Month: April 2012

This Sunday was an awful lot like last Sunday, except this week I wrote this. It was based on the prompt that is that first sentence, a separate piece supplied by each of the three of us. The rest is then just me:

When she opened the door, the doctor lost what was left of his mind, and the witch turned into a raven.

“Don’t just stand there,” said Persephone. “Help me get him to the bed before she gets back.”

Her sister did not move. She stared, dumbly, out the window through which the impossible black bird had flown. Hadn’t it just been five minutes before that they were sitting down to nothing more remarkable than a warm cup of tea? They had been chatting, hadn’t they, Dr. Gregory and the witch? They called her a witch in the village, but obviously it wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. She was just the old woman who had taken them in. She and the good doctor had been chatting, ever so politely, about the two girls, about a newly found relative in the city, about a small inheritance when the girls came of age, about releasing them both from the witch’s care. The witch had been smiling, maybe whispering something beneath her breath, but she often did that, often mumbled strange phrases neither of them understood, or read aloud passages from her old books, and mumbles and pages didn’t mean she was really a —

“Estella!” Persephone shouted. “Are you listening? We have to help Dr. Gregory before that awful hag-bitch returns!”

It was the profanity that snapped Estella back. “What?” she cried. “Oh. Right. Is he — ?”

“She opened a door in his mind,” Persephone said, “and he was fool enough to walk through it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Estella. “They were just having tea. And then Aunt Baba — ”

“She isn’t our aunt!” spat Persephone. “She’s an awful hag Father made a terrible wager with before he died. Dr. Gregory was here to finally pay off that debt and set us free. Now are you going to help me or not? Grab his legs!”

Estella bent over and grabbed Dr. Gregory’s boots in her hands. The last week had seen heavy rains, and the man’s feet were caked in grayish brown mud that stained her fingers and dress, but she said nothing as she and Persephone carried him to one of the two beds in the corner of the cabin. They laid him down as gently as they could, but even for a man as gaunt as Dr. Gregory, rail-thin and none too tall, Estella found it heavier work than she was used to. Her chores were more often sweeping out or re-lighting the fire, or gathering herbs and roots for the witch’s broths from the woods behind the house. Persephone showed no struggle, but then, her sister also held the man around the shoulders, where there was no mud to dirty her hands.

“We have to find the book with the spell that she used,” Persephone told her. “If we’re going to undo what she did, we have to act quick. She won’t have flown too far past the village, not with him still here.”