The Witch's Daughter [Short Story]

There was a witch woman who chained her daughter to the dogwood tree in her garden. The witch woman said, “Because you are my daughter, I own you. And you will never leave my garden.”

The daughter, a shy and pale girl with no magic in her, grew comfortable over the years with the circumference of her chain. She knew just how far she could go in the garden without pulling the chain taut, and no further. And though her mother’s garden was full of poison and snakes - a witch’s garden, with herbs that looked like the faces of villainous old men, and trees with branches like crumbling citadels - she still knew of a place within the length of her chain where she could lay down on certain nights so that the moon sliced across her stomach.

She lifted her hands up so that the wind blew through the crumbling citadels, carrying black and purple spores from her mother’s poison, and brushed against her fingers. And though the daughter did not enjoy the company of the men who came to visit her mother for potions, or the books the mother left out in a nearby hollow trunk for her daughter to read, or thoughts of the future, or even her own self, she did enjoy the feeling of wind, however toxic, blowing against her fingers.

The mother often sat just outside of the reach of the chain, her big smoke wings undulating in the wind, her black hair bristling like spikes against her shoulders. A shadow rested across half of her face like a mask, or a cancerous sore, and whenever the daughter said something that displeased the mother, the shadow would spasm. And it would grow. And stretch.

“One day perhaps I will marry you to a warlord,” the witch woman said. “Or I will keep you here, so that after I am dead you may continue to grow my poisons and sell them to my customers. Or I will liquidate you, and turn your essence into a third wing on my back.”

The daughter, who again, I must mention had no magic in her, would stretch her back against the dogwood tree as she listened to her mother speak. And she would try her best to not listen to her mother speak, even though she could go on for hours. The daughter would imagine things she’d never seen - mountains made of ocean spray, or white eagles, or shadows that sparked explosive in daylight. She’d imagine turning herself into dandelion fluff, so that she may slip out of the loop of chain and float on wind currents. And sometimes it helped, in moments her mother’s voice became a steady, pacing stream that the daughter could pass right over.

But most of the time, because nobody else spoke to the daughter or even knew she existed, the witch’s voice would be like a deeper poison, infiltrating the daughter’s bones. It was a malignant growth more insidious than the thorns the witch used to make men fall asleep forever, or the ashy powders that when breathed in would transform their fingers into bloody, ragged strips.

I don’t even need to tell you what else she said, because all witches say the same things.

I don’t even need to tell you that what the witch said seeped through the girl until it began to define her.

The daughter grew and the chain grew tighter.

The daughter never wondered why she’d been chained to the dogwood, that fragile frail tree with the slender, crepe like trunk, and not the sturdy oak or the willow or the dead tree struck by lightning that’d been transformed, millions of years ago, into petrified wood. Because it only needed to be strong enough to contain her, and she, who had no magic in her, was clearly a weak creature.

She accepted her eventual subsumation with a sort of relief, and stopped dreaming of dandelion fluff and foam.

But on one night, on a rare occasion when the mother did not come out to the garden to visit her, the daughter crept out to her usual patch of moonlight and her bare feet drove through the grass, crumbling dirt, into a hidden cache beneath the garden. And she knelt at the newly created hole for several minutes, her breath coming hard and slow and labored, like by breathing too fast she’d summon her mother to the hole and her mother would punish her. But the minutes passed, and the mother did not appear with her black wings and spikes and smoke. So slowly, belabored, the daughter pushed her hands through the cool moss and the dirt and grasped the hidden object

It was a small glowing seed, dirty golden and glittering, and when it hit the moonlight it seemed to glow from within, and lit the girl’s hands so that they sparked with light.

The daughter heard a rustling behind her, and she thought her heart might burst. Quickly, she shoved the seed back in its cache and buried it in dirt. Though when she found the rustling was nothing but night noise, and not her mother hauling across the universe to hurt her, she was too frightened to unearth the crystal again. Instead she slept on top of the crystal, her stomach pressed into the dirt, her legs splayed out, and dreamed of the seedwhispering to her in the language of silver stratum, in words that weren’t quite words:

I love you in silver I love you in glow I love you.

She did not know who would’ve hidden the seed there. Nobody comes to rescue the daughter of witches, because they are broken in by the length of their chains. And most of them become witches themselves, hardened and winged, static noise where their speech used to be. They are broken by who they’re supposed to be, backs split apart and filled with black stones and blacker mirrors. Even if you did rescue a girl like that, she’d sulk in your shadow. She’d swallow the bleach under your sink, or scream during sex like she was being eaten from the inside out, some invisible little worm.

And on the subsequent nights her mother sat out with her in the garden, hissing her whip-words, her anger words, her wings hovering and vibrating turning the oxygen around her head into smoke, baring her fangs and her bristling tongue. But the girl found she could not make sense of the witch’s words anymore, for they were being replaced by the thrumming hum of the seed underneath her feet.

I love you in gold.

And the words became noise, so that the girl closed her eyes and she smiled, nodding off, the memory of the shape of the crystal cool against her fingers, cooler than the soft breeze, than the soft pressure of moonlight. And even when the witch screamed at her for not paying attention, the daughter could hear nothing but:

I love you.

I love you in glow.

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