Reunion

“Six feet, Brigitte. Come on, just measure with the broom,” snapped Amelia.

Brigitte halted in her tracks and let her arms fall to her sides, two steps away from the friend she hadn’t seen since this time last year.

“Well, good to see you too, then. It’s only a meter in Paris,” Brigitte grumbled, edging backward nonetheless. 

She eyed the distance between them, comparing it to the length of the sleek ebony broom she held in her right hand. With an approving nod from Amelia, Brigitte conjured up a large ivory pouf and slumped into it. She let the broom fall into the grass, connecting the two women like points on a graph.

“You can take more risks. I’d have to sell my soul if I got sick,” said Amelia.

Brigitte cocked an eyebrow.

“Sell your soul?”

“...again,” Amelia admitted.

They turned their heads at the sound of footsteps over fallen leaves, coming from the south of the dark clearing in which they sat. A third woman came into view, wearing a flimsy black witch hat, a thin polyester cape and dress, and knee-high socks with green and black stripes. She looked like a Party City version of the Wicked Witch of the West. She was dragging a heavy, cylindrical sack and the end of an extension cord, which snaked behind her into the darkness.

“Am I the only one who dressed up? Again?” the newcomer cried, indignant. 

She stopped in front of the two women, a broom’s-length from both, and plopped right down in the grass beside her sack and bright orange extension cord. With her arrival, Brigitte and Amelia’s two-point line became an equilateral triangle, the three women as vertices.

In previous years they would join hands to then twirl in a circle, ring-around-the-rosie style, until they all fell down in a cackling pile. This year, the impersonal yet sanitary connection of their broomsticks would have to do.

“What? Look, Rach, I’m in costume,” said Brigitte, indicating her periwinkle silk dress and matching cap. 

“What kind of costume is that? You look like you came straight from Fashion Week,” said Rachel.

Amelia squinted at Brigitte, scratching her chin. 

“Beauxbatons?” she asked, “That French school in Harry Potter?”

“Exactement,” said Brigitte, managing a curtsy from the depths of her luxurious pouf.

“Of course,” said Rachel, rolling her eyes. “You would choose the chique-est fake witches pop culture has ever produced.”

Brigitte smiled but didn’t respond, making a show of picking invisible lint off her impeccable outfit.

They didn’t bother pestering Amelia for her clear lack of a costume, looking warm in her jeans, boots, and hoodie. Dressing up in silly witch outfits had been their tradition for at least a decade, ever since they began this annual reunion in their first years of post-graduation life. Having met in a college production of Macbeth, playing the three witches, of all things, it made sense.

The tradition arose from a desire to poke fun at the effort society takes to portray their kind as anything but women, as desperate and angry as all the rest. Heaven forbid a lady standing in line at the movie theater or waiting for the subway possess a power beyond that of her peers, especially her male peers, without some kind of flashing red light as a warning. 

They’d seen themselves in movies and stories portrayed with warts, wearing pointy hats, with black cats around their ankles, and other signals for people to know whom to avoid, to scorn, or to set on fire. Amelia had stopped finding it funny three or four years ago, and her friends didn’t begrudge her for it.

“Anyway,” said Rachel, “Happy Halloween, girls. It’s been too long.”

They smiled as Rachel raised her arms in an imaginary embrace. A feeling of warmth flooded their chests, providing a moment of comfort before it quickly ran too hot and felt as though their blood was boiling. Amelia and Rachel grasped their chests and gasped for air.

“Oh. Oh, no,” sputtered Brigitte, waving her hands frantically. 

The burning stopped, and Rachel fell sideways with laughter as Amelia glared at her friend. Brigitte blushed.

“Sorry,” she said, “I meant to spread a little extra love since we can’t hug. I suppose I made it too strong. I apologize, really. Thought it would be nice.”

“Real nice, Brigitte,” Amelia grumbled, as Rachel tried to stifle her giggles.

“You’re ready to bury yourself in debt, aren’t you?” said Rachel, once she recovered, “Burning through your favors on a stupid spell like that one. And how did you get here this year, did you fly?”

Brigitte was certainly the most cavalier about her magic, using it freely despite the consequences.

“Sure,” she said. “Until you two are ready to come to me, yeah. It’s silly to perch on a broom, but it’s better for the environment than airplanes. Not that they would let me on an airplane right now, being a virus-infested European.”

As disapproving as Amelia was with Brigitte’s habits, her irresponsibility did make their reunions more convenient. Whereas Brigitte flew in from Paris, Amelia only had to get a day off from the hospital and drive a couple hours down to Rachel’s dad’s farm, using no more magic than a touch of persuasion to switch shifts at the nursing station. 

Rachel, having repaid her debt six years back, no longer had the dark arts at her disposal. The farthest removed from the world of magic, she was its biggest fan, her closet full of long, sweeping dresses and crystal jewelry. Her students whispered about Miss Stone’s secret midnight rituals, rumors which she did nothing to quell and occasionally encouraged.

It was mostly for her sake that they kept careful distance, for Rachel had no magic left to heal herself or anybody else. They could offer to do it for her, but she would refuse, and Brigitte and Amelia knew better than to perform magic on an unwilling subject.

“Well. What are we watching this time?” asked Amelia, seeming wary of the answer.

Rachel unzipped her sack and withdrew a pile of DVDs. Brigitte got up and, motioning for Rachel to back six feet away, began pulling out and assembling the pieces of a large outdoor projector screen. 

“Okay! Here’s the selection. This year, I got all the Harry Potters, The Witches, Hocus Pocus, The Crucible, Bewitched…” She trailed off, seeing Amelia sink her face in the palms of her hands.

Brigitte caught Rachel’s eye and cocked her head. Rachel only shrugged back. 

“Amelia? Need anything?” Brigitte offered, still setting up the screen. She knew stopping everything to put a spotlight on Amelia would only make her uncomfortable. 

When they met, Brigitte had chosen a role as one of the Weird Sisters because she saw it as the easy way to get an art credit and keep good enough standing to maintain her student visa. Rachel thought it would be fun to be a witch playing a witch. Amelia only chose the role to hide in plain sight.

“Sorry, could we not? This year?” Amelia spoke to the ground. “Or did you bring anything that isn’t about witches?”

Rachel blinked. They would always set up a witch movie and talk over it, relieving the pressure of their only in-person conversation of the year. At every loss of words, they had the overblown stereotypes to lampoon. 

“Sorry, I didn’t think--uh. Well, since we always watch one of these, I didn’t think to… Hold on, maybe Dad has something.”

Rachel turned around and jogged back into the darkness, toward her father’s ranch house. Brigitte cringed at the idea of how many cow droppings Rachel would encounter on her way.

She carried on setting up the screen, handing the option of conversation to Amelia. Eventually she took it.

“How do you deal with it, Brigitte? The debt. It’s crushing.”

Brigitte rolled down the screen and affixed it to the stand she’d finished assembling. 

“I just know I have time. My soul never meant much to me in the first place. Seemed more like an abstract thought. I sold it for something as unsentimental as my career, you know. I wanted to graduate and find a job at home with my good English, thanks to you two, and all of that without doing much work. 

When I found out I could do it by throwing away something most people don’t even believe exists, well. Perfect opportunity. I didn’t have to sleep my way to the top, going through one bland executive after another. Just the one devil. And I got to smile in all those pigs’ faces when I was promoted over them without so much as a peek under my skirt.”

“Ok, but now you know your soul does exist. Because it’s gone. And now you’re basically waiting for Hell. You don’t care?”

Brigitte settled back down into her pouf, the projector screen unfurled and ghostly white in the darkness. 

“It’s not that I don’t care, I just know I can handle it. Rachel had to sacrifice what, about a hundred cows? Two hundred? She just set up a few incantations around her dad’s slaughterhouse, and in a few years the blood debt was paid. The Big Man was appeased and her father went on making a living. Everybody won.

I don’t know how many cows make up a human soul, but there are plenty of evil people in Paris. When I’m ready to give it all up, I’ll just tip a murderer into the Seine, say some magic words, et voilà. Debt repaid.”

Amelia winced at Brigitte’s easy contemplation of murder. Having handed over her soul to cure her little sister’s bout with cancer, ending a life was not an option she considered for herself, though she knew it was common in their community. One of the reasons she didn’t love being a part of it.

Brigitte continued, “also, haven’t you almost paid it back by now? I can’t remember the last time you used magic, at least around me. You’ve sacrificed every pest in Jersey, too. I assume it takes millions of bugs to pay it off, but you have to be getting close by now.”

“Not anymore,” Amelia mumbled.

Brigitte crossed her arms and waited. Cows lowed in the distance, munching the grass, blissfully unaware of their ultimate destiny.

Amelia peeked at her friend and sighed.

“The beds in the ICU were filling up. The hospital was way over capacity and my coworkers were catching it too. Running out of respirators. I had to lighten the load.”

Brigitte sucked air through her teeth. Healing spells were costly. In the span of a few months, her friend had undone years of work. It was impossible to know the extent, but Amelia had likely fallen back to square one.

They heard a door slam in the distance and a rustling in the grass. 

“You’ll catch up,” Brigitte said.

“When?” 

Before Brigitte could answer, Rachel stumbled up, panting and smelling of the dung that tracked the bottom of her shoes. 

“I found Finding Nemo!” She declared, holding up the DVD like a trophy.

Brigitte groaned, but Amelia laughed her approval. Rachel turned on the projector, plugging it and the DVD player into the end of the extension cord that reached all the way back to her father’s wood-paneled living room.

“Subtitles, please,” requested Brigitte. She waved her hand again, and the air around Amelia took on a strange, hazy look. She sat up, concerned.

“What are you doing?” she asked, as Brigitte rolled her pouf within two feet of Amelia’s folding chair. She looked down and saw that latex gloves had appeared on both hands. Rachel squeaked, confirming she’d been given the gloves as well.

“Oh, just hold my hand,” said Brigitte. She reached her arm through the hazy barrier she’d conjured on either side of them. Her voice was audible, but muffled.

“Completely unnecessary,” Amelia grumbled as she grabbed Brigitte’s gloved hand. Her voice echoed within the transparent cubicle. “You just bought yourself another sacrifice.”

Rachel scooted close to Amelia’s other side, thrusting her hand through the barrier. Amelia took it.

“Maybe. But at least I’ll have company.” 

They quieted down and watched the title sequence play. In a vibrant cartoon sea, Nemo’s mother sacrifices her life to a barracuda, trying to save her children. He eats her eggs anyway.