Smile of a Neighborhood Witch


    A witch lifts the karma of her husband. It hasn't been much by itself, but when she combines it with the others, whew, just the thing. The mother and father, the sister, the niece, the aunt, and two dogs from whom she borrowed before, have declined into gaseous decrepitude, suspicion, theft, simplemindedness and barking when nobody is there, never comprehending their fates detached. The husband, however, has observed that while the witch is suddenly voracious and that other men now seek rides on the tresses of her fabled luck, his own appetites have diminished and his hair has thinned. He considers leaving, but if he leaves and does not recover, he will lose doubly, for she is, as everyone says, very beautiful, and beauty is very good to be near.
         He knows she's hidden it, so he looks amongst her toiletries, listens at her boudoir door, fingers her kitchen utensils, creeps through the attic. But all he finds are the Smiley Mousse, foundation garments, Radiance-in-a-Can, and a small, gently fluttering bat, which he captures in the dishrag and releases to the dusk. He suspects all of these things, but can't tell how they go together. He's failed—though there is, of course, her garden.
         One afternoon while she's off on a joyride, he goes out there. He looks in the cabbage rows and finds a three-headed centipede, too ugly to be his. He tries the garlic. He checks okra, dill, onions, sage. It isn't until he is sunburned from weeding that he sees it—a crack in the cistern near the spigot. He moves closer and wedges away the plyboard lid. At first he thinks he's mistaken; nothing in there but toads. He's about to resign himself to another night without substance, when he thinks he sees a tiny something down among them, dark blue in color—maybe yellow. He squints his eyes, peers, bends. The thing has the shape of a cashew. It squirms!

    *
    When the witch came in—late, for the breeze hadn't risen at the usual hour and the broom was trouble starting—the house was unlighted. She prepared herself in the dark for sleep. She didn't want to tell him how she'd veered into a flock of geese or zagged through a poplar's top, nearly bashing forty chimneys in a row. She was still thinking of these things—about the weakness that had settled on her lately, the feeling that something inside was shifting—when she discovered he wasn't in bed! She turned on the light after all, and crept through the house. Nobody home. She sat in the kitchen drumming her fingers until the dawn, when she began to see, down, just outside the window, something in the garden, something she couldn't make out. It is tall, she thought, but it isn't cattails. It is wide, but not my turnips. It is dense, but no, not rutabaga either, unless rutabaga deigns to walk, for surely it's in the wrong place. She chafed her cheeks…blinked her eyes at a presence indistinct…stepped outside to see. And there it was—her husband, on knees and elbows by the spigot.
         But as the sun streamed over the horizon, she saw that he was not kneeling, he was floating—an inch above the mud—bobbing, gently rocking. Like a moored boat, she thought—reaching. When she followed his gaze, she saw nothing but the toads. They smelled dense and dank like toads, felt fat and wrinkly like toads, hopped lethargically from her touch like ordinary toads. He's pointing out toads, she thought. Why? Has he been in my potions?
         Well she'd better get him out of sight; the neighbors will offer help, and she doesn't want help, not with this, for as she observes him she feels the greatest need for privacy. So she loops him under the arms with twine and tows him across the lawn, up the porch stairs, indoors.
         Within an hour, changes come. Whiskers cover his face and hands. His clothing tightens, then rips. His chin sinks, his nose snouts, his chest heaves, his fingernails go black. What to do, what to do. To a witch, the answer always comes.
         He is down past the elephants, the leopards and lions, now, amongst his own kind. Because he is awful enough that public display would remind viewers of what a zoo is, they've shut him off in the tract behind the maintenance sheds. Only if you have nerve and credentials can you see him roam and stop and rend the earth, whence the grubs and worms he feeds on.
         From the morning she found him, the witch never smiled. She refused to fly in public. When her hair went white she didn't dye it. She did not, when her lips and eyes began to wrinkle, her cheeks to sag, have herself repaired. When her back bent, she said, So it is, and went on. She lived a long life, moving from place to place, her gardens each sparer than the one before, becoming tinier and frailer until finally her light winked out. What they found of her was a shoe carton of buttons and thimbles, spare broomstraw, seeds, lizard feet, a broken pencil, and the small something she had pried from his paw that morning with a spoon. It had the texture of a stone, now, and looked like the kidney of a mouse. On the cardboard ring box that had encased it were scrawled the words, Ursus Suburbanus. That is all.



    Bio Note
      W.P. Osborn is also published in such journals as Texas Review, Sequoia, ACM, Carolina Quarterly, Synaesthetic, The Coe Review, Mississippi Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, Louisville Review, Faultline, and Gettysburg Review. He teaches Shakespeare, American lit, and fiction writing at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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     W.P.

     Osborn