnings and away from street lamps, and as she did, dragonfly asked her questions with the buzz of its wings.

—What does tomorrow bring? he asked.

Swamp witch opened her mouth to speak it: sorrow .

But she did not. She simply stopped.

—And the day after? wondered dragonfly.

—Who knows? whispered swamp witch. But she did know, and she stopped, in the crook of two sidewalk cracks. All she could see was her boy, whose name would be Horace, lying with the gossamer yellow of new beard on his face and his eyes glazed and silvered in the sheen of death. Her girl Ellen, old and bent, rattling in a hospital bed. These were not tomorrow — nor the day after either. But they were bad days ahead — days she’d rather not have happen.

—Dream sickness gotcha, said dragonfly. Only you regret what comes, not what’s been.

—You are wise, said swamp witch, her voice shaking. She tried to think of a hex to drive it off, but the ones she knew were all for others.

—Think backwards then, dragonfly suggested. Think of the time you were born.

Swamp witch tried but it was like trying to turn a boat in a fast-moving river. Always she was bent back to forward.

“Need help?”

Swamp witch looked up. There, standing in the middle of the road, his hands behind his back, was the yellow-jacketed tea-drinking man. He had a half-way grin on him that salesmen got when they wondered if maybe you were going to buy that car today all on your own, or maybe needed a little help. He unfolded his hands and started strolling up the way to see her.

“You were banished,” said swamp witch. “I said begone !”

“I went,” said the tea-drinking man. “Oh yes. I begoned all right. Right through the swamp. Steered clear of your home there too. Like you demanded.”

“Then why —?”

“Why’m I here?” He stepped up onto the curb. He shook his head. “Let me ask you a question.”

Swamp witch tried to move — to do something about this. She didn’t want him to ask her a question particularly: didn’t think it would go anywhere good.

“Just hypothetical,” he said.

Shut up, thought swamp witch, but her lips wouldn’t move, plastered shut as they were by contemporaneous regret.

“Oh what,” he said, “if the town were left on its own?”

“You asked me that earlier.”

“Well think about it then. What if you’d just left it. Left it to have a name and a place in the world. Left the folks to see the consequences of their activities. Vulnerable you say and maybe so. But better that than this amber bauble of a home you’ve crafted, hidden away from the world of witches and kept for yourself. Selfish, wicked swamp witch.”

“What—”

The tea-drinking man leaned close. He breathed a fog of lament her way.

“I didn’t care for it,” he said. “Tossin’ me out like that.”

Swamp witch swallowed hard. “I don’t,” she said, “feel bad about any of that.”

He smiled. “No?”

Swamp witch stood. “No.” She stepped over the crack. Away from the tea-drinking man. “No regrets.”

As she walked away, she heard him snicker, a sound like the shuffling of a dirty old poker deck.

“None,” she said.

Swamp witch lied, though. To hide it, she meandered across the parking lot of the five and dime, tears streaming down from her eyes, feeling like her middle’d been removed with the awful regret of it all but hiding it in the hunch of her shoulders.

It was low cowardice. For what business had it been of hers, to take the town and curl it in the protection of her arms like she was its Goddamned mother and not its shunned daughter?

She took a few more steps, over to the little berm at the parking lot’s edge. Then she walked no more — falling into the sweet grass and sucking its green, fresh smell.

“You lie,” said tea-drinking man.

She looked up. He was standing over her now, his grin wider than ever she’d thought it could be, on one so stoked with regret.

“You are beset with it,” he said.

And then he spread his fingers, which crept wider than swamp witch thought they could — and down they came around her, like a cage of twig and sapling.

“Begone,” she said, but the tea-drinking man shook his head. He didn’t have to say: Only works if you mean it, that hex. And then, it only works the once .

And with that, he had her. Swamp witch fell into a pit inside her — one with holes in the side of it, that looked ahead and back with the same misery. She shut her eyes and did what the sad do best: fell into a deep and honeyed sleep, where past and future mixed.

She awoke a time later, in a bad way for a couple of reasons.

First, she was in church: Reverend Balchy’s church, which was not a good place for her or anyone.

And second, dragonfly was gone.

In the church this was a bad thing. For swamp witch knew that Reverend Balchy had against her advice gone in with the snake dancers’ way, turning many in his Baptist congregation from their religion, and welcoming in their place whole families of the Okehole corner rattlers that the Reverend used. Sitting up on the pew, swamp witch feared for dragonfly, for there was nothing that a corner rattler liked better than the crunch of a dragonfly’s wing.

Swamp witch called out softly, looking up to the water-stained drop-ceiling with its flickery fluorescent tubes, the dried, cut rushes at the blacked-out windows, the twist of serpent-spine that was nailed up on along the One Cross’s middle piece.

She poked her toe at the floor, and snatched it back again as the arrow-tip head of a corner rattler slashed out from the pew’s shadow. Swamp witch wouldn’t give it a second chance. She gathered her feet beneath her and stood on the seat-bench, so she could better see.

“ Dragonfly! ” she hissed.

There was no answer, but for the soft chuk-a-chuk samba of snake tail.

That, and an irregular thump-thump — like a hammer on plywood — coming from the hallway behind the dais.

Swamp witch squinted.

“Annabel?” she called.

“Yes’m.”

From around the top corner of the doorframe, Annabel Balchy’s little face peered at her.

“You come on out,” said swamp witch.

Annabel frowned. “You ain’t going to transform me into nothing Satanic, are you?”

“When have I ever done that?”

“Papa says—”

“Papas say a lot of things,” said swamp witch. “Now come on out.”

Annabel’s face disappeared for a moment, there were a couple more thump-thumps, and the girl teetered into the worship hall, atop a pair of hazelwood stilts that swamp witch thought she recognized.

“Those your brother’s?”

Annabel thrust her chin out. “I grew into them.”

“You’re growing into more than those stilts,” said swamp witch. Like the rest of the Balchies, Annabel was a blonde-haired specimen of loveliness whose green eyes held a sheen of wisdom. Looking at her, swamp witch thought her brother Tommy would no longer hold title as the family’s number-one heartbreaker. Not in another year or two.