The Jinx

Round, emerald eyes filled my vision. My lips were pinned shut, a stabbing sensation threatened to penetrate the delicate skin as I breathed out of the side of my mouth. Cautiously, I reached my hands in front of me and plucked the offender from my face.

“OW!”

A claw remained latched onto my bottom lip. I moved it in all sorts of awkward positions trying to untangle myself without causing further damage. “Jinx, that truly is an abysmal way to wake someone up. Do you have no decorum?”

The tiny black cat stared blankly with its wide green eyes and then licked its claw as if to say, “Crusty lip skin isn’t my idea of fun either.”

“Right so I guess that means Her Highness would like her morning feeding? I’ll go whip up something in the cauldron.” Upon hearing the cauldron mentioned, Jinx stopped licking, paw frozen in the air, and narrowed her eyes. I cackled loudly, as witches do, gesturing at the random ingredients I could throw in for breakfast, “eye of newt, wing of bat… OOH pickled cabbage?” At that, the jet-black feline meandered over to the half-drunk sleeping concoction on the countertop and purposefully started pushing it towards the edge. The thick green liquid instead threatened to slosh out of the top of the mug. “Don’t you dare!” The mug edged closer. “I mean it!" The mug was now neither fully on the table nor on the floor. “OKAY OKAY, I’m grabbing the good stuff. Truce?”

After every morning battle, I have approximately seven and a half minutes to get ready and broom it down to class, familiar wrapped in in my backpack. Class is, of course, only the next battle. I look at the board in front of me for the day’s objective. An expressively old-fashioned font greets me with: Today’s Task: create a potion to revive a plant.” On the desks in front of us sat small, wilted plants alongside a variety of ingredients, some of which are meant to mislead you if you don’t know your stuff.

I grabbed my textbook Potions 101 and began to flick through the pages. I decided I had enough ingredients to mix a rejuvenation and strength potion together. “It’s going to be the most ‘juvenated, strong plant ever,” I told Jinx, with a nod. Jinx stared past me. I looked behind me, but as I had a desk right at the back of the classroom, nothing was there. “Well, I’m glad you’re interested, Jinx.” She continued to pay absolutely no interest.

“What horrible concoction are you going to brew up today?” a truly weaselly voice piped up from beside me.

I looked at him, the gangly frizzy-haired boy with the worst posture I have ever seen, and smile with derision, “my plant is gonna knock your plant into next week.”

“Yeah, it’ll probably turn into the plant from The Little Shop of Horrors and feast on us all” said another student a desk ahead.

“As long as it eats you first” I replied, adding some powdered poison ivy into the cauldron and stirring vigorously.

“Maybe if you got rid of The Jinx, your creations would be a little less…cursed?” the weasel boy dared.

“Maybe if you got rid of your mouth your face would be a little less cursed”. Day in, day out, I had to swerve comments about the witch with a cursed familiar. In most stories, witches have black cats. It fits the aesthetic. In reality, however, black cats symbolise bad luck to witches as much as they do to everyone else. Having a black cat is unheard of since the days of Salem. It is well-documented that witches with black cats were always found and burned and at the stake. So, I have been reigned the Bad-Luck Witch, the Cursed Witch or even the Ill-Fated Witch after several (although some would say all) of my creations have come out a little awry.

I stirred the thick black potion as it boiled, large oozing bubbles slunk to the surface burst with a hiss. I looked around. Many other potions shone with an emerald or sapphire gleam with a consistency of runny honey. I poked at mine. It was so thick I thought it might poke me back if I prodded too hard. I looked at Jinx. “What do you think? Should I add something else?” The black cat, keeping a clear distance from the cauldron, circled a jar with a viscous transparent green liquid. “Horsetail essence, huh? Well, it certainly looks a healthier colour. Okay, let’s see…” I swirled the mixture in and the bubbling accelerated, releasing steam in a colossal exothermic reaction.

Just as the potion started really kicking off, the Professor who had been reading the newspaper until now, announced that potion-making time was over. My stomach did a little flip as I transferred the hot liquid into syringe. All around me classmates started feeding their potions to the potted plants. A cacophony of excited chatter erupted as leaves grew greener and flowers blossomed.

Slowly, I added my potion to the soil. Drop by drop by drop. The potion was so thick it seemed to just rest on the soil, and for a moment I wasn’t sure the plant would be able to take any of it in. Then, as soon as the thought crossed my mind, the small, wilted plant began to lift its head as though to get a closer look at me. It seemed to reach up and stretch out its sore back as it slowly straightened out its spine. I looked at it in awe for a moment, just a moment — then the pot completely shattered in my lap.

Roots shot out from all directions thick as rope and gnarled like old fingers. They wrapped around my legs, tying me to the chair. I kicked at the roots, frantically, as I looked to Jinx with wild eyes. Except, Jinx wasn’t there. The cat had already leapt away and was watching from behind one of the other now-healthy plants. I was going to yell about betrayal when the roots wrapped around my face and covered my mouth. Through the gaps I could see the body of the plant begin to grow. It grew so fast and had such strength that it broke through the roof of the classroom.

As bricks and light fixtures fell, distracted excited sounds turned to screams. The Professor whipped his head around to where I was now buried in the plant and reached out as though to choke out the plant. The plant was having absolutely none of it and just started to grow faster as the professor cursed at his rope-burned palm. Soon, the roots had begun to cover the other students and blacked out the windows with its leaves. Soon, the entire room would be completely engulfed in darkness. The Professor was whispering some kind of incantation. I could hear him, but I could no longer see him, and I was completely unable to even struggle any longer.

I wonder if I’ll emerge as a butterfly, I thought to myself wryly, I could do with a fresh start. Perhaps, I thought, I will have to die before I make the transformation, as it was slowly becoming hard to breathe. My face was fully covered, and my ribs were tightening. Even the incantations grew faint as my chrysalis expanded. Being able to fly without a broom might be cool, I thought. I wish I could laugh at my own humour, but my ribs wouldn’t budge. I was struggling now, even though I couldn’t even really struggle. My mind wandered to Jinx as my breaths grew painful- is she watching me die? I wondered if anyone would look after her once I’m gone. Surely, if I die, she will be completely abandoned, exiled as a curse and left alone.

I stopped being able to think clearly at all and I gave in to the surrounding darkness.

Once I realised I could breathe, I opened my eyes. My limbs suddenly felt so loose that I wasn’t sure my body was supporting them anymore. I held my arms against my body so they wouldn’t fall off completely and then my eyes scanned the room for Jinx. I skipped over the destroyed classroom and partially wrapped students and looked, instead, for bright green eyes. Every corner was filled with root and leaf, but I couldn’t find a single tuft of jet-black fur. It wasn’t until I saw the out of breath Professor glaring at me from across the room, that I realised he had four eyes instead of two. Jinx stared at me from her resting position upon his wiry, grey and currently very flat, hair.

Back at home, I collapsed onto the bed. Jinx was curled up on the pillow next to me as though she had just been through the most strenuous ordeal. Anxiety poured into my blood as I lay there. I grew cold as my veins chilled with the icy realisation of it all.

I sat up and looked at Jinx.

“Did you do that? Is it you? Are you really cursing me? Is that what you want?”

As all these questions tumbled out of my mouth, panic grew in my voice.

“Do you know what would happen to you if something bad happened to me? You can’t even be bothered to find your own food? What will you do? What will you do, Jinx? How are you going to live?” As tears welled in my eyes and the cat in front of me blurred, I could tell none of this was really bothering her. She looked up slightly as though to ask me to stop bothering her rest and then went back to said rest.

I didn’t know what to do. The only thing I could think of was to head to the library archives.

The Witch’s Academy library was a fascinating place. Bookshelves stretched further than the eye could see, quite literally. The library just seemed like endless shelves wrapped around a central desk where the librarian, an old spindly witch with triple-glazed glasses, sat and read. Apparently, this is how she remained, endlessly reading as though scared she would not complete her endless collection.

I walked up to the central desk and cleared my throat. The librarian did not stop reading. I spoke, a little roughly from the earlier suffocation “I’d like to see the archives, please.”

The librarian did not look up from her book but a voice the sound of a toad replied, “The archives are quite expansive, it would be easier to tell me the type of thing you’re looking for, my child.”

“I would like to research the black cat familiars of Salem."

This time, her almost white eyes looked up from the text. “You are the witch with the black cat familiar?”

“Yep, that’s me.”

The librarian’s lips stretched. They were so creased I couldn’t quite tell if it was in a grimace or a smile. She spoke and I wondered if the frog in her throat would leap out and attack me, “Come with me.”

Her desk chair must have been cranked up right to its upper limit, because when the librarian hopped off it, she looked like she was about the height of my knees. She tottered along in front of me, and I gazed at the endless rows of books in front and wondered how we would ever reach the archives at this speed. Suddenly, she plucked out a book from the bottom shelf of the first row and flicked to a seemingly random page. She spoke a short incantation, and the room flipped upside down.

I was just about to yell out and thrash my legs when, suddenly, I was reoriented and facing a shelf of research and newspapers all dated from the time of the witch trials. “Now I wasn’t around for the witch trials, goodness no, however I have read most of these papers by now and I can show you exactly which ones you’ll find interesting. Do be wary, most of these papers do not speak of happy stories.”

The librarian tottered away as I surrounded myself with her handpicked choices. I ordered them by date and began reading. Sickening stories of witches’ demise filled my head. Each dreadful story began with an act of service and ended with death. Witches that healed the sick, witches that saved the crops and witches that lit up the darkness all shared the same fate. Yet, in each document of each case, no witch had a black cat familiar. Owls, toads, rabbits, rats and ravens were all listed, but I couldn’t find a single with a black cat. This seemed so unlike anything I’d heard of about Salem that I wondered for a moment if the librarian had just given me an irrelevant paper.

That was until I saw them. After the trials began, witches began to adopt black cat familiars. They seemed to gain popularity until nearly every witch with a news headline had one. The black cat soon became a token for witchcraft. So central, in fact, that mentions of them drowned out the persecution of actual witches. The tragic stories I read shifted and were suddenly not of persecution but of plague and famine. Sickness spread like wildfire and wildfire spread through crops and many began to die all in close succession. Any mention of magic seemed to have died along with them and was replaced by a fear of the Devil.

After fear was instilled into the town, public opinion shifted. No longer did people want to bring curses upon themselves. Spotting a black cat walking through town was enough to empty streets. Eventually, as fear became the heart of Salem and the people felt their power was lost, they stopped persecuting others, and many detained witches were released. After that, the more I read, the more the papers turned into talk of the mundane. Until, one day, magic was no more.

I put the papers down and started shuffling them into a pile as I tried to piece together the timeline. Was it all a coincidence? Do black cats really bring so much misfortune? Does my familiar work for the Devil?

As though my anxious ruminating had interrupted her reading, the librarian manifested in front of me. I looked at her from my knelt position on the floor, we were eye-level now, “Have I been serving the Devil all this time?”

The librarian held my gaze; her white eyes widened and perfectly reflected my bewildered face back to me. She practically ribbeted, “Black cats may get a bad reputation, but the way I see it, without black cats there would be no witches.”

“What does that mean? That the Devil enjoys witchcraft?”

“Perhaps, my child, it just means that you have a lot of potential.”

“A potential for evil, apparently,” I scoffed.

“Being scared of one’s potential could teach one the value of it. The witches of Salem did no good protecting those people. It wasn’t the right time. Perhaps first, they had to learn to protect themselves instead”.

I flew to the window of my dorm and hopped in through the one I always leave open for Jinx. Jinx herself was occupied with her own reflection; she hissed at it and then ran under the kitchen table.

“Not exactly Devil behaviour” I said as I set down the broom.

I sat down on the sofa and watched as Jinx cautiously extricated herself from between the table legs and leapt over to the sofa. I pspspsed her over and she stepped into my lap. Carefully, I lifted her by the middle and hung her in front of my face, “Is that what you’ve been trying to do, Jinx? Scare me? Do you think I’m all powerful and must be stopped before I take over the world?” I followed it up with my best supervillain laugh but Jinx was royally unimpressed. Pouting, I set her down in my lap and scratched her ear. In my best baby voice, I then said, “Has Her Highness been trying to protect me this whole time?” At that, Her Highness raised up her cat backside until it was in full frontal view of my face.

“Well, you’ve sure got a funny way of showing it.”