Warlocks and the black arts, hexes and pow-wows have been neglected by a race of modern rustics who, when their crops are bad or their pigs perish, appeal to the U.S. government. City people, who supposed that the last U.S. beldame had long since ridden up the wind and that the rattle of wild laughter in the autumn air had never been heard since Salem, were surprised to learn of the York witches.
–TIME, January 21, 1929
The man I’d been fantasizing about killing for days arrived at my apartment during the first snowfall of the season. Jacob Barnum. I was surprised by how young he looked. Early twenties. Massive forehead, arched eyebrows. Thin. His skin yellow and waxy. For a moment, I became frightened, worried he’d gotten wind of my mentorship of Gertrude and was here to kill me, too. Gertrude had never spoken to me about their relationship, but I’d followed her around town, seen them in his apartment together, noticed the five purple lakes the size of fingerprints on her arm. I’d offered her protection oil, but it was left on my altar. It wasn’t long after the police found her body on the train tracks, with a bullet burrowed in her skull.
But Mr. Barnum didn’t seem to know my connection with Trudy. He’d come for me for the same reason everyone——from York to Lancaster counties——comes to my door: an ailment cure from the River Witch of Marietta.
He placed a hefty bag of coins on my table. Said he couldn’t sleep, was losing weight no matter how much he ate. Prone to intense sadness. He had a wife, but she left him a year ago. Had two children who had died in the past few years. Lost his job the previous week.
I was comforted by his misery. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to howl joyfully at hearing about his pain. Gertrude had been raised under the phrase of “girls should be seen, not heard.” I told her she didn’t have to speak or make noises during her manifestations or celebrations of thanks, but that she could if she wanted. One of the rules of my practice was to release the expectations that our world enforced. She’d pointed out how I too often remained quiet, and I had difficulty explaining that there hadn’t been a need to use my voice in years and years. I’d been alone for most of them; I’d forgotten how it worked.
I composed myself and asked Mr. Barnum the usual questions: how often did he eat, what did he eat, how much water did he drink daily, how was his stool? All the while, I examined his face closely. His shoulders shivered, though my apartment was quite warm. His cheekbones protruded grotesquely, like a poorly crafted table. As a child, Mother and I found a woman near the river whose illness mirrored Mr. Barnum’s. Malnourished, Mother said. Mr. Barnum did not appear to be on the brink of starvation, but the symptoms were similar, and if I was correct about his sickness, then I hoped he would die a slow, excruciating death.
Mother always said to trust Nehalennia. She was our water goddess, provider of all we needed as long as we fed into nature’s cycle, observed and thanked and gave back what we could to the earth. I’d been foolish to go to the police, to try to tell them that I’d seen Mr. Barnum with Trudy. They didn’t listen. Trudy was a teenager and Mr. Barnum a once married man, a churchgoing man, a man who’d had a string of bad luck but was still respected, nonetheless. Besides, nobody ever believed me. Batty ol’ Nellie Noll, deranged river witch frog eater, the whore who slept with the devil. Nellie Noll, whose mother had falsified her last name, which nobody could dissemble and figure out her real identity, or why it had been done, only that there was a terrible, awful, dark reason behind it. I should have known not to rely on authorities. Nehalennia had brought my revenge right to my doorstep, and in my head, I offered her a thousand gratitudes.
Mr. Barnum then said something that absolutely rattled me: “I’m beginning to think someone put a curse on me. A hex.”
Another gift from Nehalennia. Almost too easy. I told him to return next week with double the payment. Once Mr. Barnum left, something like lightning blazed through my chest to my knees, and I went to my altar, lit a white candle, gathered a jar of salt and an herb bundle, and walked about my house, sprinkling the salt on the floor and asking Nehalennia to purify and protect my body and my home as I began to devise my plan to avenge Gertrude.
For the rest of the day, the thunderbolt did not cease striking.
There are two kinds of magic around these parts: the art of paganism, of which I have been a practitioner of my whole life, and pow-wow, a Christian healing method used by Dutch witchdoctors. Mother could never conceal her disgust at those pow-wow prayers. The hands hovering over the body, chanting to Jesus Christ. Conducting what she called absurd rituals, like boiling an egg and placing it on an ant hill to prevent one’s death.
Trudy had heard that anyone who practiced magic that was not pow-wow was sacrilegious, but the pain from her menstrual cramps had been so severe she felt she had no choice but to seek me out. I’d been about to enter my gray age, all alone with only the watchful eye of Nehalennia as my compass, and this guppy, this wide-eyed girl, sped out of the dark water and swallowed me. Like she, a fish, and I, a dragonfly.
What I mean is, the day I met Trudy, I swore we’d been in a coven in another life. Or, once, she was a mourning dove tapping on the window of my skin, or a million centuries ago, while I was the miniscule particles of a sunbeam, my rays struck white against the silk of a spider’s web and there she was. We’d always been orbiting one another.
After I gave her a vial of peppermint oil to cure her menstrual pain, she insisted I teach her the art of witchcraft. She picked it up quickly——memorizing spells, studying the medicinal properties of herbs, learning of the moon and her powers——and I wondered if this is what it would have been like if I had a daughter. Trudy’s parents had both died when she was a baby, and the aunt and uncle she lived with were cruel and unkind, not caring whom she spent her time with or her whereabouts. All the women in my family gave birth to girls, so even though I did not have a biological child, for those years I mentored Trudy, it felt like I did.
In one of our first visits, Trudy asked me if there was any way to bring people back from the dead. I told her the truth: maybe. One of my mother’s favorite stories to tell was the one about how my great-great grandmother had tried to resurrect her husband after he passed, but that he wasn’t the same. She had to kill him again. It’s very dark magic, I said. It takes a lot of power that I would never attempt.
That’s such a tragic story, Trudy said. To lose a husband twice.
I couldn’t tell her that my great-great grandmother had killed her husband the first time.
Mr. Barnum visited me five times over the first two weeks of November. Each visit, I pretended to parse his symptoms, and each time I asked him to return with more money.
This morning, with the brumal smell of frost on his coat, he paid me another visit. He had a jaundiced glow about him and smelled of booze. He said he hadn’t slept for three days. He was already going on about the hex, but he mentioned something that caught my attention. He said when he was younger, a witchdoctor used pow-wow magic to care for him when was sick. To my knowledge, the only openly practicing witchdoctor in the county ten years ago was Nicholas Rehmer. My mother and I never interacted with him. Perhaps Mr. Rehmer knew of us, but perhaps he didn’t. Without even thinking, I said he was the one who’d placed a hex on Mr. Barnum. I watched his name squirm between the two of us like some animal caught in a trap.
Mr. Barnum wanted proof. How did I know it was Mr. Rehmer?
I shuffled some papers, stalling. Many years ago, Mother spent a few weeks tending to a patient whose husband had been unfaithful. The patient wanted to know who her husband’s mistress was. Mother, who was living off pennies, risked being labeled a fraud by instructing the patient to look at the front of a dollar bill to see the mistress’s face. People see who they want to see, Mother said.
I asked him to place a dollar face-down. I hovered my hands above it, hummed like a pow-wow witchdoctor. After a minute, I told him that once he turned the dollar over, he would see the face of the man who cursed him.
When Mr. Barnum said the name, I could see cracks forming under his feet, like he was standing on a frozen pond, the ice splintering with each step.
Nicholas Rehmer, he said.
My real last name is Knopp. With each new generation, the women in my family changed our name as a form of protection. My great-great grandmother, Joanna Knopp, began this tradition when she arrived on this land and was burdened with daily headaches. She discovered from word-of-mouth that the land was once home to a tribe called the Susquahannock. They’d been brutally extracted from the mountains and river they called home. Joanna could not ignore the reverberations around her from their murders, the crushing headaches that rendered her weak every day. She begged her husband to move, but he only became enraged with her. He’d always been closed off, even before they’d married in Prussia. But over the years, he’d grown increasingly abusive, and he threatened to chain her to her bed.
Joanna had no other choice. She’d just had a baby, a little girl.
My great-great grandfather had problems sleeping, so Joanna concocted a drink she claimed would help his insomnia. He never woke. The women in my family did what they had to for our lineage to continue, for them to escape brutality. Once the husbands planted their seeds in Knopp women, the men went to sleep indefinitely one way or another.
My mother gave us the name Noll after my father died and we fled to a new town. The name was in honor of Joanna and the mountains she birthed her daughter in, hiding away until it was safe enough for them to return to the river. When I first heard this story, I thought of my father. I didn’t have the faintest idea who he was, of course, but I wondered what his mannerisms were like, if I looked like him. Once, when I was pondering about my family, my mother grabbed my face, and because she could tell what I was thinking, she told me to forget my father. I did as I was told.
But I didn’t stop thinking about my great-great grandfather. Joanna panicking——terrified she’d made a mistake——and reviving him, then almost losing consciousness as he went straight for her throat. How lucky she was to be near the fire poker, the knifed edge going straight through his throat.
I wondered what colors he saw in the in-between stage of life and death. If he could see anything at all or only smell. What it would feel like to be tunneling through the images of your life to that dark abyss, only to find yourself back in a body that has gone cold, those images disseminated in a void that will be harder to reach the second time around. No wonder my great-great grandfather was furious when he came back to life.
“I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.” This from the boy who came with Mr. Barnum. He was maybe seventeen, redheaded, pale, and skinny as a walking stick. He was looking at Nehalennia’s statue on my altar.
Mr. Barnum explained that the boy thought he was also hexed. His parents beat him. A pattern it seemed around these parts, for a family member to maim one of their own. I wanted to tell the boy he was in the hands of another untrustworthy person, but Mr. Barnum was all fists and heavy breathing, asking how to break the curse once and for all.
I started to speak, but a coughing fit overtook me. The boy wouldn’t stop staring at Nehalennia. “Steal a lock of Mr. Rehmer’s hair,” I said, my voice strained, “and his copy of The Long Lost Friend.” The latter was the book that pow-wow witchdoctors followed for healing ailments. “Bury them six feet underground, then pay me another visit and prepare for ceremonial procedures to follow.” I withheld the rest of the plan. I had to make him confess to Gertrude’s murder. I was sure the confession would be easy to reel out of him, but I was wrestling with how to ensure the police would be present.
Mr. Barnum wrote down the instructions. I started coughing again. “She really listens?” Redhead asked, nodding toward Nehalennia.
The answer was complicated, as it was with all gods and goddesses. I could tell that that wasn’t the answer Redhead wanted. He wanted to hear that someone could rid him of his strife.
“Yes, of course,” I said. After they left, I gathered oregano, thyme, lemon, and ginger and placed them into a boiling pot. I dipped my head close and breathed in and out till my cough subsided. In and out.
I suppose the reason why I constantly thought about the revival spell as a child was because my mother let it slip that during my lifetime, I would come to a crossroads with death. My mother didn’t tell me what the choice would be, just that it wouldn’t be a choice solely out of survival, but one that would decide whether I had the Knopp powers in my blood. A true test of my magic, she’d told me. This rite of passage happened rarely. Apparently, Nehalennia had come to my mother in a dream and described that I would have to prove myself. I didn’t necessarily think of myself as a bad egg, but after the dream I found Mother becoming more easily frustrated with me. I broke jars and mixed the wrong ingredients. In my worry, I memorized as many spells as I could, always ready for that future test.
I waited for the prophecy to come to fruition for years and years. As I approached twenty-five, my mother became very sick, coughing up blood and shivering for days on end, unable to sleep or eat or even defecate. None of our homemade remedies or spells were working. After she had a bad seizure, I desperately began flipping through our grimoire, searching for anything that could abate her illness. On page one-hundred and thirteen, I found the resurrection spell, the one Joanna had used on her husband. I held it up to my mother——her spittle crusted on her lower lip and her eyes watering——and asked her, on the verge of tears, if there was any way I could try bringing her back once she was gone. I can’t live without you, I said. How am I supposed to live without you?
My mother was exhausted. She was angry by how quickly her body had diminished in only a few months. She held my hands and said, In my dream, Nehalennia said you weren’t like the other women before you. I’ve seen it, too. Sometimes, I don’t think your power is in the right place.
She died a few days later. I made up excuses for her ruthlessness at the end. She didn’t know what she was saying. She was writhing so badly, like an alive fish whose stomach opened at the glint of a knife.
Absolving her of her scorn did not stop me from memorizing the spell. I’m not sure when I stopped thinking about my mother’s prophecy. It fell in the background of my day-to-day life. But sometimes, I would mutter the words of the spell to myself without thinking. Just begin while I was walking. Hold out my hands. Imagine someone rising from the ground beneath me.
A few days passed without any news from Mr. Barnum. I called him several times, the operator becoming irritated with each repeated call, but his phone only rang and rang.
Early one morning, I set the kettle and looked at my calendar, realizing the full moon was the next night and I hadn’t yet planned a ritual for it. I went out into the cold, my cough shattering my ribs, and my knees still stiff from my bed. At the line in the market, list of herbs in my hand, I caught what the couple ahead of me was chattering about: a mother and father in Philadelphia were being put to trial for killing their baby. But the interesting twist——and, yes, they had said, “twist”——was that the wife hadn’t touched the baby at all. It had been her husband’s doing. He’d smothered the baby, but he was adamant his wife had given him a potion to do so. That she hated the baby, didn’t want to go near her, so she magicked him to kill their child. He’d then nearly beat his wife to death after, but that was also a part of the spell——to make him look more guilty. A cough escaped from me, and the couple looked over their shoulders and just as quickly looked away, frightened. They quit their conversation. I couldn’t wait to place my order. Dizziness overtook me. I went home, shoved my face in a pillow, willed myself to bleat with anger, but nothing would come out. How could someone use witchcraft, something I believed to be so sacred, as an excuse to murder their wife and child?
I removed my head from the pillow. The last money bag Mr. Barnum had left was still on my kitchen table.
I could not erase what had been inflicted upon me or Trudy, but I could try to break the next cycle of devastation before Mr. Barnum placed it on another woman. No more fleeing from the men who petrified me. Mr. Barnum would be the deer who would run too late when my bullet entered his pithless jugulars.
On the morning of the night of the full moon, I made my way to Mr. Barnum’s house. Anger ransacked my body as I knocked on his door. I thought about Trudy shivering as she waited to be let inside. I needed to go with Mr. Barnum to Mr. Rehmer’s to make sure he went through with the plan. He was dragging his feet, and I couldn’t wait any longer.
A coughing fit beat me when Mr. Barnum opened the door. “Mr. Rehmer has put a hex on all of York County,” I sputtered.
Mr. Barnum wouldn’t look at me. I suddenly wondered if he was afraid. He kept twisting the doorknob, each fidget suggesting that, yes, he was. “You’re frightened,” I said, purposefully not framing it as a question.
His face went hard, serious. I knew if I called him cowardly, he’d rise to meet the challenge. “We’ll break the hex tonight,” he said.
“I’m coming with you.”
He paused. I could see what he was holding back in his throat: Why the hell would we bring an old hag like you?
I offered an idea: I was sick, and we could ask Mr. Rehmer to heal me. I could distract him while Mr. Barnum plucked off a hair from Mr. Rehmer’s coat and Redhead stole The Long Lost Friend.
Mr. Barnum looked like he wanted to argue. Again, I asked if he was a coward. I thought he would hit me. He curled his hands into fists. “We’ll pick you up at eight o’clock,” he said.
On the way over in Mr. Barnum’s Model T that night, I saw Nehalennia everywhere. It was lightly snowing, and the moon casted a glow on the flakes, and out the window, there was the goddess trailing behind us. She took the form of a young woman who looked familiar: hair long and silken; her body beautiful, strong, untouched by the world. Not Trudy. Not someone I necessarily knew. But still familiar. I swore she was in the trees carrying a nautical lantern, the kind you attach to a boat. She never strayed from my sight for long. Her skin and bones blurred, as water does running through a hand.
Mr. Barnum stopped in front of a tall, skinny brown house. So dark it nearly blended into the night. Three floors with a porch that wrapped around its front. As Mr. Barnum locked the car, unease lurched in my gut. Something didn’t feel right. I imagined that this was what Joanna felt when she first stepped onto her property. I sensed something rotten leeching into the foundation.
Redhead was sweating. The front door opened. Mr. Rehmer had a friendly face. Full lips, big nose, and even bigger ears. “John,” he said, but he looked from me to Redhead, surprised.
“Nicholas,” said Mr. Barnum, “I know we haven’t spoken in quite some time. My friend here has recently fallen ill, and it seems nothing is bringing her back to health. I recall your assistance to my family throughout the years, and I was wondering if your services may still be available?”
Mr. Rehmer was flustered. “That’s so kind of you to think of me. But I’m essentially retired now. I don’t know if I’ll be much help——”
Mr. Barnum took a step forward, pushing Mr. Rehmer inside. “I will pay you well.” He then waved his hand at me. “This is…”
“Nellie,” I said. I waited to see if Mr. Rehmer recognized my first name, but nothing flashed across his face.
He shook my hand. “Please, ma’am, come in.”
Mr. Rehmer’s house was astoundingly warm and sparse. Only a fireplace with a table and a chair. No pictures on the wall, and the stark tickle of dust. Some garden tools leaned against the table, a rake and a hoe. “Trying to get the last of the vegetables,” he said. He patted Redhead on the arm. “I have a boy who comes around here a few times a week to help me with the farm. If you’re ever looking for extra work or want to learn more about farming——”
“I live on a farm,” said Redhead quickly. Mr. Rehmer moved his hands to his pants, awkwardly rubbing the fabric and chuckling a bit, perhaps to gloss over the boy’s discomfort.
We sat at the table, and Mr. Rehmer pulled out a book from the shelf over the stove. The Long Lost Friend. Redhead and Mr. Barnum looked at each other. Mr. Rehmer also went into a pantry in the kitchen and took out a medical bag. “Let’s check your temperature.” He stuck a thermometer into my mouth.
The three men began chatting about their crops. The house looked as though no one else resided there, and Mr. Rehmer mentioned his wife had recently taken his daughter for a visit to her sister’s place, his voice catching in way that suggested they hadn’t left on good terms. He checked the thermometer. “A hundred point one.” He opened The Long Lost Friend to a section that read, How to banish the Fever.
“Write the following words upon a paper and wrap it up in knot-grass, and then tie it upon the navel of the person who has the fever,” Mr. Rehmer read. The words were “Potmat Sineat.” Absolute nonsense.
“How long will it take to work?” I asked.
“Within a few hours. Just have someone watch you.” He began writing down the words, but Mr. Barnum tried to reach for the book. “You have to be careful,” said Mr. Rehmer, holding it close to his chest. “It’s quite old.”
“Let me see it,” Mr. Barnum said. He closed in on Mr. Rehmer, the focus gone from my illness and placed on Mr. Barnum’s intimidation. Mr. Rehmer could sense it. He asked Mr. Barnum if we could please leave. “I have an early morning tomorrow,” he said. Mr. Rehmer reached out to gently push Mr. Barnum away, and Mr. Barnum flinched. “Don’t touch me,” he roared.
Everything fell apart. Mr. Barnum instructed Redhead to tie up Mr. Rehmer. Redhead trembled but extracted rope from his belt. Mr. Rehmer thrashed on the floor, screaming and begging for help as the two other men held him down. I feared they would hurt Mr. Rehmer, whom I had never intended to harm. I tried pulling Mr. Barnum off, but he knocked me over. I went to pull him off again, telling him to stop, that this was going against our plan, but he pushed me once more, this time so hard that when I hit the floorboards, hot liquid came out of my left eyebrow onto my cheek. I tried to stand but was woozy and collapsed. Mr. Rehmer was screaming. Mr. Barnum shouted over him, “So you’re protecting him?”
I tried protesting. “We are here for the book.” My tongue felt like cotton. “Not to——”
“He is hexing people! Ruining our lives. I should have known not to trust you, evil witch.”
The slap I had been wanting to give him for months came out of me hard on his face. All three men stopped their fighting, momentarily in shock. “That was for Trudy,” I said, breathless.
I thought revealing my knowledge about their relationship would frighten him. I stood, feeling empowered.
Mr. Barnum swung at my stomach. For a few moments, I was no longer a person, just stars of agony. I came to as I heard him say, “If you don’t shut up, you will be in the ground, too.”
My breath came out ragged, stinging my sides. Something within me was broken, but still, I hissed out, “You are nothing but a small, wretched man.”
Mr. Barnum became an animal, all fangs and saliva, and suddenly he was upon me, hands on my throat, and I couldn’t breathe, and the same purple lakes blotted on Trudy’s arm now swarmed my vision, and I heard Redhead yelling, “I can’t hold him——” and Mr. Barnum screaming, “Do something! Anything!” and for a moment, Nehalennia was beside me, holding my arm, but she disappeared at the sound of a branch falling into a river——wet and heavy.
Mr. Barnum let me go. I couldn’t move my neck. My body felt like it was trying to pulse its way out of amber, like my skin had been stripped and I was all bone. Blood dripped from Mr. Rehmer’s head onto the floorboards, like me, but he wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed. After what felt like ages, Mr. Barnum leaned close to his mouth. “He’s still breathing,” he said.
Redhead threw the piece of wood that he must have struck Mr. Rehmer with across the room. “I only hit him because you told me to. What are we going to do?” He shook.
“He’ll report us to the police,” Mr. Barnum said. “I’ll finish him.”
Redhead’s face went white. Mr. Barnum killed Mr. Rehmer the same way he’d tried to kill me, his hands around his limp neck, teeth gritted.
The floorboards sounded like fire crackling. Of course, that was what Mr. Barnum intended to make of them. He snapped them from their nails. I struggled to sit upright.
“Nobody can find their bodies,” Mr. Barnum said. Bodies plural. He ordered Redhead to find some kerosene. I moved to Mr. Rehmer’s side, pressed my ear to his mouth and chest. Silence. He was dead. I’d inadvertently killed him. Another man dead by the hands of a Knopp woman.
Mr. Barnum turned to me. He kicked me back onto my side. Redhead returned and splashed the liquid on Mr. Rehmer’s body. He looked remorseful, like he wanted to tell me to run.
“Grab the book,” Mr. Barnum said to Redhead. “Light this place up.” He knelt close to my face. “The River Witch,” he said. “What a joke.” He wrapped his hands around my throat, and I tried to push him off, but my arms were jelly, and somewhere in the farthest corner of my mind, I unlocked a crate and slid inside it. There was my mother’s bedroom, her sheets smelling of myrrh. Mother on her side, head bent over her bed into a bowl, retching. The words of the resurrection spell in the book on my lap, my fingers tracing the curves of the ys and the ms, me muttering their syllables under my breath, thinking of a chest buoying——a chest that looked like Mr. Rehmer’s——Mr. Rehmer’s hand on the flank of a cow, the sound of the animal slowly moaning, as though being gutted, his fingers cracking against rigor mortis, his jaw unhinging, his glassy eyes blinking, his fingernails, hair, skin, teeth——
Air whooshed back into my body. I fell to the floor and coughed and coughed. Redhead yelled, horrified, and the front door opened and closed. My vision slowly returned. Mr. Barnum was pushing Mr. Rehmer off him (Mr. Rehmer, alive!), screaming, for the flames had engulfed Mr. Rehmer like a wick and were spreading to Mr. Barnum.
An undulation near the table. Nehalennia crested beside the hoe. With the last ounce of strength I could muster, I crawled over to it and went back to Mr. Barnum, who was curled on the floor in agony, Mr. Rehmer on top of him. I was so weak I could barely lift the hoe. Mr. Barnum’s eyes flashed at me with desperation, and I thought of Trudy, if she ever even got a moment to beg or if he had just shot her before she could speak. I brought the flat side of the blade down onto Mr. Barnum’s head. My lungs swelled with smoke and despite Mr. Barnum grabbing my leg——the smell of my skin burning hitting me before the excruciating pain——I did not stop clubbing the hoe against his skull, a branch hitting water again and again. The fire felt like it was leaping from his body into me. I was a blaze, reddening to Mr. Barnum’s cries, echoing into an inferno. I hit him until the smoke became too much. He wasn’t moving. Neither was Mr. Rehmer. He’d wilted to the floor, the fire on his body dwindling.
Something cool touched my arm. Nehalennia, pulling on my elbow. For a moment, I forgot about how much I was hurting. Her concerned face looked like my mother’s but also not. She took me to a window that had cracked open, the glass cutting my arms, but I didn’t care. I fell into the snow, the fire where Mr. Barnum had clutched me snuffing out in the ice, and what I remembered last was the name of my great-great grandmother and wondering if Nehalennia had taken her face as her own.
If this was a story I was telling Trudy, she would ask, “Was Mr. Rehmer really dead? Or did you somehow bring him back without even speaking?”
I wouldn’t be able to tell her I didn’t have an answer. I wouldn’t be vile in my response, like my mother had been to me when she died. I would try to have her believe that anything could happen, that not everything was explicable, like I’d imagined as a child.
I would tell her a story about what happens after a woman kills a man. The part of the story I never really heard from my mother nor she from hers. I’d always wanted to hear about how the Knopp women rebuilt themselves in the wake of their husband’s deaths, how they took sands and dust and rocks and secreted a new shell.
The story would go like this: No sounds at first. Nehalennia helped me out of the snow, back to my feet. Slowly, the roar of the world came back. Everything sounded like I had fallen asleep in a bath. The house, a hundred feet away, had gone dark. Nehalennia, her body muted in color——hair gray, eyes gray, gray legs that seemed to paddle in the air. I would tell Trudy I expected to see blood on the ground where I had lain, but there was just an imprint of my body, and as Nehalennia led me further into the forest, footprints appeared. Small bare feet. Only a few, then more and more. They came from all directions. Dozens of them. And my feet joined theirs because I wasn’t cold. I couldn’t feel anything.
I would tell Trudy how Mother reminded me often that covens were dying out, but that she must have been wrong. In the distance, humans howled. Women howled. Their voices detonating into cackles. I wouldn’t tell Trudy that I stopped, afraid. How embarrassing, afraid of my own kind. But I would tell her that Nehalennia was gentle with me, said they were all waiting, and that maybe someone was there who I knew. “Me?” Trudy would ask, and I would say, “I think so. I think anything is possible. I think you are always running ahead, and I’m always meeting you somewhere new.” And maybe Trudy would ask of the women howling and laughing, say, “So, they are making all that racket because they had let go of what they once believed in? Of their old lives? Of what they once clung to as true about the world?”
I would tell her how Nehalennia took my hand, and I felt something denser than water. “What can be touched,” I would say to Trudy, “what can be held, is what the faraway howling is all about.”
Casey Reiland’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, HAD, trampset, On the Seawall, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Wyoming. She resides in Somerville, MA, and you can find more of her work at caseyreiland.com or her latest musings at @caseyreiland.bsky.social. You can judge her all you want, but her favorite revenge movie is Face/Off.
