My Witch's Keeper

My witch is lonely.

She holds me in her lap sometimes and presses her face into my fur. Whatever she does makes my fur wet, and she makes strange sounds like she’s struggling to breathe, but she isn’t afraid like she’s choking, so I think she’s okay. Her heart sounds sad to me, but she doesn’t leave this space that holds the sadness for her in it. The unknown is too great for her to face, she says.

She spends her days tending to her tasks. My witch has many tasks to keep herself busy with. Silly, mortal things - tidying up her desk, arranging her collection of potion bottles, hanging herbs to dry above the cauldron. She spends hours in front of a notebook with a pen poised, but she doesn’t write things for all of those hours.

Mortals are funny like that.

I try to bring my witch outside more.

She seems happier when she gets out of the cottage. There’s a moment when she crosses the threshold that seems to frighten her, as if there is a monster there, but then her slippered feet touch the ground and the grass and wet leaves mesh into softness beneath her step and she remembers how good it is to be out here. To not hide behind the tasks.

This forest is steeped in magic, like liminal tea leaves hanging on trees that could tell some fortune if she could harness it. That’s why she moved here - it was a “safe bet”, she told me when she had packed our things, “plenty of mystical energy to work with.”

Only she doesn’t know why she wants to work with it, so she rarely does anymore. She’s always preparing to, but then she falls short whenever she remembers that she doesn’t know the reason for things anymore. The energy stays potential, and she stays locked inside.

There are old, defunct railroad tracks that stop just outside the cottage that my witch and I live in together. Moss and roots have wrapped themselves around the wooden bits, and the metal lines are like linear pots for the flowers that grow up around them. They’re pretty little things, and it’s good that the forest has made use of the tracks, since no train would ever come here, into the deep woods with its magic and its darkness.

I thought, at least. Then one night, my witch shakes me out of a half-sleep state and whispers, “Look! Look, there’s a van out there!”

The moon is full tonight, and together, we trek to the window at the front of the cottage that faces those tracks, and there it is - a white van with a large, pink flower on its side and some scribbling that I know to be human language of some sort. An older man with dark skin and a thick mustache wearing overalls and a shirt stained with the green blood of plants exits the driver’s side door and enters our field of vision. Two younger human boys who look enough like the first to be his offspring step out after him.

Together, they open the back doors and then… they stop. They stand there. They must be waiting for something.

I look at my witch and see how her face lights up with the sight of other people. My witch is lonely. I wish I could make her go outside and talk to them. It would make her heart glad, I think, and I miss the sound of her heart when it is glad.

But she will not go, because it is frightening out there already, and my witch is a strange witch, because the sight of people make her glad but the thought of speaking to them scares her. I do not understand her sometimes, but I love her, because she is my witch.

There is a sound like a distant grinding of stone on metal, and then an impossible thing rolls into our view - a train, just a small one, a collection of two cars and the engine that pulls it, but it is on those tracks that hold the flowers and the roots and it is rolling to a stop there, just in front of our cottage, at the end of the tracks.

It is dark both in the forest and in the black windows of the train cars, and so I see nothing. I reach out with tendrils of energy to feel alongside it, and I am blocked. Something magical is inside that train - perhaps that train is something magical. It is strong, whatever it may be, and it is here.

The humans do not appear surprised, though I have a hard time reading their facial expressions. They have so many, after all. My witch’s face is quite familiar to me after all these years, and even she makes funny sounds and her eyes scrunch up and I do not quite know what it means from time to time.

The humans reach into the back of their open van and begin to pull out flowers - lots of them. Daisies arranged in chains, bouquets of roses, violets, colors that I’ve never seen in these woods before, they bring them out and lay them in bundles on the ground beside the train. Then they pull out small tools from their pockets and they begin to affix the flowers to the cars.

They keep their heads bowed while they work, averting their eyes as if these trains cars were a human bride on her wedding day, and they work with the efficiency of those who have done a task before. I should know, for I have watched my witch become very proficient at her tasks, until the tasks take so little time that she needs to add new tasks to fill in those empty spaces.

My witch and I watch together in silence. We do most things in silence, but this is a different kind. It holds a space, like a breath, taking it in and then pausing there, waiting. Waiting. We sit in that bubble of waiting breath together, and then my witch gasps softly, and that spell is broken and I can move my paws closer to the window to see what has done the trick.

The train car is covered in these flowers. They match the ones along the rail tracks that they sit upon, a perfect set, like the woolen shirts my witch knits to go with her skirts. The older human man and his offspring have stepped back and stand in a line with their heads bowed, looking like a row of their own flowers, bending their petals towards a sun that sheds no light.

But it does have a light, and I can see it now. It glows white, softly, and I can see the bugs that are drawn to bright flowers making their way over the petals with a floating curiosity, towards the moonlight that seems to emanate from their buds.

There’s a crack that whips with force in the forest’s silence and the held breath of everyone and everything seems to let loose in a whoosh of fascination as the train cars release their brakes and pause for the merest moment. It feels like we are all paused mid-movement, as if we were all taking a step but wouldn’t dare be so rude as to set foot to ground when the movement of that train has yet to complete.

Then the train cars roll out just as quietly and simply as they rolled in and the humans are done with their job. They move into their vehicle once more and the doors slam with the strangeness of a technological wonder in the heart of an ancient forest that never moved past the invention of fire and the cobbling of stones together to form a hut.

Winter in the forest is a strange time. The sun already struggles to make its way through the thickness of leaves that grip each other close in the brightest seasons, and in the winter, the clouds are thick with the muggy fatigue that moves them slowly across the sky. The forest days look so close to the forest nights that one blends into the other like a patchwork quilt that has lost the colors in its patterns and it is all one, gray, endless expanse of blanket over everything.

My witch is more sad in the winter.

Her sadness is different. During the warmer days, it is lined with a piercing edge, like sharpness that might cut someone who gets too close. In the cold, it turns into something slippery and heavy, something that can’t be held but is too much to be moved.

The strange day-night-day-night goes, and goes, and the thoughtless, emotionless hours are longer than hours should be, and I begin to itch for the outside, but I will not leave my witch behind. She needs me. She needs herself, but she doesn’t know where to find her, so I shall keep my eyes on her so that she can find her when she is ready.

She isn’t ready for quite some time.

The fog starts to break, first in the trees and then in her mind. Snow begins to melt and turns to water to nourish the plants who remember that it is their time to wake, too. The animals that rely on such movements of season know it is their turn as well, and we all awaken. I am so happy to see my witch awaken.

She goes outside. I don’t know how long it has been since she went out, but it is a great moment, terrifying and bright. She steps outside and I feel that same feeling that came when the whip crack sound of the train movement filled our cottage for the briefest window of time.

We are out there together when she kneels beside me. I can sense the wetness of the living ground leak into the knees of her skirt and she loves it.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she whispers to me, quiet, as if something else could hear her. The woods do. They hear her and I see the flowers along the train tracks perk up as if they sensed a stray ray of sunlight make its way down to them, a floating leaf from a tree that carries the warmth of life.

It is warmer soon, and my witch begins to thaw along with the woods. She talks now while she mixes her potions - she makes potions again, and I do not know how long it has been, but it feels like years - and she sings sometimes. It is good to hear her sing. I purr my approval.

One night, she is awake late. I watch her from my perch in the window. She is looking out the open door. It has been open for many minutes but she does not go outside. I feel like I need to wait, watch. Wait and see. Something is happening. The air is thick with it.

My witch reaches her hand out through the open door. Moonlight graces her skin with its touch and I watch her fingers stretch out and then fold back into her palm, like she just discovered she had hands that were capable of moving and grasping, of making and molding.

I hear it then. It’s the same crack, the same impossible stone on metal, and I am up, I am looking, and it is there. It rolls down once more. The train with its two cars.

The cars are naked again. I know what will come to clothe them and it isn’t long before the van arrives. The humans, the same ones as before but with a few more lines in their skin, step out and begin their quiet task. My witch watches them with her door open. They see her, I think, but they keep their heads bowed, as if she is another train car they must pay bowed respects to.

They complete their floral mission and step back. This time, the line they form is closer to the van, leaving an open, empty expanse from my witch’s doorstep to the train. It doesn’t roll away this time, though. It waits. The humans wait. I wait.

My witch stops waiting.

She steps inside our cottage fully and scoops me up in her arms. She feels warmer than I remember her feeling, inside and out. Her arms are strong, though they tremble. It is not from my weight, I know, but from the release of another weight. She steps past the threshold of the cottage that has held all her sadness and fear and the mix of heady desperation for so long.

She steps out into the moonlight.

I wrap my tail around her arm and hope it gives her the strength she needs, but I know she already has that without my help. I hope to remind her it’s there.

She remembers.

The train doors are open and waiting for her like the embrace that she holds me in now. I can’t lift my head from where it is pressed against her chest, but I don’t want to. This moment is for her, and I hold warmth for her in it, but I cannot live the moment for her.

-----

The crow has preened her wings about a dozen times in the last hour, enjoying the sunlight as the long grasses on the plains soak it up and distribute it among the moist, Spring ground. Flowers are beginning to bloom in full force, except where the old train tracks pass through the village. The flowers are always in bloom there since nothing ever disturbs them.

Her witch is humming a song as she bakes her pies. There is a Spring festival in the town tonight and my witch will drink that human beverage that makes her feel warm and fuzzy. She will pass out her pies among the tables that will be set around the town’s bonfire and the humans will appreciate a taste of her magic.

A child plays on the tracks, his hair brushed and shining, fresh from a bath. He goes about disrupting the cleanliness of his skin with the soft dirt that isn’t yet mud and the leaves that are warm and wet, painting a tableau of nature upon his arms and bright, ruddy cheeks.

There is a sound off in the distance that none of the humans hear, but the crow does, as does her witch, and they freeze mid-motion and look out at the forest. There is a darkness that wraps itself around the woods, and so none of the children go there, and the adults pretend they are not afraid of it, but they won’t look at the boundaries if they can help it.

The sound, impossibly, is coming from those woods, the same woods that swallow up light and never spit it back out again, but it is preparing to spit something out now. Her witch reaches up an arm for the crow to fly down and land upon, and together they make their way outside of their home to the tracks.

“Move along,” the witch says, not unkindly, to the child, who looks up at her through thick, long eyelashes, then runs off, shedding leaves in his wake.

The treeline breaks for a moment to allow a thing to exit - a train, with two cars pulled behind it. As the impossible vehicle nears, the sunlight glints off of the roses and daises and lily flowers that adorn its sides. The train is covered in them, bright and beautiful, something that could not possibly have come from inside of the forest of black, dank, and cold.

Yet it comes. It moves along the tracks with the sound of stone on metal, not sharp and grinding but powerful, allowing others to hear its nearing presence. Behind the crow and her witch, the town’s inhabitants are falling silent and gathering closer to the tracks that have never seen a visitor before. First, it is silence. Then, murmurs begin.

The gentle fragrance of a thousand freshly cut flowers heed the train’s coming, and when the it stops in front of the witch, the flowers notice that they have arrived as well.

One by one, the blossoms detach from the train’s exterior and begin to drift, first around the train tracks, then catching flight on the wind, petals shifting and freeing from the center of each flower until they, too, are floating free in the breeze, a mass of color and scents crafting trails in the sky.

The door to the train car at the back begins to slide open, and the town holds its breath together.

A woman with pale skin and wide, bright eyes emerges from the dark depths. A large, black cat is clutched in her arms, and the crow recognizes one of her kind at the same time that the crow’s witch recognizes one of her own, too.

The new witch is trembling slightly, and the cat sets a paw on her arm, and her limbs still. The crow urges her witch silently forward, and she steps towards the visitor with a smile.

“Welcome!” the town witch calls with a cheery wave. The crow seeks out the cat, and the two exchange flashes of images.

The new witch speaks, and her voice cracks a little, like it isn’t used to having an audience. “I’m from the forest. We,” she nods at the cat, “were all alone out there, and we had to leave. We don’t know where we’re going, though. We just had to leave.”

“Here,” the crow’s witch says warmly. “You were going right here, and we are happy to have you.”