🧹 The Troubles of a Bog Witch

There was trouble brewing in the bog.
Drella stood over her cauldron and admired the boiling broth within. A bog witch is well accustomed to trouble. From curious young ravens who practice their ominous foreshadowing by lingering in the corners of a witch’s vision, to foolish young townsfolk who march off into the wilds to slay whatever limited reason dictates. Trouble and youth, it seemed to Drella, usually walk hand in hand.
But today was different. It was not yet a day filled by the troubles of others, today was surrounded by a trouble of Drella’s own devising. For today was Drella’s birthday, and to celebrate she had decided to brew a potion.

Stirring the flaxen coloured mixture so as to even the heat, Drella caught sight of herself in the reflection and frowned. A reflection was rarely flattering from within a cauldron, but never had the bog witch seen herself look so haggardly.
Oh to be haggard, but never a hag. The cross-stich of infinite sayings composed itself unhelpfully upon the wall. Given to Drella several years prior, the witch stared at the circularly framed cloth paper until it meekly reverted back to its default image of a cottage bearing the humble phrase of phrase Home sweet home.
You couldn’t be a hag at thirty, could you? She thought, staring deeper into her shifting reflection. Taking pause, Drella instinctively pointed a finger toward the rafters as a warning to birds that were preparing themselves to quoth something pithy.
Two eyes, a normal enough nose, and tangled hair, looked up at Drella from the within cauldron. It was a face that you could almost claim to be young, it looked tired but hadn’t yet begun to feel tired. It was a normal face for a normal bog witch.
Once again stirring the potion into a swirl, Drella thought on matter of trouble for a moment.
It was a needly little word. It was the kind of word that would grow into a thistle if it were to be found in botany. It would be a plant that was impossible to uproot without disturbing something else, or one that overruns the garden into to bother and strife before it can be weeded out. If she were to brew a potion with trouble…
‘Bah,’ Drella spat, once again pushing her wandering thoughts back onto a potion maker’s path, tapping her ladle against the side of the cauldron just to enjoy the deep *thunk* of wood upon cast iron.
She didn’t often brew potions. Eye of newt and hoot of owl were silly things to mix into what was essentially tea. But so it was that people expected arcane nonsense when dealing with a witch. Bark from a birch tree and honey could cure most headaches, a eucalypt leaf in warmed brandy would relive any blocked nose. Drella knew that if her customers wanted actual medicine, they’d go to a chemist. Secretly, she had been selling a rather effective activated charcoal face scrub with to the apothecary in town and knew that she would be laughed out of the bog if any other witch was to find out. But that was life for a bog witch. Depart from the “expectedly otherly” and people start to worry.

How would trouble be brewed?
That thought returning again. To make, to go to, to get in, there were many different ways to prepare trouble, but if it were to be added to a potion? If she were to distil it. If she were to break it into its very essences and harvest what makes it so troublesome, would she be able to undo it? Could she then make a potion that would make a person’s troubles go away?
Drella wasn’t evil, you would be hard pressed to find a witch in Lundra that was actually evil, but the thoughts of changing a person’s life seemed burgeoning on the hagish to her. The potion wouldn’t be for others, no. It would be for her. She could make it once, be too cowardly to ever drink it, and then tip it out onto the petunias when the label was too faded away for recognition. This was the fate of most of Drella’s potions, and it was a routine that had kept her from meeting with the god of death so far.

Thread wove through cloth.
True magic is believing in yourself.

Bogs weren’t inherently magical. Across the history the grand mystery of bogs was best defined by the time that was lay preserved within them. There was an elderliness beneath the surface of a bog, a knowledge that has seen countless seasons and patterns across the land that comprised the bones of dirt. A good witch becomes entwined with these places. They listen to the heartbeat of life in the darkness and they become as much of the land as it does of them.

Something stirred in the shrubland.

Opening the door to her cottage, Drella looked out along the oak lined path and listened to the pattering rain. Rain in Lundra fell more often than a clock had seconds, and when it was said to only be pattering it could be taken as a fine day.
Stepping into her gumboots, Drella carefully moved towards what she felt as a disturbance. There were old bones below the mud of her bog, and occasionally she would have to deal with a problem before it took root.
Following the wind, the bog witch scrambled over a fallen oak and splashed her way along a muddy trail that led away from her cottage.
Aside from her garden, Drella was quite fond of letting the bog maintain itself, as it felt free from the troubles of cultivation. Moss rich boulders sat solemnly in gathered circles, dotted mushrooms grew from leaflitter and fallen timber: a network of fungi richly hidden in the dirt below. As she walked, ground water would bubble up and snag at her gumboots, bell birds would call in song. She thought of an outcrop of stones that lay further down the path that her grandmother had long ago carved their name into and often claimed that bad luck was buried deep below. The bog was in its usual state of harmony, but there was one string that still felt out of tune.
Shifting through the threads of the bog’s creation, Drella could see a miss-stich that was tangled within the others. It was a frayed little scrap that seemed more accidental in its appearance than woven with malice.
Following it, Drella stooped below a willow’s bow and took shelter for a moment as the rain began to fall with increasing urgency. Wide droplets landed heavily against the soft ground and the bog became alive with movement from the sudden downpour.
Kneeling, Drella pushed aside a small thicket of blackberry that that wrapped itself around the base of the willow tree, the stubborn thorny brambles grimly clinging to the earth as all blackberries tend to do when disturbed.
Below the thicket, Drella was surprised to see the tangled thread reach its end as a single thistle, one hidden away below willow and thorn.
‘Well if it isn’t trouble,’ she said, pulling the odd growth from the ground with a handkerchief so as to not spike her fingers.

A Lundrian is rarely disheartened by the rain but the walk home was miserable.
After losing her boots and all of her patience to the shifting bog, Drella fell into her cottage with the sodden kind of collapse that encourages a good cry after completing. Mud coated her clothes and hair, her feet were raw and blistered, it was in this moment that she felt most like a hag.
Wearily, the beleaguered bog witch dragged herself upward from her stupor and considered tipping out what she had been brewing for a potion so that she could warm some water for a bath.
But what of the trouble-shrub? She thought, as a shiver of wind suddenly whipped the misting rain into her cottage, extinguishing a set of candles that were upon her kitchen bench.
Filling her mortar with a small amount of water, Drella dropped the shrub into the bowl and turned to stoke the hearth below her cauldron.
It was a small cauldron when compared with the ones she had seen other witches favour. But Drella enjoyed how it was easy it hide away inside a cupboard whenever she had visitors. She often hated how a guest’s eyes would dart to the cauldron when it was left out, believing that it made the offer of a cup of tea much more of an awkward dance than it rightly should be.
Returning to her mortar, Drella was disheartened to find that a crack had begun to form in the bowl’s base and a small tickle of water had run out onto the benchtop.
‘Well, strike the day sodden.’ she swore, rubbing her thumb over the crack, hoping by chance that it should somehow heal. Picking up the pestle with a huff, Drella ground the shrub into a paste and then scraped it into her cauldron.  
The day had been nothing but a bother, she thought as the fragments of the trouble-shrub settled in the warming water, a sickly green pigment already becoming visible on its surface. She had found mold in her flour to start the day, and then the mold that she was actually storing had dried. She had been woken by a circle of ravens that had stood around her as she slept, and to top it all off, a post officer had become lost in her pantry.*

Steam lifted itself from the cauldron with silky tendril. Lithe and serpentine it drifted towards the cross-stich of infinite sayings. Lifting its frame from the wall the tendril returned to the cauldron’s edge. Words began to form on the cloth.
Trouble? it wrote.

Drella watched patiently as the anomaly of cross stitching and boiled herbs brought themselves into existence. A person could be scared by the failure of life’s mundanity, but a good witch never allowed themselves to show it.
‘Just with weeds.’ she replied with a mock sweetness. She had never liked the cross-stich and its apparition within the mist of her cauldron did little dampen the threatening kind of smugness that it radiated.      

The cross-stich unwove, then depicting a cottage covered by thistle. It receded behind the growing weeds, becoming consumed as thistles covered the totality of the cloth.
We can hide these troubles, it wrote, a rich green threading weaving through the cream-coloured cloth, we can obscure them. Place them where they may not be remembered.

‘What then?’

We will grow, as all plants do. Other troubles will be buried, you will be happy.

Picking up her cauldron’s lid from the kitchen bench, Drella held it between her and the cross-stich as a kind of rudimentary shield. She began to circle the hearth and the frame followed her in turn.

You will be happy, it repeated, drink of the water and be free.
Steam billowed freely from the cauldron, lifting it from the hearth and carrying it slowly forward towards Drella.

Jumping back as the steam lashed out in fearsome grasp, Drella took a deep breath before darting forward in a unexpected dash. She turned, battering away another burst of steam and charging closer to the cauldron. She leapt slamming the lid down over the cross-stich and straining towards the cauldron’s top. With her full weight she forced the steam of the trouble-shrub back, painful heat and thorn lashing out, desperate not to be covered.
Still sodden from her walk, Drella felt the weight of the bog push down along with her, the root of every tree and leaf of every peice of moss, joined in their efforts, leaning upon the cauldron’s lid to hold it firm. Together, the bog witch and the strength of her home forced the cauldron through the earth, driving it deeply into the heart of the bog, smothering it within the inescapable stasis of time. Holding it within a place where no troubles can grow.  
Within the darkness, Drella could hear her heartbeat.

–

Sean Bottle was rather lost.
Given a letter with the address simply stating, “the Meadow-Lough Boglands”, he had been wandering through muck and mire for several days and had begun to notice that things were becoming more and more upside-down.
It was strange, the road that he had wandered into. The air was muddy, which was saying a good part for how it smelt, and if he was not raised to be as blindly practical as coal in a coal mine, he would have said that he was underwater.
Staring at the roots of a tree and wondering what curse of nature had caused it to grow upside down, the officer of the Royal Stallinger Post Office was rather startled by a hagish kind of woman who had suddenly fell through the floor while holding what looked like an iron pot.  
Seeing no sense as to leave her floating, Sean picked her up, stuck his head through the hole and immediately vomited due to the sudden shift in perspective.

Tea was put into a kettle and in time the hag was revealed to the recipient of the letter.
‘Happy birthday, Miss D. Agnew.’ Sean proudly announced, ‘A warm regards from the post office, and an earnest wish for a trouble free year ahead.’

–

J. McCray
2024

*The pantry of Drella’s bog cottage had recently become an extension of the underside of the surrounding area due to a miss-threading to the weave of existence.