Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

Our hands were joined across our coats. I hadn’t seen it happen, but since it had I drew her closer and told her, very quietly, about the soucouyant. The night didn’t listen to us — it had a noise of its own, wind murmuring in the branches. I told Miranda about the girl who killed the soucouyant.

That girl had grown up friends with her shadow, grown up hugging herself and singing to herself, so happy alone that everyone in her village thought that she was retarded. While they slept the girl took herself out dancing, put her arms around the moon and travelled to see things no one else in the village would ever see, not even if they lived to be a thousand. She saw the wicked soucouyant feast on the girls and boys in her village and the next. She saw where the soucouyant slept, and was bold enough to follow her there. She saw where the soucouyant put her skin when she walked in her true form. Her lover the moon told her: “If you cared to, you could kill the soucouyant. Treat her skin with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her her power, and if she is unable to reenter her body by sunrise, she cannot live.” The girl cared to protect the lives of the young in her village, and she knew you cannot bargain with a thing inhuman. So the girl reached right inside the old-woman skin and rubbed salt and pepper all along it; she stretched past bone and sinew because she was herself entire, and knew she could not be consumed. She hid and watched as the ball of flame returned to its tree hollow at dawn, searching for its skin. She watched as it filled the old woman skin, watched as the body rose and bulged with life, then screamed and fell deflated. She watched as the soucouyant, having no other option, rushed to join her flame with that of the rising sun.

I stammered finishing the story, because of Miranda’s gaze, her eyes like swords. We were nose to nose.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was just the thing.”

“The girl doesn’t get away. It’s not a story about her getting away. She was born free.”

“The soucouyant gets away though. Doesn’t she count as a girl?”

I drew back. “No, she doesn’t,” I said. “She is a monster. She dies.”

“Does she?”

“All monsters deserve to die.”

Miranda didn’t say anything.

“Miranda,” I said. “Come on. The soucouyant is bad. She sucks the life out of people.”

“That is true.” She smiled in a way that undid every knot in me. There was no way I could be afraid to kiss her when she smiled like that, so I kissed her, and she kissed me back and we were like that until we gasped for air and laughed at each other, her eyelashes scraping my cheek so when I blinked they felt like my own.

Miranda woke to find Ore smiling at her from a cushioned window seat across the room. The curtains were wide open. It was more sun than Miranda could tolerate. She threw the covers over her head, then changed her mind and got out of bed, reaching for her bag, which she’d spotted on top of Ore’s bookshelf.

Ore said: “Do you never go a day without that red stuff?”

Miranda dropped her rouge back into her purse without opening it.

Ore saw her expression and put her books down. She drew Miranda to the window seat. There wasn’t room for the two of them and their legs were happily entangled.

Miranda looked down. “Is it alright to say how much I like this?”

Ore kissed her forehead. “What?”

“The way our skin looks together.”

Ore’s beautiful lips. Before she could reply, Miranda kissed her mouth, first the top lip, then the bottom, then both together, then a tiny bite on the bottom lip for good measure. There. So this was kissing, a thing she could probably do forever. Decent sleep after so long made her feel elastic. Even when she’d left Ore’s room and sat through two lectures and muttered her contribution to a supervision on an essay question about The Tempest , a song called “Earth Angel” played in her head all morning — also three trumpets and a piano.

Miranda’s father came to visit her — they went to Browns and he scoffed languidly when the baked camembert arrived at their table. Miranda counted out the acceptable number of bites of food she’d agreed with Lily, then doubled them to please him. He didn’t notice. He only noticed the food that she didn’t manage.

Everything was fine at home, he said, but he missed the sound of her sewing machine and doo-wop CDs, and he even missed the badly disguised smell of Eliot’s marijuana.

“Où le marché est?” Miranda asked, smiling.

Luc sighed.

“Have you spoken to Eliot?”

“Yes, some days ago.”

“Oh,” Miranda said. She had been trying to call Eliot from pay phones nearly every day, shivering as she dialled, her gloves slipping around her fingertips as she pressed the numbers that Eliot had written on her hand on the way to the airport. He hadn’t answered once.

Luc scanned Miranda’s face. “I think he only called because he needed a certain sum of money, half of which I allowed him.”

As a diversion Luc spread some of the illustrations for his cookbook out onto the restaurant table. The cookbook was to be published, and the final plan was to combine photographs of each dish with little ink drawings done by a friend of a friend who had already read parts of the manuscript. In the illustrations, the chef was a round-faced stick man in a puffy chef’s hat — his face was free of all features except a neatly curled moustache, which twitched when he was moderately excited by his work and spun around like a windmill when he was extremely pleased. When Luc packed the drawings up, Miranda, at a loss for things to do, offered to show him the Botanical Gardens, or to take him around her college.

“Has it changed since you moved in?”

Miranda’s college “aunt” was a pigtailed girl from the year above that Miranda had not spoken to again after the first day. The college aunt had given Luc and Miranda a tour of college. Miranda confessed that nothing had changed.

“Then I’ll be off,” her father said. His glance skipped sternly off her three-quarters-full plate as he stood up from the table.

She wrote an essay in her room until evening, tossing her responses to what she’d read onto paper without even checking it for sense. She followed Eliot’s rule of always making recourse to the essay question at the beginning and end of every paragraph, no matter how obvious the connection. He had sworn to her that teachers loved it, and it seemed to be true. She didn’t know how it could be that she hadn’t spoken to Eliot properly for weeks. She felt she had done something wrong, but what?

Ore was so stark in her mind that Miranda bypassed her name; she didn’t so much think of Ore as think her. On days before this one Miranda had lingered on her way back from the post room and looked at Ore in the common room, reading Varsity over someone else’s shoulder; it seemed Ore never saw fit to pick up her own copy, even though there were plenty of each recent issue stacked under the snooker people. Ore read the student newspaper without a smile or a snigger — everything she read seemed very grave to her. But sometimes Ore read things aloud and the person whose shoulder she was reading over would laugh. Ore had a gap between her front teeth and wore her jumpers too big so that the neck slipped down on one side and bared her shoulder and the strap of her vest. Now Ore had kissed her. She had tasted Ore’s mouth. A tisket, a tasket … momentarily, she wondered what the goodlady would have to say about that, then forced herself to knit meanings out of the words in the book before her. Don’t concentrate on Ore. Don’t witch her to death, Miranda.