Love as a Witch in a post-modernist world.

TW: mentions of familial death, general death, blood.

I have learnt to accept that my love story wouldn’t be the Pride and Prejudice of the 21st century. Nor the monsoon epiphany of two- or three- scantily clad adults, sharing woes and overcoming sudden transgressions. After all, manufacturing a love spell was as easy as breathing.

Let me begin anew. 

I could start by telling you how I had been abandoned from a young age by parents unequipped for family life, about the human sacrifices they apparently performed or cursed book that plagued their souls.

I digress.

My life up till now was a social heap of private boarding school life with pompous cherubs - I'd accidentally cast into existence - bleak GPAs, rhetorical questions, and conventional bullies. I’d had ‘friends’ come into my life and leave just as quickly, the passing rumours feeding into their gullible ears. “You’re not worth it Ella. You weren’t at the beginning, and you certainly aren’t now.”

But that was fine. If my money wouldn’t buy their friendship nor my charm, then maybe my penchant for magic would improve my odds.

It had not.

By the time twelfth grade hit, the nurse’s office had changed from a simple stuffy box with its plain white walls and single cot to an isolation room for my self-proclaimed tortured society meetings for the young maladroit aristocracy. It sounded very English I thought, particularly on days where the smog was thick and the days bleed together with bouts of hot wind. Yes, very English. 

I think I realised then in no uncertain terms that life was unfair, and I was going to use it to my advantage. 

By University my first love came in a flurry of test papers and marriage problems - no love potion needed. I thought I had hit the jackpot. That I had managed to procure a man worthy of my time. We passed letters filled with saccharine words and sought each other out to hide in cupboards and empty rooms. But three months in the life of a mistress had turned from bohemian to basic. 

Much like how our relationship was underpinned by favours and money. He felt beneficent while I gave him sensuality, or perhaps I consumed materiality, while he gave me a body in which I could supplement my trial and error of what made a good girlfriend.

Was he using me, or was I using him?

We lasted another month before he called it quits. I think he had expected me to be upset, maybe even depressed. As if my thoughts only centred on him, as if I only lived for him.

(At the time I was imagining ways I could hex him without killing him, very hard to do these days when the spells you require were written in the 1800s. )

I let him know in simple terms that such implications were not only wrong but bordering on offensive, he’d settled with leaving me to pay for the food. I did it silently, ignoring the imploring glances and soft words from the wait staff as I shuffled out the door, his last words burrowing into my head.

“We’re two wandering souls Ella. Sometimes when they meet, they’re too broken to be much else.” 

Moaning like a second-hand theatre production, shuttered up in a little room performing Ophelia. That’s how I remember him by these days. I think he would have taken it as a compliment. 

But again, I digress.

“So, is this your first time here?” The lawyer was a practical thing, all sharp edges following a rigid algorithm: work hard, succeed more. I'd have offered a get-rich-quick spell but feared the 'insanity' clause that was sure to get me signed off the will somehow.

“Yes, it’s my first time losing a family.” She paused, shuffled and sniffed indignantly.

“Hm. It appears you are a full-time worker, currently single. No future plans to have a family.” She kept shuffling the paper around, waiting for individual words to pop out at her to throw back at me: love child, old money, female, alone. Not that she actually mentioned the last two, but I felt it in her gaze, that look a person gives when dealing with someone far beneath them. I chose then not to mention the recent upheaval in my life filled with grim nights of bloody headless gooses, screaming women and early mornings feeding my endless illegal supply of Sonata.

“Well, it’s a good area, small but that just means it's more communal. Sign these papers and the place is yours. As well as this.” 

She pulled out from her desk draw a book. It was old and leatherbound. I knew it as my great grandfathers’, passed on by wealthy bigots as a keepsake. Not that it was worth much.

 Being an Arts major I could appreciate the finer details of a classic, from the painted cover, a deep green with threaded weaves of gold, to the glossy words one might see inundated on books to give them that textured feeling. I leafed through the yellow pages before placing it down, trying my best to ignore the smell of sulphur and endless repugnant weight that had appeared from simply opening the book.

I settled further into my chair; pen in hand and scratching obscenely loud as it dropped fat bloats of ink when I didn’t move quick enough. She stamped the papers when I had finished writing and pushed me out of her small, glassed office room.

I left then an empty shell walking a full street of people. Carrying a book I was starting to think was actually a grimoire, but hidden in code between the lines of three preposterous fables: The Fox and the Goblin. A tale of woe and virtue. The kelpies lullaby.

I remembered the book had been postured as something rare, grand and out of reach, covered by a glossy white cloth and hidden behind a stained-glass window. Pathetically haughty and elite, something my family thrived on.

The wind had picked up and turned the summer sun into a frigid draft, which – if caught standing too long – turned into prying hands, with the resounding echo of a drum. It felt impending but smelt like a grove of lavender surrounding a groggy pub. It tasted bitter on my tongue and reminded me too much of Mathew. Darling Mathew, the second one I couldn’t keep.

….

“So, it’s over.”

“Bloody hell Ella what do you want from me? A tragic monologue detailing my woeful attachment to you?” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the oven mittens clenched tightly in his hand, the food still warm on the stove. It felt so underwhelming.

“Well yes platitudes would be nice, a ‘it’s not you it’s me’ or ‘we’ve reached a crossroad it’s time to walk our separate paths.’” He moved once again, past the costly paintings I had chosen to brighten the room, and the dead lavender bush I had never been able to revive but refused to part with.

“We all know you spelled me, Ella, we didn't have love, not the real thing at least.” He grabbed the whiskey bottle still packaged, red bow in place. Before walking out. The shutting of the door was followed closely by the smashing of glass.

“I think I would have preferred the monologue.”

…

The walk did me good. I think. I passed the homeless man with his new purple jacket –stolen of course, but it seemed redundant to say it out loud when in a few night's time he would not have it. The laundromat with the dog that would always aggressively bark from behind the fence - I'd been so close then to spelling him into a frog, and the two renegade teens hovering about the playground dressed for a school they never seemed to attend. Now that I look back on it, my thoughts seemed a bit cynical, glass half empty. But maybe that was just my rationality speaking.

By the time I realised how far from home I was the wind had turned from sharp to biting and the clouds had opened like a morbid rendition of Edward Thomas’ poem:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

Remembering again that I shall die

Terribly dreary I thought, and most definitely the foundation for a curse I had written when I was fifteen. But as the rain clogged my boots and was sucked into my lungs, all I could think about was the carpet I was bound to ruin when I managed to find my way back home. 

For the moment though, the church seemed closest, looming out with its cross leaning to the side. I entered and found myself encased in a room of shifting low-light lamps, high ceilings and old wooden pews.

Choosing a row I gazed around the room, particularly to where the partial light broken by streaks of shadowy rain stretched across the altar, allowing the faint dust particles to emerge and create shapes of floating rabbits with bowler hats sitting on aisle seats and praying to hungry gods. My imagination ran wild as reality slipped further and further from my grasp, and my eyes shut against my will as the heavy ache of grief tore through me.

…

She- or so I believed- was a little thing made up of green plumage and sticks wrapped in bits of blue fabric, her face a pallid sheen of obtruding cheekbones with deep set black eyes and sharp pointed teeth, created an image of a humanoid rat. 

“So pretty and look how plump those cheeks are! Red as a jewel hidden away, I sense good things from you my dear!” She hissed sporadically between her words, tongue twisting around the vowels and biting off the ends of the constants. She was truly disgusting.

"What. The fuck. Where am I?"

"You're back home deary!"

“Who are you?” 

She skipped her way out of the small alcove she had hidden away in, nimbly jumping from shelf to shelf holding books that glowed and snapped and cried. She dug her way into the moth-ridden grooves on the wood with what I realised quickly were black iridescent claws.

She jumped once more and extended out the membrane of her wings, the sickly attachments, no bigger than that of a sparrow’s, jolted rigorously up and down before the thing dropped onto the table, blue-black blood splattering alongside it.

“Ahh, what a painful flight, been stuck inside for too long. Your family library leaves much to long for.” She stretched her arms out allowing the silver pockets where her ribs were to flare. My stomach curdled as my hand gripped tightly onto the book.

Ah, the book.

The only thing I clung to in this twisted dreamland. Or twisted reality. How was I here? The place I’d decided I would never come back to; the black oak floors I thought I would never feel under my feet again.

“A God you see.”

“What about a God?” 

“The reason, that you’re here.” She scurried across the desk, feet clacking and eyes peering into the depthless darkness plastered to the corners of the room, and only disrupted by the soft candlelight. 

“What?” I said, flustered from the dream that wasn’t a dream, and the creature I was sure shouldn’t exist.

“The curse! You dumb girl, the curse!” She spat, her tongue forking out.

“Right.” I mumbled, “the curse. From a God.” I had sat down by this point, in a green armchair of Victorian origin. I felt like Alice trapped in Wonderland, except here the food was sure to be horrid and the creatures a certified health hazard.

“Yes, a God, a being, a deity, whatever you want to call it, he is it.”

“So then why the curse?” The thing had paused a while back now, content with simply swinging its legs, and nibbling at the cluster of ghost mushrooms hidden beneath the folds of the damp desk. 

“Well, he suffers you see, a terrible human ailment.” 

“And what would that be?”

“Loneliness.” She leered.

 Someone grabbed me then, big hands bound to leave a red puckered rash across my arm. 

We discussed the nature of Orpheus and Eurydice once in class. Between the lines of diligent ramblings from old white philosophers, we argued ardently over the intentions of the characters. The class found Orpheus to be possessively motivated, his love for Eurydice one-dimensional. And Hades? Well, he was a God, seeking to give love to a woman who had clearly been indoctrinated in the matter.

But when that man had grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall, the demon nymph cackling all the while, I thought then and there that they'd all been wrong and that Nietzsche was right in saying that love was an expression of egoism, and that apparently while contemplating all this I couldn't even come up with a spell to get me out of this hot mess.

“Enough.”  His voice rattled terribly like that of a seasoned smoker shacked up in a metal organ. The very words he spoke shifted the air current and were absorbed by the walls, there was a disparity to his tone, the type I had seen in men having experienced the worst of the world and had taken it as a personal slight. I could understand that. 

But when I looked into his eyes and saw through the orbs just how fragmented the knitting of his mind had become. I thought maybe in those split seconds as his hands - scared white and blue by broken skin - gripped my face, that love seemed overrated and that a curse, red flags and all could definitely be validated, psychologist and exs' be damned.

"Yeah, this could work. A witch and a God, who would have thought?"