The smoke rose no higher than the stake. Even fire was reluctant to grant the town a spectacle. The priest, who sat farthest from the witch, could not see that the fire had been lit, and stood up in frustration. Get on with it. Are you doing it or not?
The women wanted the witch to pray, or sing, or scream. Everyone knew how the witch had killed the priest’s child before it even left the womb. Even so, the town’s women thirsted for martyrdom. There were no words for the plunder that they had endured– for the dull dread that they, too, had lost their children. Without knowing why, they wanted to join the witch in the fire in a collective howl that ripped the air so neatly, heaven would fall straight through.
The witch was to be pressed to death with stones, but when the men scoured the riverbank, there were no stones to be found– only soft clay and the body of a girl who had died months before, on her wedding night. At first, it had not concerned the townspeople that the young bride no longer showed her face in public. They spoke of her fondly, happily, as mist collapsed onto her still-warm body. The girl’s beauty was unchanged when the men dragged her back to town, where nobody seemed to recognize her. Still, they thought she was deserving of a proper burial. As night fell, the men heaved shovelfuls of dirt into her newly-dug burial plot until it filled her nostrils and crusted her eyelids shut. Her coffin heaved with the weight of the earth until finally, it splintered apart. The stones were forgotten.
The priest’s wife was still at home, mourning her daughter. The baby had been left with the midwife for only a few hours– afterward, the baby’s face was crushed, her limbs twisted out of proportion. This, at least, is what the priest told his wife. Worse, the midwife had insisted on burning with the baby in her arms. When pleading did not work, the men tried to take the baby by force– the midwife’s screams created such regular percussion against the walls of the church that even the priest’s wife could hear it, from the bedchamber where she was hiding– where she was hidden. But the midwife refused to let go of the baby.
Delirious, in bed, the priest’s wife realized that the witch was starting to feel the first touch of fire against her feet. This was a dream she had dreamt before. The dream started with a lace neckline, waiting to spill open. It started at a party. No, it started in a boyfriend’s basement. Today, it starts when the fire is waist high.
The men start to jeer and cough at the smoke, but the women gape at the sky. A large, black crow plunges at the girl on the stake and tugs at the bundle near her chest. She does not resist. The bird carries the bundle in front of the pyre and unwraps it carefully, maternally. Instead of a mangled child, the cloth falls open to reveal a single, perfectly round stone. The girl breaks her silence at last with a gasping laugh. The need for air strangles into birdsong. It sounds like cackling– like strange music. At this moment, the priest’s wife remembers that she is not yet married, and prays that her husband will keep his word. Be happy. They will let you keep him.
The wife-to-be wakes up. She has cut her hair for the first time in months, and she is still in a giving mood. The boy has put his priest costume back on, and she giggles at how silly it makes him look. She smiles as if into a mirror and runs her small hands across the back of his neck. He smiles back at her meaningfully, searchingly, as if he can see past her skin and into her beating corpse. In a few months, the boy will give his wife a stone, and she will say no, of course I’m happy. The sound of rain against their walls will be weak and terrifying.
The fire reaches the girl’s neck, and she begins to recount a story that her mother once told her– a story of two lovers. They had been banished from their town. They walked for two days and two nights in search of a new home, before a brutal storm set in. Water tore the dead air from moment to moment, forcing them to seek refuge. Yet by morning, the cave had closed its mouth around them– in searching for an exit to their hideout, they were only drawn deeper into the earth. At first, the lovers vowed to wait for rescue. But with hunger came delirium. Everywhere, there was a warm body to bite into– their own bodies trying to live. They wasted away together, hungry for each others’ flesh, wallowing in each others’ filth. The woman was half-alive when she killed her lover with a stone. Eating away at his body by day, she used his bones to chip away at the cave walls, until finally, she saw sunlight.
Today, an entire town loses their sight after laying eyes on this stone. The still-silent witch knows not to look. But such dreams are unimportant. As the townspeople shout and stumble blindly, the witch frees herself from the ropes and escapes. The cold rain batters her body as she runs into the forest. She does not know what she has done. She recalls something having been clawed out from her insides and patched over her skin– like plastic strips, clinging only by the tackiness of water. She thinks of arteries splayed like turkey legs, with all the right cavities waiting to be stuffed. The cries cascading upstream of the uterus. The boy who had swam with her in the river. The man who had been kind enough to leave when her first daughter came as a stone.
In another town, she was a storyteller, but the children had spit back her stories wrong, turning the characters into parodies of themselves. The symbols bled into each other and birthed each other until they were absurd and indistinguishable. Years ago, her living children had drank the river’s anger and journeyed upstream.
Anyhow, there were too many boys to bear in the town with the timid fires. There was the priest’s wife, who grew sicker by the day, and the sky, which refused to rain for twelve days, and her bloody nightgown, crucified nightly on the clothesline. There was the priest, who prayed for a god who could birth himself, and then for a living son in the years to come, but never for his wife’s forgiveness.
Every time, near the end of the witch’s stories, the still-beautiful wife cried not for her husband, but for air. But today, there is no sound, only a child buried beneath her polyester blanket, turning in her sleep. In her dreams, she sees a midwife swaddling a crying thing that looks nothing like the priest. In her dreams, she hears a woman calling for her daughter.
Far past the woods, the midwife closes the girl’s eyes and touches her forehead– smooth as stone– with too much tenderness. I will tell you a different story, she says.
This is the last time they will see each other.