Aldergrove

A witch’s revenge

Art by warmtail

Where laughter once
ran through the square—
just noise, really, the ordinary kind,
the kind nobody thinks about until it’s gone—
Aldergrove has gone strange.
Something wrong in the air,
not fog, just wrong,
and nobody says it out loud.

They came at dusk with their decision already made.
Maelis saw it in how they held their arms,
in how they would not meet her eyes.

She stood in the wood pile
and looked at them anyway,
long enough that a few shifted their weight,
looked at the ground,
looked at each other.

She was not afraid. That was the part
they would not be able to explain later.
Look at me, she said.
Not a plea. Not even anger.
Just—look at me.
They didn’t.
That’s the whole of it, really.
A square full of people
choosing not to see.

The fire started and did its work.
Sparks went up and the smoke
blew back toward the crowd;
someone coughed, moved away,
and that was that. They went home.
Most of them slept.

Midsummer and nothing coming up.
The furrows looked wrong, cracked in a way
that wasn’t just drought.
Cattle off their feed.
One man said it was the soil,
another blamed the season.

Nobody said her name for almost a month.
Then they did, quietly, and then less quietly.
By August the blame had grown legs.
They stood near the ash
not pointing exactly,
but orienting themselves toward it.
She’d done this. It made more sense
than the alternative, which was
that they’d just made a terrible mistake
and now had to live inside it.

February. The sickness came.
No warning. Doors closing one by one
and then just closed,
chimneys cold by March,
a whole village going quiet
in the specific way of a room
where someone recently died in it,
the air changed and knowing it.

And maybe she’d cursed them.
Maybe she hadn’t.
Maybe they’d cursed themselves just fine
and needed a word for it.

Her name kept going house to house 
long after there were houses.
That part, at least, they’d managed.
She survived them
in the only way she had left.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

• Check out other Halloween/horror-themed posts at the Halloween link

• My new book, The Edges, is now available in digital and paperback formats

Upcoming…

• A ghostly haiku chain:

  Phantom Lover, 26 October 2024

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