She nibbled with gumflesh at the balustrade then pouted. Her rotting porch no longer tasted sweet enough to lure even the chubbiest of prey. Yyrja was growing thin and left to eat her unpalatable bait. She swept away the stale gingerbread crumbs with her expired, inanimate broom.
A wooden sliver roused a bud of blood from her pinky fingertip, whose pain she inspected as a curiosity of such things physical; such minutia which, as she aged and her sorceressliness waned, littered the floor of the confines of her life. Yyrja considered the vermilion, a familiar hue from her heyday: ink for infernal pacts, potions from virginal menses, steaming mounds of sacrificial goat offals, but never something she had bled; she never knew she contained that same rich hue.
Yyrja watched the neighborhood girls stroll the street with their sweethearts, squandering all that fervid blood.
Oh, how she longed for her sordid youth. She missed the sunless sinning. She missed sleeping with the Antichrist. Though they hadn't spoken in a millennium, she still remembered him as her malevolent little Beezeypie. They lost themselves, babbling the things romantics do, slurring sweet nothings, entwining their profane tongues. Her Beezeypie ditched her to stud for another of his vast and infernal harem.
Her love seemed antiquated and misplaced. The suburbs held no arboreal orgies. The streetlamps kept things too well lit and the shrubs were shorn too low.
Much of her twilight was spent observing the time, wallowing in the end of her days of witchery. She moped through her condo, impeccably tidy as a result of ample time rather than a hatred of filth. All her magic spent. Her wand lay limp. Her incantations merely malarkey. Her mirror mirror on the wall would not answer her at all. In it, Yyrja saw herself: utterly benign.
Yyrja wondered if she were still a witch at all. She felt listless, impotent, irrelevant. The forgettable and ephemeral magic of her youth was gone, so instead substituted what life presented her with memories: the jostle of public transit for madcap broom flights, the inanity of television for her nights as a gibbering mooncalf, pork butts for curious kinderfolk. She knew what it was to be a witch, and that perhaps that was enough. Her fingertip had clotted.
Some pudgy girls from next door ring the bell. Grandmotherly Yyrja invites them to relax on her porch, offering them scrumptious cookies.
A wooden sliver roused a bud of blood from her pinky fingertip, whose pain she inspected as a curiosity of such things physical; such minutia which, as she aged and her sorceressliness waned, littered the floor of the confines of her life. Yyrja considered the vermilion, a familiar hue from her heyday: ink for infernal pacts, potions from virginal menses, steaming mounds of sacrificial goat offals, but never something she had bled; she never knew she contained that same rich hue.
Yyrja watched the neighborhood girls stroll the street with their sweethearts, squandering all that fervid blood.
Oh, how she longed for her sordid youth. She missed the sunless sinning. She missed sleeping with the Antichrist. Though they hadn't spoken in a millennium, she still remembered him as her malevolent little Beezeypie. They lost themselves, babbling the things romantics do, slurring sweet nothings, entwining their profane tongues. Her Beezeypie ditched her to stud for another of his vast and infernal harem.
Her love seemed antiquated and misplaced. The suburbs held no arboreal orgies. The streetlamps kept things too well lit and the shrubs were shorn too low.
Much of her twilight was spent observing the time, wallowing in the end of her days of witchery. She moped through her condo, impeccably tidy as a result of ample time rather than a hatred of filth. All her magic spent. Her wand lay limp. Her incantations merely malarkey. Her mirror mirror on the wall would not answer her at all. In it, Yyrja saw herself: utterly benign.
Yyrja wondered if she were still a witch at all. She felt listless, impotent, irrelevant. The forgettable and ephemeral magic of her youth was gone, so instead substituted what life presented her with memories: the jostle of public transit for madcap broom flights, the inanity of television for her nights as a gibbering mooncalf, pork butts for curious kinderfolk. She knew what it was to be a witch, and that perhaps that was enough. Her fingertip had clotted.
Some pudgy girls from next door ring the bell. Grandmotherly Yyrja invites them to relax on her porch, offering them scrumptious cookies.
