AnnaMeursault
What does it mean to be a witch? Witches now are very commonplace, believe it or not. The girl playing hopscotch on the corner, the teenagers giggling over inconsequential gossip, the woman chastising her incompetent subordinates over the phone, all of them are witches.
Note though that men cannot be witches. This is a result of the gender split in the fairytale mythos: girls were princesses-in-disguise, women witches, and men princes, heroes, farmers' sons.
The point is, men simply don't have enough experience with being systematically categorized into one of two groups: the innocent and the reviled.
Well anyways, most women have a bit of magic in them. It's the ones that have a bit of natural talent that become witches.
And talent, this particular witch had in spades.
Now the beast wasn't to go unchallenged, because even as the witch dreamed it up, she also dreamed its three adversaries.
And like all fairy tales, it takes trials to reach any type of result.
So the beast was to conquer the fields of asphodel, gather the five Hwansaengkkot, and steal the Sudarshana Chakra.
In response to this hodgepodge of mythology, the beast spat in narrative convention's face, but left for the fields anyways. Even beasts must follow rules after all.
But while A and N were trapped in the witch's apartment lair, as I've mentioned before, they were only children. Mostly insignificant in the scheme of things.
So while they couldn't leave, this was not the most interesting bit of the story.
No, that honor goes to the beast still hiding in the village, and the witch it managed to subdue from the deep confines of her mind.
While the witch was wasting away, trapping her influence in the mortal plane, the beast was getting ready to transfer its consciousness from hers to the 'real world' so to speak.
But to do that, it needed to finish the story.
At the same time, the witch in the high rise bled on her floor. Her blood and lymph soaked into the cracks between the tile.
This seems quite irrelevant, or at the very least redundant, but what you have to remember is that the girl was a witch, and witches, much like English teachers like to thing of authors, rarely do anything without purpose.
And the purpose was soon to become clear.
When her watchers made to leave the penthouse suite, soon after they had created a foolhardy plan to escape the witch's curse, they couldn't move.
So what now?
Her two listeners, let's call them A and N for now, weren't really prepared for this type of situation.
As you may or may not have surmised, despite their general air of indifference, A and N were actually quite young.
Everyone in the small city, well everyone who wasn't a college student at least, knew about the creepy witch who lived in the penthouse of the only upscale apartment complex in town. Get through one of her weird stories, and as long as you don't speak, you'll get a boon in return.
What in the world's a boon? Well, look it up, we have time.
...
Okay, so A and N were hoping for something. Unfortunately came the corollary to the previous condition. Let a story go interrupted, and you'll fall under a lifelong curse.
Obviously, A and N were very unwilling to go along with this course. So, they hatched a plan.
So now back to the beast. The beast who may or may not have been a wolf but who, like the girl's watchers, was becoming tired of the imposed hiatus in its story.
And so that night, when all she wanted to do was sleep, never to wake, it humored her wishes.
The next morning, her watchers came to find her in disarray, arms and legs strewn aside, blood sluggishly sliding down the tips of her hair to pool on the stone floor.
"But the difference here is that the beast knew it was in a story. Well, 'knew' is too strong a word, but the narrative structure that we take for granted, one that so rarely reflects the intricacies and banalities of how life plays out, had wrapped itself around stories of wolves, particularly in this small village, and so by some intuition, the beast knew what it shouldn't do."
Her listeners seemed impolitely disinterested, so she stopped.
"That's all for tonight I guess. Come back tomorrow if you really want me to play Scheherazade for you so badly."
If she was hoping to startle them into some sort of action she failed. Her two watchers left for the night, and she was alone again.
"But back to the story," she shook her head for a second, clearing her thoughts, before starting back up again.
"It would stay away from women and children, but even the men, though they'd be hard-pressed to admit it, because these men were not socialized to admit such things, found it strange."
One of her listeners coughed, the scratched sound breaking her from the rhythm of the story.
"Oh yes you're right, I'm extending this bit of background for too long. Well, needless to say, the beast was a wolf. I jumped the gun a bit, but in this kind of tale, the beasts are always wolves."
Her second watcher yawned rather loudly, face ruddy and red after being glared at both by his companion and by the girl.
"Fine, I'll speed this up a bit. What's important is that the beasts are wolves, because now we have tamed them into dogs, and humans always like to be the masters of their own stories."
"And it would hide, amongst all the men of the village, lips salivating at the thought of impending destruction. It avoided children, because they could see what it was. It avoided women in the same way two negative charges repel."
She stopped for a second, eyes on a frayed denim thread.
"You see, women and wolves are very much alike. Neither of them like to bite, but their teeth are always bared."
They weren't her friends, but they would visit, donned in sweatshirts and skinny jeans, and listen silently.
So she would speak.
"Once upon a time, there was a great big beast, foul and fearsome, paws as big as a laptop, sharp edges as hidden as spilled glass."
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