Eye of Newt
Barbara Brockway
If you asked me if I believe in witches, I’d lie and say “of course not,” laughing the question off. All the while I’d be holding my fingers crossed behind my back.
But there’s no other way to explain what happened to my daughter, Libby, and me. We don’t talk about that day, then again, we don’t talk about a lot of things. All the stuff that led up to us meeting the witch, what I think of as our Bad Year, maybe it’s better we leave it in the past.
It wasn’t like it was some big horror movie encounter, a climatic scene in a mountain top castle, boiling caldrons and lightning zaps zinging around the room. Our witch wasn’t a hunch-backed crone with stringy hair and black ragged clothing. Ours wore purple scrubs and Nike sneakers . . .
“Why is it always freezing in hospitals?” Libby spits out disdainfully.
Her whine sets my teeth on edge. I can’t remember when she didn’t speak like that, these teen years seem to have started too early and are lasting too long. I resist the urge to shoot back that if she were wearing longer shorts, she might be warmer. Pale and shivering, a big gash on her forehead, she looks so vulnerable on the paper-covered gurney.
I take a big breath and the antiseptic smell sours in my mouth. We’ve spent way too much time in hospitals lately, my daughter and I.
“I told you I didn’t want to go hiking,” she grumbles.
How stupid I was to think spending a day in nature could be healing, help bridge the gap that has grown over the past year. Instead of a happy mother-daughter bonding experience, we’re waiting on x-ray results after Libby slipped off a steep trail.
I notice her hands tucked under her skinny legs. She’s always hiding her hands these days, trying to conceal her warts from the rest of the world.
I know, warts and witches, a bad cliché. These warts had appeared sometime during our Bad Year, after Tim was diagnosed as terminal. I wasn’t quite sure when, I was too preoccupied with pills and forms and dreadful plans.
“Libby, what’s that on your hand?” I had asked sharply. She tried to pull away from me, but I held her arm firmly.
“Mom, you’re hurting me,” she retorted, her eyes flashing. “It’s just a couple of weird bumps.”
The sprinkling of pink mounds soon grew into a craggy, black speckled mountain range spread across the backs of her hands, over her knuckles and woven between her fingers.
“Warts are a virus, they’ll go away on their own,” her pediatrician said, clicking his laptop shut. “They just have to run their course.”
“Easy for him to say,” Libby grumbled on the ride home. My long-legged colt of a daughter, her body poised on the edge of adulthood. I thought about what I was doing when I was thirteen. Not wondering if my parents’ marriage would fail. Not waiting for my father to die. When I was thirteen I was listening to loud music, not my parents having loud, wicked arguments. When I was thirteen I wasn’t listening to those arguments quiet into an uneasy funk after a doctor told my dad he’d be dead in matter of months.
“Try some over the counter wart drops,” the pediatrician said after the warts had stubbornly refused to subside.
“We can try freezing them off,” he said the third time we came to see him. “But I’ll warn you, there’s some discomfort during the procedure.”
“Discomfort, my ass,” Libby cried bitterly, leaning back in the seat with tears forced out of tightly closed eyes, her bandaged hands resting in her lap. I didn’t bother to admonish her for bad language. When we took off the gauze, the warts were dusted white, like snow had fallen on Libby’s mini-mountain range. After a few days the warts had reverted back to their usual crusty pink and black clusters. The snow melted, but the warts remained.
The screech of the privacy curtain being yanked aside brought me back to the present. A small blond woman entered carrying a tray with supplies. She moved swiftly, her shoes making soft squeaks on the linoleum. She gently brushed back Libby’s hair to better see the forehead wound.
“Now, what snapped ’round and got ya?” she asked softly in a thick north Georgia accent. She leaned forward a little, staring intently into Libby’s eyes.
“She fell off the side of the mountain,” I said. The nurse jerked her head in my direction, as if noticing my presence in the small space for the first time. Her green eyes bored into me. My answer felt inadequate, as if I hadn’t understood the question.
Her head swiveled back toward the patient and she began dabbing the gash on Libby’s forehead with antiseptic.
“The doc’ll be in right directly with the x-rays,” she said, glancing briefly at me.
I nodded, but she had already turned her intense stare toward Libby’s wide eyes.
Libby shifted on the gurney, the paper rustling loudly. She pulled one of her hands out from under her leg to hold her long hair out of the nurse’s way.
The nurse caught Libby’s hand and pulled it close, examining the warts closely.
“How long you had these?” she demanded, shifting her gaze to Libby’s face.
“Like, a year,” said Libby, softly. The whine was gone.
“We’ve tried everything,” I interjected, then immediately regretted it.
The nurse pivoted her face to mine lightning quick, then away again, as if to silence me.
The nurse took two quick steps back and yanked the privacy curtain closed.
She leaned in close to Libby and asked in a conspiratorial tone.
“You got a coin on ya?”
She said it with such authority, I pulled my purse off my shoulder and started digging for my wallet.
“Not you,” the nurse snapped, never taking her eyes off Libby’s. “It has to be hers.”
“My backpack,” Libby said, pointing at her bag slumped against the wall, still gazing at the nurse.
I snatched up the bag and handed it to Libby, who blindly rooted around until she pulled out a grubby quarter. The pack spilled onto the floor as she handed the coin to the nurse. I made no move to catch it.
The nurse began to rub the coin over the backs of Libby’s hands. She murmured softly, unintelligibly.
All the sounds of the hospital faded away as I focused intently on the nurse. There was an electricity in the small space, a sense of urgency. I didn’t feel like Libby was in danger, but it didn’t feel like she was entirely safe, either. I could have demanded that the nurse stop, but it was like watching a car accident in progress; things seem to move in slow motion, but you’re powerless to react until you hear the crash.
“You have to believe the bad time is over,” she said clearly to Libby when she was done rubbing. “You have to let go of all that.”
She folded the coin into Libby’s left hand, closing my daughter’s fingers over it.
“Put this in your pocket. When you get home bury it in the backyard before you go inside. Don’t let nobody see where.”
The screech of the privacy curtain broke the spell and the three of us whirled our heads as a young, bearded doctor absentmindedly walked into the room looking at his laptop. He startled a little when he laid eyes on the nurse. Or was that my imagination?
“Uh, Mrs. Conroy?” he stammered, shifting his eyes in my direction. “Uh, yeah, there’s no break. Libby just has a sprain. We’ll wrap it and if she keeps it elevated for a day or two…”
His words trailed off. He cleared his throat, nodded to the nurse and began to back out of the room.
“Uh, I’ll clear her for release, you can go as soon as you’re, uh, finished.”
He was like he couldn’t leave quickly enough.
The nurse was plastering a big piece of gauze on Libby’s head. She then shifted to wrapping an Ace bandage around my daughter’s thin ankle, humming softly. Criss, cross, over and around, I was mesmerized by her hands fluttering around Libby’s leg.
When she finished, she tapped Libby’s ankle softly.
“You’ll be right as rain in no time.”
Right as rain. My mom used to say that to me when I was little.
The nurse grabbed the metal tray, now littered with torn paper wrappers and pieces of leftover gauze.
“Remember what I said, Libby,” she called softly over her shoulder and she was gone, the squeak squeak of her shoes getting softer until we couldn’t hear it anymore.
I didn’t say a word, just gathered up Libby’s backpack and put her arm over my shoulder as she limped out of the ER. Neither of us spoke the whole way home.
When we pulled in the driveway it was starting to grow dark. Libby opened the passenger side door and hopped to the side of the garage. She grabbed a shovel and, using it as crutch, started hopping out into the darkness.
I almost called to her crossly. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to break your neck hopping around in the dark. Almost. But there had been a weird feeling over me ever since that nurse had demanded the coin. Instead I turned and went into the house and made us sandwiches.
Libby hopped into the house about fifteen minutes later and washed her hands in the kitchen sink before sitting across from me and digging into her sandwich. No wrinkling of the nose over the egg salad, no complaints about the wheat bread or my diagonal cut. It was so quiet you could hear the clock on the stove ticking over our soft chewing sounds. As I rinsed our plates I heard Libby hopping softly toward me, then felt her skinny arms wrap around my waist. I turned and planted a quick kiss on the top of her head. She looked squarely into my eyes and I saw a spark there I hadn’t seen since I can’t remember when. She hopped away toward her room without saying anything.
That night I didn’t exactly pray, but I hoped. Hoped with all my heart for a miracle, for some peace, for the curse to be broken.
“Mom!”
Her call woke me from dreaming about the two of us hiking through a dense forest. She sounded excited; it wasn’t the ‘mom’ I was used to lately. Not ‘mom I need a ride’, ‘mom you’re being so mean’, ‘mom where is my uniform.’ It was a fresh ‘mom,’ one I didn’t remember ever hearing before.
She burst through the door, beaming, no sign of a limp.
“Look!” she said, thrusting her hands toward me.
I held her hands in mine. There was no trace of the warts. The skin was baby soft, unscarred.
“What in the…” I started to say, but Libby silenced me with a laugh, shaking her head, her eyes flashing.
There can be a lot of unspoken things between a mother and daughter; maybe a witch encounter should be one of them. All I know is Libby’s warts vanished and the two of us put all the hurt and pain of our Bad Year behind us.
Was it all a bad dream; the crash of my marriage, Tim’s death, the pox that erupted on my beautiful daughter?
Remember how the nurse told Libby not to tell anyone where she buried the coin? But you know teens; they can be careless. The next time I was pulling weeds in the garden I noticed the small mound of freshly dug earth behind the pink dogwood tree. A few weeks later I saw a decent sized bunch of flowers growing from the spot. The blooms are champagne flutes of dark purple, spiky petals. If my flower identifying skills and the internet are correct, it’s Belladonna. You know, like witches use.
Witches, warts, spells. Crazy, right? There has to be a logical explanation. Me, I just steer clear of any conversation about witches. And that spot in the yard.
Barbara Brockway's work has been published in various literary magazines and she’s been honored to win several awards, for both fiction and essays. She lives in Chieri, Italy with her husband and is seeking representation for her recently completed commercial fiction manuscript. When not writing, Barbara can be found biking in the shadow of the snow-covered Alps or relaxing in an outdoor cafe. She can be found at barbarabrockway.com
But there’s no other way to explain what happened to my daughter, Libby, and me. We don’t talk about that day, then again, we don’t talk about a lot of things. All the stuff that led up to us meeting the witch, what I think of as our Bad Year, maybe it’s better we leave it in the past.
It wasn’t like it was some big horror movie encounter, a climatic scene in a mountain top castle, boiling caldrons and lightning zaps zinging around the room. Our witch wasn’t a hunch-backed crone with stringy hair and black ragged clothing. Ours wore purple scrubs and Nike sneakers . . .
“Why is it always freezing in hospitals?” Libby spits out disdainfully.
Her whine sets my teeth on edge. I can’t remember when she didn’t speak like that, these teen years seem to have started too early and are lasting too long. I resist the urge to shoot back that if she were wearing longer shorts, she might be warmer. Pale and shivering, a big gash on her forehead, she looks so vulnerable on the paper-covered gurney.
I take a big breath and the antiseptic smell sours in my mouth. We’ve spent way too much time in hospitals lately, my daughter and I.
“I told you I didn’t want to go hiking,” she grumbles.
How stupid I was to think spending a day in nature could be healing, help bridge the gap that has grown over the past year. Instead of a happy mother-daughter bonding experience, we’re waiting on x-ray results after Libby slipped off a steep trail.
I notice her hands tucked under her skinny legs. She’s always hiding her hands these days, trying to conceal her warts from the rest of the world.
I know, warts and witches, a bad cliché. These warts had appeared sometime during our Bad Year, after Tim was diagnosed as terminal. I wasn’t quite sure when, I was too preoccupied with pills and forms and dreadful plans.
“Libby, what’s that on your hand?” I had asked sharply. She tried to pull away from me, but I held her arm firmly.
“Mom, you’re hurting me,” she retorted, her eyes flashing. “It’s just a couple of weird bumps.”
The sprinkling of pink mounds soon grew into a craggy, black speckled mountain range spread across the backs of her hands, over her knuckles and woven between her fingers.
“Warts are a virus, they’ll go away on their own,” her pediatrician said, clicking his laptop shut. “They just have to run their course.”
“Easy for him to say,” Libby grumbled on the ride home. My long-legged colt of a daughter, her body poised on the edge of adulthood. I thought about what I was doing when I was thirteen. Not wondering if my parents’ marriage would fail. Not waiting for my father to die. When I was thirteen I was listening to loud music, not my parents having loud, wicked arguments. When I was thirteen I wasn’t listening to those arguments quiet into an uneasy funk after a doctor told my dad he’d be dead in matter of months.
“Try some over the counter wart drops,” the pediatrician said after the warts had stubbornly refused to subside.
“We can try freezing them off,” he said the third time we came to see him. “But I’ll warn you, there’s some discomfort during the procedure.”
“Discomfort, my ass,” Libby cried bitterly, leaning back in the seat with tears forced out of tightly closed eyes, her bandaged hands resting in her lap. I didn’t bother to admonish her for bad language. When we took off the gauze, the warts were dusted white, like snow had fallen on Libby’s mini-mountain range. After a few days the warts had reverted back to their usual crusty pink and black clusters. The snow melted, but the warts remained.
The screech of the privacy curtain being yanked aside brought me back to the present. A small blond woman entered carrying a tray with supplies. She moved swiftly, her shoes making soft squeaks on the linoleum. She gently brushed back Libby’s hair to better see the forehead wound.
“Now, what snapped ’round and got ya?” she asked softly in a thick north Georgia accent. She leaned forward a little, staring intently into Libby’s eyes.
“She fell off the side of the mountain,” I said. The nurse jerked her head in my direction, as if noticing my presence in the small space for the first time. Her green eyes bored into me. My answer felt inadequate, as if I hadn’t understood the question.
Her head swiveled back toward the patient and she began dabbing the gash on Libby’s forehead with antiseptic.
“The doc’ll be in right directly with the x-rays,” she said, glancing briefly at me.
I nodded, but she had already turned her intense stare toward Libby’s wide eyes.
Libby shifted on the gurney, the paper rustling loudly. She pulled one of her hands out from under her leg to hold her long hair out of the nurse’s way.
The nurse caught Libby’s hand and pulled it close, examining the warts closely.
“How long you had these?” she demanded, shifting her gaze to Libby’s face.
“Like, a year,” said Libby, softly. The whine was gone.
“We’ve tried everything,” I interjected, then immediately regretted it.
The nurse pivoted her face to mine lightning quick, then away again, as if to silence me.
The nurse took two quick steps back and yanked the privacy curtain closed.
She leaned in close to Libby and asked in a conspiratorial tone.
“You got a coin on ya?”
She said it with such authority, I pulled my purse off my shoulder and started digging for my wallet.
“Not you,” the nurse snapped, never taking her eyes off Libby’s. “It has to be hers.”
“My backpack,” Libby said, pointing at her bag slumped against the wall, still gazing at the nurse.
I snatched up the bag and handed it to Libby, who blindly rooted around until she pulled out a grubby quarter. The pack spilled onto the floor as she handed the coin to the nurse. I made no move to catch it.
The nurse began to rub the coin over the backs of Libby’s hands. She murmured softly, unintelligibly.
All the sounds of the hospital faded away as I focused intently on the nurse. There was an electricity in the small space, a sense of urgency. I didn’t feel like Libby was in danger, but it didn’t feel like she was entirely safe, either. I could have demanded that the nurse stop, but it was like watching a car accident in progress; things seem to move in slow motion, but you’re powerless to react until you hear the crash.
“You have to believe the bad time is over,” she said clearly to Libby when she was done rubbing. “You have to let go of all that.”
She folded the coin into Libby’s left hand, closing my daughter’s fingers over it.
“Put this in your pocket. When you get home bury it in the backyard before you go inside. Don’t let nobody see where.”
The screech of the privacy curtain broke the spell and the three of us whirled our heads as a young, bearded doctor absentmindedly walked into the room looking at his laptop. He startled a little when he laid eyes on the nurse. Or was that my imagination?
“Uh, Mrs. Conroy?” he stammered, shifting his eyes in my direction. “Uh, yeah, there’s no break. Libby just has a sprain. We’ll wrap it and if she keeps it elevated for a day or two…”
His words trailed off. He cleared his throat, nodded to the nurse and began to back out of the room.
“Uh, I’ll clear her for release, you can go as soon as you’re, uh, finished.”
He was like he couldn’t leave quickly enough.
The nurse was plastering a big piece of gauze on Libby’s head. She then shifted to wrapping an Ace bandage around my daughter’s thin ankle, humming softly. Criss, cross, over and around, I was mesmerized by her hands fluttering around Libby’s leg.
When she finished, she tapped Libby’s ankle softly.
“You’ll be right as rain in no time.”
Right as rain. My mom used to say that to me when I was little.
The nurse grabbed the metal tray, now littered with torn paper wrappers and pieces of leftover gauze.
“Remember what I said, Libby,” she called softly over her shoulder and she was gone, the squeak squeak of her shoes getting softer until we couldn’t hear it anymore.
I didn’t say a word, just gathered up Libby’s backpack and put her arm over my shoulder as she limped out of the ER. Neither of us spoke the whole way home.
When we pulled in the driveway it was starting to grow dark. Libby opened the passenger side door and hopped to the side of the garage. She grabbed a shovel and, using it as crutch, started hopping out into the darkness.
I almost called to her crossly. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to break your neck hopping around in the dark. Almost. But there had been a weird feeling over me ever since that nurse had demanded the coin. Instead I turned and went into the house and made us sandwiches.
Libby hopped into the house about fifteen minutes later and washed her hands in the kitchen sink before sitting across from me and digging into her sandwich. No wrinkling of the nose over the egg salad, no complaints about the wheat bread or my diagonal cut. It was so quiet you could hear the clock on the stove ticking over our soft chewing sounds. As I rinsed our plates I heard Libby hopping softly toward me, then felt her skinny arms wrap around my waist. I turned and planted a quick kiss on the top of her head. She looked squarely into my eyes and I saw a spark there I hadn’t seen since I can’t remember when. She hopped away toward her room without saying anything.
That night I didn’t exactly pray, but I hoped. Hoped with all my heart for a miracle, for some peace, for the curse to be broken.
“Mom!”
Her call woke me from dreaming about the two of us hiking through a dense forest. She sounded excited; it wasn’t the ‘mom’ I was used to lately. Not ‘mom I need a ride’, ‘mom you’re being so mean’, ‘mom where is my uniform.’ It was a fresh ‘mom,’ one I didn’t remember ever hearing before.
She burst through the door, beaming, no sign of a limp.
“Look!” she said, thrusting her hands toward me.
I held her hands in mine. There was no trace of the warts. The skin was baby soft, unscarred.
“What in the…” I started to say, but Libby silenced me with a laugh, shaking her head, her eyes flashing.
There can be a lot of unspoken things between a mother and daughter; maybe a witch encounter should be one of them. All I know is Libby’s warts vanished and the two of us put all the hurt and pain of our Bad Year behind us.
Was it all a bad dream; the crash of my marriage, Tim’s death, the pox that erupted on my beautiful daughter?
Remember how the nurse told Libby not to tell anyone where she buried the coin? But you know teens; they can be careless. The next time I was pulling weeds in the garden I noticed the small mound of freshly dug earth behind the pink dogwood tree. A few weeks later I saw a decent sized bunch of flowers growing from the spot. The blooms are champagne flutes of dark purple, spiky petals. If my flower identifying skills and the internet are correct, it’s Belladonna. You know, like witches use.
Witches, warts, spells. Crazy, right? There has to be a logical explanation. Me, I just steer clear of any conversation about witches. And that spot in the yard.
Barbara Brockway's work has been published in various literary magazines and she’s been honored to win several awards, for both fiction and essays. She lives in Chieri, Italy with her husband and is seeking representation for her recently completed commercial fiction manuscript. When not writing, Barbara can be found biking in the shadow of the snow-covered Alps or relaxing in an outdoor cafe. She can be found at barbarabrockway.com
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