witch — Blog — West 10th

Prose Editor Hannah Keselman shares a coming-of-age episodic narrative about the things that keep her up at night, the things that haunt her, and the things that brighten the dark.

I. Beginning

When I was in second grade, we had a writing open house. Parents were invited to celebrate their child’s personal narrative, the culmination of a year’s worth of lessons in penmanship and prose. A precocious reader and natural teacher’s pet, I had taken to the art of writing almost immediately. So I was exceptionally excited for the open house, as I saw it as an opportunity to showcase both my academic prowess and my new-found love.

Other classmates had written about their family’s trip to Disney World or that Christmas they got a puppy. Perhaps a small part of me was resentful that I didn’t have a new puppy to write about. Or perhaps I truly needed catharsis. Instead of a joyous memory, bubbling and golden, I wrote about the time my father locked me in our basement. It was an accident, of course, one that was followed with profuse apologies, including a guilt-induced ice cream trip. But that memory was so potent in my mind, so personal. It was one of the first times I was consciously aware that I was afraid. In Magic Marker, I had written about the darkness that shrouded me, the spidery shadows that danced around my feet, dangled down the walls from spindly webs. It was quite a dark way to describe how the basement looked in the middle of that crisp September day. There was only one window down there, but it had flooded the concrete walls and floor with light.

I watched the blood drain from my father’s face as he reached the climatic page, the one where I was alone in the basement, crying for someone to come save me: “I almost lost all hope.” Even then, I had a flair for dramatics.

But despite my parents’ embarrassment, and perhaps my dad’s genuine fear that my teacher would report him as some sort of negligent father, they were impressed with my writing. I think all three of us knew, even back then, that words were going to be my weapon of choice against the monsters that would be.

II. Body

One Halloween, I wanted to dress up as a black cat. I wore black leggings and a long-sleeved shirt, fuzzy cat ears, and a tail. My mother painted a pink nose and whiskers on me with lipstick and eyeliner. Her soft touch tickled me, causing me to crinkle my face and send my whiskers askew.

It was a particularly cold New England October night, so my father wrapped me in my brother’s fleece jacket. Despite being a year younger, I was as tall as him, so it did not swallow me the way I worried it might. The three of us then left to go trick-or-treating, while my mom stayed at home to hand out sweets to the small witches and ghosts and pumpkins that would soon fill the night.

Under a bulbous moon, we walked around the neighborhood. I avoided the nutty candies at each house, looking at my brother each time so he was sure what a good sister I was, accommodating his allergy like that. In truth, I had no taste for peanuts, but playing my selections as sacrifices gave me leverage in our trading later on.

There was one house we went to, large and looming, lavishly decorated with gravestones and flashing string lights. We knocked on the door. A sickly green face leered at us. It was all hollow dark eyes and dripping lips, and so I screamed. Loudly.

When we arrived home, my mother scooped me up. “Hey, kitten! How was the night?” she asked me. I immediately launched into a retelling, complete with detailed descriptions of the zombie that answered the door.

“That must have been really scary, baby girl. I’m proud of you for being brave. Are you proud of you?”

I didn’t have an answer to that, so I hopped off her lap and ran off to compare loot with my brother. The corpse man was forgotten until the next morning when I recounted the tale for any classmate who would listen.

III. Break

My mother liked to blame the full moon for things. “It messes with people, you know,” she said.

I snapped back at her. “I’m not a werewolf.” Although there was a small part of me that hoped that I was—it would explain the not-sleeping. I became unwillingly nocturnal. My eyes remained open, yet I thought of nothing but nightmares. I’d turn on every light in my room—once, twice, three times—so no shadows could leap out of the cotton candy walls or bubblegum carpet. Night was the only time I appreciated the design choices my six-year-old self had made. It was harder to imagine sinister things living inside walls painted the color of unicorn excrement, although my mind did its best to think of grim things anyway. I weighed my body down with blankets and stuffed animals. The plush fabrics became soaked with my sweat.

At a certain point, I just stopped trying. While the rest of the house slumbered, I took out pen and paper with shaking hands. I would write for hours, most of it nonsense, until my hand cramped, and I’d collapse from exhaustion.

IV. Breath

After my mother picked me up from yet another session, I told her I was tired of exorcists. They looked at me with too much pity, not enough empathy. They spoke to me like a child and thought of me like a project. They had given me medicine that had killed one ghost but birthed another. I was sleeping again, although fitfully. But sleeping had become the only thing I wanted to do. Just a few days before, I had remained in bed for the entire day. I just stared at the ceiling and refused to eat the food my parents left on my nightstand. As I stared out the car window, legs pulled to my chest, I reminded her of the depressed stupor I had been in after one exorcist’s advice.

“You just haven’t given them enough time,” my mother responded. “You just have to keep talking so they can help you.”

“That’s just it, Mom. I’m tired of talking.” I had been speaking of my hauntings for months now, saying the same things again and again. This was my purgatory. So as we drove home, I broke down crying, a mix of the soft sobs of exhaustion and the hot tears of anxiety.

For a while after that, my mother stopped taking me to see the exorcists. But a few weeks later, she told me she had found one last someone for me to see. I agreed because as hard as my hauntings had been on me, I knew they had been just as hard on her.

I sat down in her office, the room dimly lit by warm lamps and winter sunsets. I waited for the usual questions, the prodding, the poking, the pushing at my ghosts. Instead, she offered me a notebook and a pen.

“Write,” she said.

“Write what?” I asked. It felt like a trick.

“Anything you want.”

So I wrote about the stars and a sky dressed in unsuspicious blue. And that night, for the first time in months, I slept. And I had no dreams.

V. Blood

I started writing letters, never sent, when I was fifteen or sixteen. I messily penned rhapsodies, odes to people who hardly cared that I existed. I loved the idea of being in love, yet I hated the feel of it. I confined my feelings to these letters, keeping their contents entirely to myself. It was not an easy feat. They begged to be sung to the world, to be screamed from rooftops and out of windows.

Around this time, I made friends with vampires, beautiful but deadly. They would often take out forks and knives, ask for my heart to be served to them on a platter so that they could discuss and dissect and dine on it.

“Just give us a taste,” they begged, licking their lips. They hungered for more, always more, of the blood, the boys, the buzz. I was terrified that if I gave them a bite, they would find that the taste was not what they had been craving. They would drain me, and it still would not be enough. So I never invited them into my home, my letters. I was lonely. I was miserable. But I was safe, and so were my writings, buried at the bottom of my sock drawer.

Even after the flames I carried burned out, one by one, I did still wonder what would have happened if I had let someone’s eyes on my confessions of love. Perhaps they would have sung the words along with me.

VI. Bitch

It is frighteningly easy for men to become monsters. I watched it happen countless times. The first symptom is a lashing tongue, venomous spit. The first time I encountered such an occurrence, I was thirteen. I was walking back from school when they appeared, smiling and sneering and snarling. They grabbed my backpack, tugged on my hair. I kicked the ringleader, then ran the last few blocks home. The next day, I made eye contact with them in the hall. I stared at them, refusing to be the first to look away. They didn’t bother me on my walks anymore, but their message was clear all the same. I was not untouchable.

Two years later, a boy in my literature class told me that if I had been alive during the Salem Witch Trials, I would have been burned at the stake. A second boy in my physics class claimed that he didn’t trust my calculations. I then caught him trying to cheat off me during our midterm exam. In my art class, a third boy thought he was being helpful when he loudly explained to me that my opinions made me unattractive to all men. I laughed and said it was a good thing he wasn’t one. He then called me something worse than “witch.”

At sixteen, I started a feminist newspaper with a band of other girls who had been told to burn. The first article I wrote was about sexism in the classroom, how smart women are the most dangerous creatures to men, the most harrowing threat. I was told, by several comments on the website post, that my article was just proof that women were overly dramatic and hysterical. I wrote my next article about female rage and the fragility of men’s emotions based upon hormonal science. The comments increased, but so did our numbers. More witches joined my team. We were writers and artists and dreamers, and all the other things that teenage girls could be.

VII. Bone

I had this dream about driving. As I would approach a red light, I’d slam on the brakes, but nothing would happen. The car kept barrelling forward, right through the intersection. Some nights, and these were the good nights, the intersection was clear. The road was empty. Other times, it was my mother who stood in the middle of the street, staring at me with wide eyes, begging me to stop. It was my best friend, pleading with me to brake. It was my brother, screaming at me to slow down. And sometimes, it was me out there on the pavement. I could never stop the car soon enough. I’d see the spray of blood cover the windows, feel the squelch of viscera under the tires. I’d wake up after this excruciating moment of impact.

If I couldn’t fall back to sleep, I’d get out of bed and stand in front of my mirror. I’d peel off my skin slowly, watching my reflection do the same. I’d rip apart tendons and sinew, tossing them aside. Then I’d reach into my chest and pull out my lungs, my heart. They too would join the pile of flesh. When I was little more than bones, I would retreat into my closet for the night. In the morning, I’d hang my body back over my skeleton. I would stretch my fingers, crack my knuckles. Tell myself it was just a dream. There weren’t really monsters in my closet, or under my bed. No, it was just me there inside my head, inside my room.

These words offered me a little comfort, if only for a moment.