My years of servitude became an apprenticeship of sorts. The Sea Witch taught me true, every spell, every magic, every enchantment under and over the waters, all the knowledge she had gathered in her very long life because she knew, even when she’d called us to her, that her time was coming to an end. She desired a daughter, a successor. In me she found a willing student. Betrayed, lost, I needed a place to belong and the Sea Witch, with her heart of salt and seawater, gave it to me.
When at last she wore out, I did as instructed. I removed her flesh, stored it in jars and bottles and tubs for use in spells, then took the bare bones and wound them into the body of the throne, adding to its height and breadth, as every new Sea Witch’s had done for millennia. And it became mine.
I could have returned home, then, but to what end? I could have revealed my sister’s treachery, claimed what she’d stolen from me, but I had been long gone from the kingdom and had begun to change in both appearance and temperament well before my mistress died. I would not have returned to any good purpose, and I’d have had to witness so many faces frozen in terror at the sight of what I’d become. Besides, I’d found a love for the power, the knowledge, the darkness to which I was heir, and the patience to play a long game.
I have never seen my sister again, but she sends me tribute. I know she still lives, for the girls keep coming even after all these centuries, and I ask them who rules. She sends me all those little girls and young women who want too much, who long for things they cannot have, whose yearning makes everything else in their lives appear insignificant. She has sent daughters and granddaughters, nieces and great-nieces. Fools all. Perhaps it’s a test for those silly little things: if they’re willing to trade with me, they get what they deserve.
But perhaps she simply fears if she didn’t send them, I’d return home.
I think about the latest child, with her lovely hair and lovelier voice. I wonder how long before disappointment strikes, before realization hits, before she or someone who truly loves her comes to me, begging a solution. I’ll give them the knife, the same one I always do, I’ll tell them their choices and we shall see what we shall see. Whose blood she’ll choose to spill, her own or his—I suspect her own. Not out of love, no, but shame; it’s easier to die than live on under the weight of humiliation. Again, I can count on five fingers the girls who’ve come limping home, who are strong enough to bear the burden of consequences.
In the deepest darkest part of the cave, in a tiny alcove, on a bed of coral lies my own child, my own successor, the work of my own hands, the sum of those silly little girls. Over the years I’ve cobbled their pieces together to make one being, a daughter of stitched-together sorrow, made with all the things those girls discarded as unimportant: their very best gifts, the cores of their secret and best selves. An amalgam of sacrifice and loss and pain.
In all my years I’ve never seen a girl worthy to take my place, never saw in another face whatever the Sea Witch saw in mine. Whether that’s good or bad I do not know, I only know that a broken bargain will make a witch do terrible things. Like this.
She’s ragged and lovely, my daughter; at last I have her voice. When I put that inside her she’ll lack just one final thing: life. And when I breathe that into her—when I give up the core of my very best self—she’ll take my place.
Imagine: all that loss, all that sacrifice and grief, all those pieces of self, exiled from their very being. Imagine: all that rage. Imagine: my last breath, my last desire, my final instruction and knowledge of my home; my sister, the broken bargain.
Imagine her, my child, my girl, my successor.
She will be terrible.
And I will be free.
Fallow
Ashley Blooms
They find the bottle in the barn. There are a lot of things there, whole piles of things: tractor-part things, tire things, cutting things and bolting things, all tired things, slowly fading toward the same color of rusty brown. The inside of the barn smells of stale hay and beer. Misty picks the bottle that is the least broken and William holds it between two fingers and lets the water drain from its open mouth onto the packed-earth floor. The base of the bottle has a deep crack running through it that snakes along the length, almost all the way through. The crack raises up a little, just enough to tear their skin if they aren’t careful.
They sit so their bodies form a triangle, William and his best friend Misty and her sister Penny. They sit in the corner of the barn, there among puddles of something that might be water. This way, no one can see them from the road. It’s William’s idea. The whole game is William’s idea.
The bottle spins and spins and they kiss what they are given. Wooden beams. Metal pipes. Once, for William, a grasshopper. The bottle seems to find only the gaps between them, the space that separates their knees from other knees. It doesn’t land on a Body, not the whole time they are playing, even though William moves them three times, convinced that it’s the ground or the shadows or the moisture from the puddles that is warping the bottle’s path, but nothing changes.
They decide there will be one last spin, and William reaches out, and William is sure this will be the spin that changes the game, when a car pulls into the driveway and a voice calls, “Penny! Misty!”
The girls are gone before William can ask them to stay. Only Misty pauses in the doorway to wave, and William waves back. He listens to their mother’s voice, to the rustle of grocery bags, the slam of a trailer door. He waits until he can hear the water in the creek near his house. Then he spins the bottle one last time. The glass clinks and grinds over the dirt, kicking up breaths of dust so small that you have to squint to see them. The bottle stops with the mouth pointing at William’s knee.
When the girls are gone, William sits by the barn door, which is always open, propped on two crumbling cinder blocks. He watches Earl, whose trailer sits behind William’s, by a field that Earl tilled many years before. In all ten years of William’s life, he has never seen a single thing grow in the field. There is a word for places where things don’t grow. William’s mother taught it to him. Fallow, she said, and said it again when William asked her to. He liked the way it sounded, a little like hollow, or holy. He said it to himself sometimes, at night, repeating it over and over just to feel the letters rolling on his tongue.
The fact that nothing has ever grown in the field doesn’t discourage Earl, who is bent double over the plow, driving it into the soil. The dirt gives on either side of the blade, opening up, gutted. The earth exhales a damp smell. Creek water and must. Earl keeps going. William spins the bottle again and again and it lands, every time, with its mouth pointed at his knee. Earl plows and plants until the sun begins to set and then he curses and walks to his trailer. Without him, the quiet takes over the field, and the crickets are born out of the quiet, bringing noise.
Earl pauses at his trailer door, squinting to see William in the shadows of the barn. “You ain’t supposed to be in there,” he says.
“I know.”
“Well.” Earl looks toward the trailer he rents to William’s mother. There’s no car in the driveway and no lights in the windows. “Just be careful,” he says. “There’s broken glass and God knows what. You’re liable to catch tetanus or some shit.”