For my ravishing hunger For my deafening silence For my relentless vanity I pray, I pray For your callous innocence For your kneeling sorrows For your jealous poverty You burn, you burn, you burn
The impending dawn shatters out from beneath distant treetops. Fragments of light bore through the crevices between gentle leaves above. A violent kaleidoscope of fiery gold is cast upon the vengeful Witch.
The men in their pure cloth bury themselves to their knees, wailing incoherent prayer, the men with their blazing torches jeer obscenities and hurl stones at her bound body. She screams. Or she laughs. I cannot tell which one. The manic glee sprawled across her once-supple and unblemished face betrays my initial impression of her writhing with intense agony. She grimaces unkindly, droplets of sweat and tears glistening in the gentle and gradual embrace of a rising sun. I breathe in her delicate doe-shaped eyes, in her irises a cool grey, regal winter, its edges caressed by the tongues of tourmaline embers. I knew this woman. She arranged bouquets of flowers for the mothers at church. She wrote poetry.
‘She has the devil in her,’ a hundred hushed voices whisper inaudibly from the surrounding crowd. I hear it in their fear-stricken eyes, see it in their trembling voices chanting meaningless prayers. When I look back at her, her head is thrown back, cursing damnation at the sky, her skin blackens and shrivels grotesquely, the repulsive scent of sweet, sinful greed polluting my nostrils. Her eyes are rolled up into her skull—filled with blankness.
‘Witch!’ This woman is a Witch. I know this because I know this. I know this because we know this. I also know this because the ones who burned her say so. The ones who beat her in her home, dragged her to the forest to tie her to this stake, and struck the flint that set her humble slippers ablaze. They say she dealt with the Devil for her vengeance. They say he reached his wretched claws out from within her to strike a passing man.
I won’t know that she smacked his face when he grabbed her thigh the night before, that he forced her into his bed and tore her clothes, that she cried out to tell the neighbors. Neither will any of these people. All this Witch shall leave shall be her ungodly ashes. An abstruse tale that wills the rest of us to join him in his bed quietly, as any obedient creature would.
‘Lord, have mercy,’ a threadbare and desperate plea. Was it hers? Or a pastor? Or myself, clutching at the defiant lion in my ribcage to cease its foolish pounding, begging it to learn obedience before the fire reached me too?