I really have no idea where this came from except a bout of insomnia and a slight temperature!
The Swamp Witch (987 Words)
They call it the swamp-witch. A tree half sunk in water. Moss drapes it like soft green hair; one branch, towards the uppermost end, supports its weight, as though the witch leans on one arm.
The story is that she crawled that way, dragging herself by her arms, her legs being broken. Another branch reaches out, pleading; there’s a hollow, softly cupped like a palm; just the right size for a baby’s head to rest in.
She’s begging for her daughter, that’s the story; begging for her child to be buried with her. A daughter they claimed she’d killed with witchcraft, along with a dozen other children who died within weeks of each other in one foul, steaming summer.
It was probably a fever; or a dozen different fevers. These swamps were riddled with sickness and superstition, back in the bad old days. Now the tourist boats cut clean paths through the dense brown water; moss tries to cling to their hulls and falls back, helpless, to disappear under the churning blades. The guides grin and shrug, telling stories about the past and its follies. Credulous people who believed in the power of herbs picked at the right phase of the moon, words spoken at the right time, dances with the spirit. These are modern times and no-one believes such things any more.
Well, perhaps a few. Among the sightseers are the…other tourists. They are a slight embarrassment, but they spend, and so cannot be ignored. They are the ones who are looking for something long swept away from their clean modern world, a world that allows for no alluring cobwebby corners. They dress in black in the thick heat, and come here seeking mystery.
The girl with the moon-pale skin and hair dusty charcoal like a corpse’s, clings to the boat’s rail as far as she can get from her parents. She finds them vulgar, embarrassing, and incapable of understanding her; which is the privilege of all teenage children. Unfortunately, in their particular case, her judgement is absolutely accurate. She watches the swamp-witch out of sight and wonders what it must be like, to grieve, to be tortured, to love a child so much. Had the mother really been a witch, capable of vengeance but refraining from it as proper witches are supposed to do? Or had she just been an outsider, scapegoated for the town’s miseries, because she was somehow different?
Had the baby had time to know she was loved? Had her little drifting soul wailed as they took her body from her suffering mother?
It doesn’t matter if the story is true or not. The girl’s mind seizes on it with a passion she will, in life, apply to many things, some worthy, some not.
Her parents whinge and mutter about the heat, the mosquitoes, the food. They drink too much and collapse bloatedly into bed. The girl sneaks out to relish the moonlight, the song of strange insects, the creak of frogs, the moss swaying like ghostly dancers in the midnight breeze. Far away, thunder crackles.
She walks into the woods, with a laser-bright torch she wishes were a smoking lantern. It is hardly dangerous; everyone is very aware of the need for tourist dollars, and few would jeopardise them by attacking the daughter of wealthy, if irritating, tourists. The only real danger is from the alligators, which refuse to join the modern world, and will eat anyone.
She wanders towards the river, upstream of the bend where the swamp-witch endlessly reaches out.
To her delight, she discovers a graveyard in a clearing. It has not been signposted; graveyards are unpopular, and this one is insufficiently quaint. It has no crypts or mausoleums or evidence of witchcraft. Many of its plain markers tilt, sinking into the wet ground.
She wanders among the stones, brushing them with the tips of her fingers, whispering fragments of poetry, spells, any words that seem to fit this place and its simple mysteries. The moonlight disappears, the thunder rolls closer, and a great blue-white tree of lightning stabs down, lighting up her entranced face. Then the rain, great fat warm drumming drops. She begins to dance, holding up her thin white arms, laughing, her feet in their black buckled boots churning the soft earth.
Then her boot goes deep, suddenly, cold mud sliding in over the top. She flounders off balance, almost falls, realises that she has disturbed something, perhaps a grave.
She is not frightened, only guilty. She pulls herself free, looks for a stone, or a cross, to set upright. But there is nothing. If the grave was ever marked, it is no longer.
She bows, gravely, apologises aloud to anyone she may have disturbed. The rain drums down; nobody answers, but she feels comforted. Wet hair flat to her head, she makes her way back to the hotel, falls asleep still, in her mind, dancing to the beat of the rain among the forgiving dead.
She wheedles money from her hungover parents and takes the boat trip one last time. The river is swollen fat and excited with rain. When they get there, only the nub of her green-draped head, the forward reaching arm are out of the water. The guide runs through the story, but as they get closer, he falters to a stop.
Something is caught in the branch. Even as the people on the boat begin to murmur with shock and disgust, the girl smiles with clean delight at the sight of the tiny skull that rests, fitting perfectly, in the wooden palm.
She knows someone will move it within a day, sweep it away. It’s too much of a mystery, too disturbing.
And even though there is a logical explanation of flooding and graveyards and loosened earth, it works so perfectly as a mystery, that it works anyway. The reality cannot remove the wonder. Not now, and not ever again.
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