At the witches’ house I sit in the waiting room along with everyone else who needs to see a witch. We leaf through back issues of Sports Illustrated and Mademoiselle and Children So Cute You Could Just Strangle Them Monthly. Upstairs there is screaming, as if someone’s being ripped in half, and horrible, clinical smells, like a thousand apes trapped in the world’s worst zoo, but for a purpose, and, now and then, underneath it all, the piteous cries of the sort of person who always loses their nerve at the last moment and begs for it all to stop.
The woman next to me has her red pen out, she’s making corrections and circling the noses of people in the magazines, people she admires she tells me. “What do you think of this nose?” she asks. “It’s sort of like a ski jump; that’s sexy, isn’t it?”
Like the water spilling down from a tub where a person is dying comes the name of the next woman up. “Dolores,” the voice says, gently, so gently. “Dolores Crane?” Grimly, Dolores packs her knitting away and ascends the stairs.
“Best of luck, Dolores,” we all say, and soon we hear her begin to shriek.
“Good, serves her right,” we all think, as she goes on and on and on and then dramatically stops.
Meanwhile, that woman next to me is crossing out the photography credits, filling in the white teeth of all the grinning faces so it looks like their mouths are full of blood, tearing out last year’s poison recipes from a small pile of back issues of Mademoiselle, leaving only useless antidotes. “You should try it,” she says, after handing me a crumpled ball like it’s some sort of present I’m going to need before long.
Like I didn’t already know recipes are for cowards.
“Obsessive acts are great for getting the magic started; plus it really calms the nerves,” she says. “If you’re diligent I’m told the witches will even give you what you actually want.”
She looks at my twice broken nose and everything that implies.
“But we all know what you want,” she says.
Everyone there looks at me when she mentions that, like they’re all not there for exactly the same reason. Like if they each already had an army of monkeys, then their lives would be perfect. They wouldn’t have to ask anybody for squat: they’d just take and do and fuck and fuck up whatever, and all the people in their way would love and respect them and complement them on their beauty and their wit.
Just one pinky in the air, one little monkey chirp, and you know who would just fall over themselves. They’d say, “With a nose like that, of course you can keep the keys to the house!” They’d back off quietly.
They certainly wouldn’t dare ruin, for starters, page by page, all the books and magazines you treasure.
“Can you handle it? Getting what you want?” that woman sitting so close to me asks, her face a network of fine scars, like that of a recently retired professional boxer, someone with power who thinks she knows what she is doing. Someone who knows I’m always going to say yes to her.
She enjoys watching me struggle.
All the people in the room enjoy watching each other struggle.
All day long, name after name after name gets called to climb those steps. Someone’s going to get that army of monkeys. Someone’s going to want it badly enough.
“Can you take it?” she asks, like I’m her child, like I hadn’t already been featured in the July issue of one of those magazines, not so very long ago.
Like this is a lesson.
But I’ve got something special in my purse, and it isn’t knitting. And if the little monkey breaks my nose every time I reach for her, make her do what I want, so be it.
And when I get a few hundred more? Well, little miss Hester over here better watch where she puts that hand of hers.
“You look so cute when you’re seething,” the woman says, leaning closer. “You should get started on one of those atlases over there, before your name gets called. That is, if you really want what you want, witch.”
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s writing can be found in X-Ray, Bull, The Woolf, Midway, Hex, and The Offing, among others. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. His most recent collection is Animal Children (Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press). He lives in Barcelona, where he’s the fiction editor of Mercurius. https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg. His favorite work exploring revenge is Bleed Out, by the Mountain Goats.
