judy sobeloff / fiction

Offerings for the Witch

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Every time the little girl needed to use the bathroom, a witch was hiding behind the shower curtain. The girl would sit down just long enough to go, then quickly wipe and run from the room. She never took the time to flush because then the witch would snatch her. 

Baths, on the other hand, took forever, and she cried beforehand every time. “And when I come to get you out, you cry again,” the girl’s mother scolded. 

The little girl knew why: She was petrified to enter the realm of the witch. But once she made it across, the shower curtain flung open for the world to see, she wanted to stay in the one place she might be safe for now. 

The girl could only guess what the witch looked like: dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes—a dead ringer for the girl, only more so. Spinning around to catch the witch reflected in the bathroom mirror, all the girl glimpsed was her own gaping mouth. 

*

I am five, and I have a new babysitter. She is in my room looking at my bed. “Where’s your pillow?” she asks, turning toward the hallway as if to search the house. 

She’s brand new and I want her to like me. “I don’t have one,” I admit. 

“You don’t have a pillow?” She laughs, then frowns. “What about your parents? Do they have pillows?”  

I shake my head and try to help her out, pretending to look for a pillow on the other side of my bed. “I don’t see it,” I say. “I guess I’ll sleep without it tonight.” I’m in my pajamas and have brushed my teeth. “We could check in the linen closet,” I suggest, since she isn’t moving. 

“How come you don’t have pillows?” 

“My mother doesn’t want us to.” I don’t say, My mother is scared of something, and I’m scared of something, too.

I know she won’t babysit for me again—she can’t get past this one fact of our existence. She’s not moving from the doorway, so I get in bed and wait for her to close the door and turn out the light. 

*

The witch also lay in wait under the little girl’s bed. Every time the girl entered her bedroom she would jump from the doorway onto her mattress so the witch couldn’t grab her by the ankles and drag her underneath. This was especially important at night when the room was dark. First her mother came in to kiss her goodnight, then her father, and then they left her alone. The girl had to sleep in the exact center of her bed for fear of slipping off. Often she dreamed there were snakes on either side of her, so close she’d be eaten alive if she moved. When awake she knew the snakes in her bed were only a dream—unlike the witch, who was real—and the real snakes lived in the bamboo thicket separating her backyard from the neighbors’ backyard below. 

The bamboo was advancing, spikes bursting through the ground overnight. Sometimes when the girl peeked behind the house she found a forest mere feet from the door. 

*

My mother kneels on our pink fluffy bathmat while I sit in the bathtub with my washcloth and soap. I am not allowed to turn the water on, touch any part of the faucet, lean my head back, or get my soap if it goes under water. 

When my mother leaves I splash the water out of the tub. My sloshings cause the basement ceiling beneath the tub to disintegrate in a steadily expanding area. On Saturday mornings bits of plaster fall from the ceiling onto my mother and me when we go down to the basement to do laundry. My mother nails boards over the decaying ceiling area and bans me from using the bathtub ever again. 

Inside the laundry room is an old refrigerator I am forbidden to hide in, and behind the refrigerator is a separate room filled with things my family never uses, suitcases belonging to dead ancestors and open cans of paint. As I grow older more relatives die, until the shelves sag beneath their increasing belongings. 

*

The witch also lurked in the dark basement where the girl’s mother stored the girl’s toys. The only light the girl could turn on was at the edge of the living room, which lit up the stairs. But this only made matters worse, because then she was illuminated, walking blind into a trap. 

The girl’s mother appeared not to see the dangers. She was willing to watch from the edge of the living room, but she refused to accompany the girl down. Her mother said the girl was big enough to do it alone—but maybe her mother was just protecting herself. The girl had no way of knowing whether her mother would wait for her up in the living room or whether she would turn and run. 

On weeknights the girl’s father would return from his office after dark and go down to the basement to work in his den, the same room her grandparents slept in when they visited, until they stopped visiting and died. No one ever slept in the den after that, though the girl’s mother kept the grandparents’ beds made up, ready in case they came back.

*

I am six, standing in the living room with my mother, the curtains drawn. To our right is the front door, which my mother tells me I must never answer.

I will follow this rule the entire time I live in our house. Every time I hear a knock I will lie down behind the couch, then wait frozen until whoever is knocking gives up and leaves. 

*

The girl suspected certain passageways in her house served as portals for the witch, particularly the chute in her parents’ bedroom wall which led directly to the witch’s laundry room lair. The girl’s mother told her to push her socks and underpants through this opening every night for good hygiene, but the girl knew they were offerings for the witch and always yanked back her hand. She had seen her father giving over his own items, looking strained. The girl tried balling hers up in her closet instead, but her mother came looking and carted them away. On such occasions her mother would yell, then lie down and return refreshed hours later and yell some more. 

The girl’s nighttime chore was to carry bags of garbage out of the house and stow them in a wooden enclosure with a lid. The girl’s mother said the latch was to keep out raccoons, but the girl knew the real reason for keeping even garbage locked. 

*

My mother never opens the door to a stranger, not even a crack with the chain on. When someone rings the bell, she pushes aside the cloth covering the small window in the door and calls through it, “Yes?” Then the Girl Scout or delivery person standing on the other side shouts to her their business. Outside the wooden front door is an additional glass door. We have no need for a screen, as our front door is never open unless we are slipping in or out. 

*

When the girl turned seven her mother surprised her with a pair of kissing fish the girl didn’t want. At bedtime when her mother came in to kiss her goodnight, the girl would look in her crystal ball and tell her mother yes or no—usually no. The crystal ball was imaginary, but the girl’s fear of being kissed was not. “They won’t kiss you, silly,” her mother said. “They kiss each other.” 

The girl wanted to exchange her kissing fish for more standard fish, guppies or minnows or whatever wouldn’t kiss her. But she was too scared even to ask her mother for a drink of water in the night, so she left the unwanted fish in the bowl on her dresser as they were. 

*

I’m allowed to walk by myself in my bathing suit and towel to our neighborhood community swimming pool, where, instead of going straight in, I linger at the entrance by the honeysuckle bushes at the edge of the parking lot. I discover honeysuckle in our backyard, too, unexpected vines blooming among the forsythia my father planted to shield our house from the encroaching forest of bamboo. My mother tells me to leave the honeysuckle untouched because a dog might have peed on it.

Despite my mother’s warning, once I’m out of sight at the pool there’s no stopping me. I know, with every droplet of nectar I suck, a dog might have peed on it. I imagine the dog. I imagine dogs of all types and sizes peeing at once. At first I select blossoms higher up, but eventually I turn to those lower down because I don’t want to miss any. Other kids passing by might suck a few droplets as they continue into the pool area without breaking stride, but I stay by the honeysuckle as long as I can. 

One afternoon I sneak into our backyard and sample some of the honeysuckle there. Hours pass this way, until I whirl around and glimpse the witch peering out at me from an upstairs window. 

*

The girl had never liked her kissing fish, but she cried the morning she found one floating belly up, like a blossom on the surface of the bowl. Her mother told her to watch the fish to make sure it was really dead, because sometimes things came back to life. When the sun set and the girl’s father went to bed, her mother took the fish in a ladle out to the backyard and buried it in the bamboo among the snakes. 

Her fish would return to the earth, her mother said. So the girl crept around the house collecting the implements she might need to get it back—the ladle and spade used for the burial, a silver nail scissors, an antique thimble. She hid these items in her closet to wait until the time was right. 

*

The next time I come home from the neighborhood pool, my mother calls me into her bedroom. I sit on my parents’ bed wrapped in my towel, my bathing suit leaving a damp spot on the bedspread. My mother stands in front of the closet where my father’s shirts and pants and ties are hanging. I think she must know about the honeysuckle.

“The floors and showers in that dark, humid pool locker room are covered with a foot-infecting fungus,” she says. She stops talking and glances at my father’s closet. He fell ill after I tasted the honeysuckle in our backyard, and I know she is warning me about the danger of my bringing the fungus home and spreading it to my father’s feet.

I stop going to the pool. I can’t let my father catch a fungus. He has to take so many medicines already now. 

*

The girl’s mother had strict rules about treats, but occasionally the girl was allowed to walk to a small convenience store and buy an ice cream cone. The walk to the store was long, over several hills and a busy intersection with traffic. 

Her mother had forbidden the girl ever to enter the woods alone. But when an older girl showed her a shortcut, an indistinct path through the woods behind the neighborhood elementary school, the girl realized she was already ruining everything and decided to go into the woods and let the witch get her. 

She tiptoed behind the school, checked that no one was coming, and raced into the woods. In certain places the path forked. The girl wondered where these fainter paths led, but she didn’t dare follow any of them because she was still petrified of coming upon the witch. 

Nothing bad happened to the girl in these woods—sometimes even the witch needed to rest—but that didn’t mean nothing bad ever would. For the time being the danger remained where it had always been: in the basement, under her bed, behind the shower curtain, and anywhere within reach of the laundry chute in her parents’ bedroom wall. 

* 

 “Shortness of breath,” my father mumbles into the phone, a new array of pills like little candies by his plate at every meal. He seems to be slowly sinking, becoming smaller every day.

He wants to walk with me in the forest springing up behind our house. But all he can do is sleep in the living room, no longer able to go to the woods or the pool or even the backyard. 

*

In the girl’s bedroom, her one remaining fish swam upside down, circling the bowl on its back. It swam ever more slowly until one morning it stopped swimming at all. Its gills forced themselves open, the fish not floating on top of the water but sinking down. 

She should never have tasted that honeysuckle. She should never have taken that shortcut through the woods. Now the witch could be hiding anywhere and could harm her and her family any time.

When her father became too sick to work or leave the house, the girl discovered that the witch also lurked in a dark corner of the covered play area behind the school. Her teacher sometimes took the children back there to hit each other with a rubber ball, and older boys sometimes went there to piss against the wall or smoke cigarettes. Surely her teacher would not persist in bringing the class out there if she knew about the witch, the girl thought, waiting near the door to be allowed to go inside. With so many colorful, moving bodies, perhaps no one would be drawn to her dark, frozen one. Silence and stillness were her only defenses. 

What she needed, the girl realized, was a potion. 

She ran into the woods behind the school and gathered all the berries she could find—gooseberries, gorseberries, mulberries, marberries. She had no idea what powers they contained, but she would use them for making a bargain with the witch. 

She yanked the shower curtain open and shined a flashlight under her bed, but now that she needed the witch, she couldn’t find her anywhere. So the girl tied her berries into a bundle along with the items from her closet and climbed in bed to wait. 

When the moon shone through the window onto her blanket, she rose and slung her bundle on a stick over her shoulder. Next she had to get a heart and wrap it in cloth and set off deep into the forest. Lifting her remaining fish from its bowl with the ladle, she secured it in her bundle and stole down the dark hallway, guided only by a faint light seeping out beneath her parents’ door. Then she made her way into the dark basement and stepped outside. 

Immediately the bamboo rose up and scratched her face, thrusting her back toward the house. The girl fought, hacking at branches until she could pry apart an opening and pull herself through. The passage sealed shut behind her, a flame flickering dead ahead. She took another step and then another, careful to tramp out a path so she wouldn’t get lost. 

She walked for hours, until the sun’s first rays brushed the forest’s uppermost branches and she knew she was too late. Far ahead something beckoned—a hollow tree, a stone statue, the witch? Her own self reflected in a pond, her heart pounding so loudly she could barely breathe. 

When the sun rose a little higher, the girl heard crying and followed it home, hoping with every step she could still exchange her bundle for a cure. 

*

I am fourteen, standing in my parents’ bedroom—my mother’s bedroom—the only place I can find her anymore. It’s mid-morning, and the curtains are still drawn. My mother is lying beneath the bedspread in the long underwear top she sleeps in and wears around the house every morning now. 

She’s always slept in nightgowns and bras and worn them around the house, but the long underwear top is a new addition. Most days she wears the top without the nightgown, despite its saucer-sized holes, through which I can see her bra and skin. She never wore the top when my father was alive. I don’t know where it came from. Years later I wonder: Was it his?

All my mother does anymore is rest or sleep, intermittently lifting her head and letting it fall back. If someone rings the doorbell she doesn’t respond. If I ever end up at home alone, my mother reminds me to lie down until whoever is out there goes away. 

*

Years later, when the girl grew old enough to live on her own, she would move to a little cottage by herself in the woods. Signs of the witch would be everywhere, and the girl would set a trap—a circle of rope hanging from a tree that would tighten at just the right time. 

Sometimes, then, she would untie the rope or leave her door unlocked or prop it open to let in a breeze.

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Judy Sobeloff's stories and essays have appeared in such journals as American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and The Forward. She's received fellowships from PEN Northwest, the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the Edward Albee Foundation. She leads creative writing and expressive arts workshops for people of all ages.