🧹 A Bog Witch

Drella was a bog witch.

Across the span of two decades, Drella had double, double toiled and troubled her way into becoming quite competent at bog witchery and couldn’t help but feel disconsolate when her life was boiled down into nothing more than hocus pocus. For a bog witch, there were many presumptions that were placed upon them when discussing business. And, in politely suggesting that any further mockery would result in a sensitive area falling off of its own volition, it became hard for a conversation to sensibly progress any further. People were blinded by their own assumptions, Drella couldn’t help that. Blacksmiths grow strong arms; chimney sweeps are covered by soot. The effects of a person’s work may change their outward appearance, and it may even change their personality. But the manner in which a person works, the manner that they are defined by? Well, that was to be mucked up by themselves alone.    
In fact, Drella didn’t tend to agree with any of the stereotypes that were lumped onto bog witches. She was clean, presentable, her laugh was closer to a guffaw than it was a cackle. She kept her cottage tidy, her garden was mostly free of snakes, and with the flurrysome brush of a person who actually enjoys cleaning, Drella would even go to great pains to ensure that everything was as dust free and as cobweb light as a quagmire would allow.

It was embarrassing to be confused with a swamp druid. A druid was a hopscotchly minded person who delt in concoctions and hexes. A mud-covered root chewer, who whispered in evils and spoke bubbling nothings that didn’t even match the temperate climate of a bog.
Bogs were great. They were homely—despite one being able to argue in favour of both definitions to the word—they were never too dry, they were rarely too wet, and no matter how often Drella had pruned back the pumpkins, there were always fresh sprouts seen shooting up in the morning.
There was a veil of otherness to her bog. It was as if there was a tangential mysticism to the mundane that shimmered across the moors and became beleaguering as much as it was useful for her craft.   

But the bog was in a state of unbalance. She had lost a tarot card.
Now, for any creaky knuckled fortune teller who lived out the back of a carpet shop, this was an inconvenience. But for a bog witch? Well, losing a tarot card could almost be as bad as a mental breakdown. It could be an omen, it could be a summons, the sheer myriad of fantastical guesswork that was embodied by a misplaced rectangle of card could lead to some very unfortunate places.    
In a time of more vociferous gods, the secrets of the future were easier to garner. Ask a deity if a river might flood its banks and the right god would tell you[1]. But these days the future was opaque. You had to interpret the future before it had the chance to misinterpret you.

Drella sat at her kitchen bench and laid out the cards before her.
It wasn’t as though she had wanted to be a witch, she hadn’t even wanted to be a Drella. When she was young, the other children of her town all had sensible names, like Courtney and Tara. And, after enough embarrassed parents had asked her “where does that name come from?” Drella had known well enough that she had been given a witch’s name and could no longer lament her mother’s routine of over-dying every item of their clothing black as soon as it was dirty—even though it was a good honest colour and always turned out better in the wash.

‘What to do with a short deck’ mumbled Drella as she fanned out the colourful cards and searched for meaning within the hand drawn pictures. She had counted them. Three times she had counted to seventy-seven and three times she drummed her fingers upon the bench, refusing to believe that she had done so correctly.
There was nothing especially arcane about the cards, every newsagency in Lundra sold tarot cards. They were even originally purchased to play a card game, not for fortune telling. Drella had played solitaire with them in her life far more often than she had looked to them for omen. But now that they were incomplete, things were unstable.

‘If there’s a hearth sprite in this cottage make yourself apparent or I’ll scrub the ash box so clean that you’ll be coughing up bubbles until the day enjoys its last sunset.’
Drella had encountered house sprits in the past and knew that the threat of a scouring brush was usually enough to have missing possessions miraculously reappear.
Nothing, the croak of bell frogs and the general burble of the bog lands continued its monotone and the occasional bluster of mist laden wind only had made the morning cold. Not a hearth sprite then, maybe it was that she had just misplaced a card and only had noticed now that she needed them.
It was pointless to search for the future with an incomplete deck of cards. You could try to cut your own hair in a broken mirror, but the results would always be patchy. So too the tarot deck; it was artless, there was enough doubt introduced in any reading that it would be certain to be apocryphal.
She knew what would happen next. There’d be a search, a journey, a quest. This mundane beginning would grow into something all too convoluted and she would end up sitting upon a mountaintop with only the company of some knight’s brave sacrifice and a slight cough from all the ash.        

Drella chewed at her nail and slumped down into the poor postured defeat of not wanting to deal with a problem.
Witches were often said to be more inclined to the realms of action than that of laziness, but as anyone who has tried to cut vegetables in the dark would tell you, some things are better put off for tomorrow.
Bugger it, Drella thought as she marched over to the Waridan case and pulled a bottle from the tangle of parsley, if she had to go on a quest, she would at least try to skip the beginning, middle, and end of it.    

The smell of sage always brought back unpleasant memories.
Leaning over her diminutive cauldron, Drella unstoppered a vial of rosemary and sage oil and then sprinkled a few droplets over the bubbling brew, stepping back and holding a handkerchief to her nose as she did. Listening to the slow breath of the earth below her feet, the bog witch then matched her own breathing to that of existence and closed her eyes in an effort to forgo the next part of the contract.
Fog, city rich and perfectly opaque, bloomed from the cauldron and within its tendrils a face did then appear.

‘On such a dreary day I am called to be, and without fanfare, I appear. Where is this place, oh caller of spirit?’

Drella hated summoning the spirits that were beyond Dormir’s judgment. Something about undeath made its denizens stuffy, they spoke in obtuse grandiosities, and acted as if their brief apparition into the realm of the living was nothing but an inconvenience.  
Keeping her eyes closed as a point of rebellion, the bog witch turned away from the billowing fog and restoppered her vial.
‘Right, I’m a month of Sundays too far past dealing with riddles. You’re going to tell me where my missing card is, or I’ll be boiling cabbage in your cauldron water until you turn green. And don’t tempt me, it’s been a particularly good year for cabbages.

The spirt was thrown, witches would normally gaze into their cauldrons. They would let their minds slip into the spirit world and attempt to outwit the dead though cunning and guile. But this witch, this unwelcomingly rude witch, was as practical as a wood axe and seemed to be nearing the point of her down swing.
She had kept her eyes closed too, the spirit had nothing to anchor it to the living world nor the world of the dead. It was in limbo, trapped within the fog of a tiny cauldron.  
‘Well, if you’re going to be unwelcoming then I’m happy to be unhelpful.’ There was an amplification of the silence. An intention that seemed as impassive as the tide covering old sand.
‘And why should a cabbage scare me?’

The spirit had wavered, Drella doubled down.
‘Well, they’re wonderfully aged and quite fragrant at this time of year. They grow quite pungent out here in Meadow-Lough, and you could say that they barely need any boiling to bring out the flavour. Have you ever smelt cabbage water? I can imagine it would be rather unpleasant to be stuck in a fog of it.

The Spirit greened, to be summoned for such a menial task was demeaning. Spirits were capable of seeing into the now, the before, and the yet to be, and this witch was worried about a missing playing card. She had abhorrent manners too. In the old days, when witches were proper hags, there was an understanding that the undead should be respected, that the living should be polite if they wanted to remain being able to be polite. There were sacrifices, covens of praise; there would be moonlit dances so debaucherous that even the night sky would blush; it was proper magic back then too, none of this rudeness and using threats to get your way.
The spirit took a moment and looked into the depths of its own future and could only foresee a humid steam. Peering closer, the spirit inhabited the steam for a moment and was immediately thrown back into the present timeline.
Gods, the witch was serious. The stench was lingering even in the past. It was singular, a total encompassment of sight and sound that formed a wall around the entirety of existence. All that there was would be cabbage, all that there had ever been was the smell of over-cooked cabbage.
Whimpering, the spirit searched the past for the misplaced tarot card and soon found that it had stopped existing. Its shape was still there, but there was a nothingness inside its edges. No colour, no form, there was a lack of thing-ish-ness that only non-existent things could contain.
The spirit looked back further, a child crying, a card maker carefully counting to the correct number and then rushing off in worry. This wouldn’t do. The spirit could already foresee that the witch would imagine this to be a lie and decided that another lie might be more believable than the truth.           

‘It was stolen,’ the spirit said with a mask of confidence, ‘Thane of the tricksters wishes for you to go mad.’  
Terrible, terrible, the spirit thought, remonstrating itself for claiming that a playing card would be stolen by a god. It eyed the window cautiously, shivering when it caught the site of a well-tended vegetable patch, one that somehow thrived in the boggy marsh.

‘Stolen things leave a trace behind. This is missing.’ said Drella forebodingly, her eyes still clamped shut.
‘Have another think, and this time think carefully.’

The spirit hadn’t seen where it had come from, but the witch was now gently tossing a head of cabbage up and down in her right hand. Never before had a single vegetable seemed to be so innocently threatening.
The spirit went back again, this time not only looking at the missing card but the cards around it too. It searched the table, seeing it grow from a seedling and then watching as it was cut into the present day. It saw the floorboards, the dust. The spirit saw the entire creation of this witch’s cottage and still couldn’t capture the theft of the missing card. One minute it was there, the next it was gone.
The spirit was becoming frantic now, it looked at everything twice, three times. It was moments away from accepting its cabbage steamed fate when a flowerpot suddenly fell out of existence.
‘There’s a tear,’ the spirit suddenly shouted with relief, ‘there’s a tear in the threads of existence.’

~

Drella had heard of loose stiches and tears in the fabric of the cosmos but had never expected one to be inside of her cottage. There was a wonkiness to the air that surrounded it, a vortex of reality that was only visible if you were looking for it.
It wasn’t a tear, actual damage to the weave was said to be impossible. This was closer to a pocket; it was as if an extraneous piece of cosmos had been folded over and sewed under itself in an effort to tighten up the corners of reality without having to cut and restitch anything.
If the world was sown by a master’s hand, it made sense that there were a few shorthanded stitches here and there, that the imperfections of the fabric were hidden away within the weave.
After dismissing the sprit, Drella had drunk two cups of tea and taken short walk around the bog before she could bring herself to look into the vortex.
It was cavernous, light bent inward and coloured the walls in a single beam of luminescence that softly lit the ground in a flickering hue. The floor swept upward as a single surface and then met itself upon the roof, looping back over and then falling down the opposite wall. It was impossible. The open defiance of sensible geometry in this space was so obtuse that it began to make sense and Drella needed to fight off small bouts of vertigo each time that she blinked.  
Just within the edges of the pocket, Drella had found three candles, a pot plant and the missing card from her tarot deck. Among her own possessions, there were also barrels, part of a fence, boots, and all manner of misplaced matter that a bog would be likely to ensnare if something was left too long upon unsolid ground.
‘I guess it’s like having a pantry,’ said Drella, now realising that the surface of the space was actually the underside of the bog. She looked up and saw the footings of her cottage, the fleet footfall of a hopping mouse that made splashing bounds away from something that slithered. Boot prints, marching along as if they were searching for something.   
It was nice to see the bog from below. Something about knowing the entirety of her home made Drella feel more witchy, in a way.

The card was close. Drawing a deep breath and leaning into the pocket, Drella reached up taking great care not to fall into the space, knowing that if things could fall in, surely they would also fall out.
Stretching and reaching with her fingertips just beyond the grasp of her card, Drella felt the fabric of reality shift below her and was shunted forward into the vortex, flailing her hand out for the one thing that she could reach.         

~

Tadgh hated witches.
Long ago, in the impressionable innocence of his youth, the witch hunter’s parents had frightened him with tales of the forest–as parents are often want to do–and had whispered that the wicked witch was coming to eat him should he not behave.
For some, the lessons of life can become misconstrued, and as Tadgh grew more and more into the bully that he was today, he decided that it was his sole duty to rid the world of its every witch and then burn down whatever remained of their influence.
He wasn’t scared of witches. Not once in his hate-filled adult life had he been frightened of the creatures that so haunted him as a child. There were friendly ones—liars of course—witches that lived in towns, and even witches that many would consider pretty.
But it didn’t matter, each one was to be killed, that was the end of it.  

He had heard that an especially unpleasant witch had lived in this bog, this disgusting bog of tepid mud and vile brambles. He imagined the witch to be a haggard and twisted old crone, with stooped shoulders and teeth constructed of bones that she had stolen from all the fools that had been taken in by her trickery.

Nearing on the cottage, Tadgh leaned his axe against his side and reached into his pocket to feel for the familiarity of his flint and steel.
All wood burns, he thought to himself and twisted a wicked smile as he regarded the cottage. Wooden walls and a thatched roof, this hunt would almost be unsporting, but he had never really cared for sport.
Taking a moment to set up his box of kindling, the witch hunter imagined himself striding up to the cottage, absently flicking his cigarette into the brambles of thatching and laughing as the evil witch panicked from within.
He stood, taking two puffs and watching the smoke rise into the grey air when he suddenly noticed a slight pressure at the base of his left foot.

A movement, bursting from the earth a cold hand pulled itself from the path and gripped the witch hunter by his ankle. With terrifying strength, the hand pulled downward, sinking Tadgh’s boot into the disturbed mud and withdrawing more of its own desiccated limb from the dirt laden tomb.
He jumped, years of repressed terror flooding back into his childish mind as his mouth was unable to make a scream.
Kicking the boot from his foot, Tadgh fell forward and scrabbled upon the ground, his axe knocked into the bog water and lost from view.
Another hand then emerging from the earth, pawing and grasping, both arms gripped and snatched at the air with maddened urgency, one clutching at a scrap of card in its fingers with dead grip. From impossible depths of horror, the demon’s head then emerged. Matted hair covering what was sure to be its sightless eyes, the creature rose slowly and seemed to drag the hells along with it. Born from the bog itself, the creature moved forward with puropse, still half consumed by the maw of its own earthen terror. It opened its mouth as if to speak but only a stream of mud and fowl water gushed out as if it was part of the beast itself.
Gripping Tadgh’s shirt and pulling itself closer, the creature then held the card toward him, showing the witch hunter the card, demanding that it be seen.  
And it was seen.
For upon the card was the symbol of death and behind it the creature smiled.

~

It had taken Drella some time to get the smell of bog water from her hair.
The man, whoever he was, had departed with only a shrieking wail and appeared as if not even the horizon was a far enough for him to run.
Another silly farmer who was scared of witches, Drella thought as she sharpened the axe that had fallen into her new pantry.
Everything felt at peace within the lands of the bog marsh.
It was a glorious day of nothing to do, and Drella revelled in its appearance.                 

---

[1] While the wrong one might appreciate the good idea.

---

J. McCray
2023