"Transcripts with the Witch's Daughter"

File 30918
Dr. Olga Vyrensky’s notes with patient No. A9041
Transcript 2 of 8

Doctor: When you think back on your mother, what do you remember?

Patient: Her soft smile, musky breath of herbs and roots, the way her voice sounded when she sang me to sleep, like delicate wind chimes, somewhere far away, somewhere still in the old country.

Doctor: Where did you go afterwards?

Patient: To another home of healers and seers. She had always told me that if anything happened to her that I should follow the holly bushes into the woods until they ended and then track the bloodstones until I saw a cave. I grew up in that cave.

Doctor: Ironic, isn’t it, that you ended up following a trail of stones?

Patient: That’s not an original thought, Doctor. It’s already been mentioned in the papers.

Doctor: So, your mother planted those holly bushes and placed those stones there for you?

Patient: That’s right.

Doctor: Didn’t you think about going to the police?

Patient: (laughs) Police? As if they would do anything to about a “witch’s” death, and not just any witch, but that witch, the one from Dark Woods, the one everyone was trying to get out of Farayland. And what should I have told them? ‘Hello, I’m the witch’s daughter, the one no one knows about. I’m seeking justice. The Radvich twins just murdered my mother. Please help me put them behind bars. Oh, I know, Officer, it’ll be tricky because they’re the children of the richest mobster around, John Radvich, who runs all of Farayland’...

Doctor: John Radvich was a poor woodscutter…

Patient: (laughs) And Hansel and Gretel were innocent abandoned children…

***

I used to wish, when I was a little girl, that I had my mother’s brown skin and eyes so deep green they looked black, except in the full moon where they glimmered with light like the waning sun upon Dark Forest.

My eyes were slightly like hers, except paler and a touch narrow at the corners. But it wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to be just like her. Long wavy black hair to the waist. Skin the color of wet earth. But she would say, it’s good, Marjoli, that you inherited your father’s hair of sun and skin of milk.

It’s good that you can pass. As one of them.

***
From a crack in the bedroom door I watched as the girl beat her on the head with a cast iron pan and the boy shoved her into the fireplace. My mother had always loved fire, loved sitting near it while roasting herbs, built a fireplace for herself big as a cave. It was a cold night so the flames were roaring. The full moon flooded the living room. Even from where I crouched I could see her eyes glimmer. I think it scared the twins for a second, right before the fire took her, to see them change color like that.

My mother didn’t scream. For this I am thankful. They couldn’t get her to scream.

They ran out as soon as they could. The house smelled first of burning hair then flesh as smoke filled it room by room. I stayed behind that bedroom door for a long time.

To this day, the smell of burning hair reminds me of her. Sometimes I burn my own hair just to feel her next to me.

***

Doctor: So, you’re saying your mother wasn’t a witch?

Patient: (chuckles) No. If anyone was prone to trouble-making, it was me. I was the one who liked to fry ants under magnifying glasses and dissect worms to watch them grow. My mother was kind, too kind, you could say, hated to see even a wasp suffer.

Doctor: How was she too kind?

Patient: Well, the most obvious example is how she let the twins in that day, even after they had been egging our house and burning her rose bushes for years. Even after she caught them red-handed eating all her herbal homemade candies that she had left outside to cool.

She probably thought if she invited them in, they’d see that our house was just a normal house. She made them lemonade and lavender jelly sandwiches. They stayed all evening and seemed to be enjoying themselves. They said their father was out of town and that it would be okay for them to head home late by the light of the moon.

She probably saw their happiness as a good sign, hoped they would put a good word in with their father.

Doctor: Why do you think they did it?

Patient: (long pause) Why does anyone hurt what they don’t understand?

***

A warm rush fills me as I place the candies in his mouth. He is smiling up at me. I am straddling him, his hands running along my smooth bare back.

“Mary Jane,” he whispers. “Your candies remind me of being a child again,” he moans as I feed him another and thrust myself down on him. “So familiar…”

And just as he is about to come, his body becomes rigid and then I know they’ve taken effect. Total paralysis, yet totally conscious. I toss my hair back and laugh, wildly. His eyes are the only part that can move as they widen in shock and confusion.

From my nightstand drawer, I grab a thin switchblade and place it against his neck.

He tries to scream, a soundless scream. The full moon’s light pierces through the blinds. I bend close to him so he can see how my eyes too glimmer with the last light of Dark Forest.

“I have her eyes, see?”

In that instant I know. That he knows. Who I am.

Twenty years I’ve waited for this.

The blade is quick and sharp, sharper than he deserves.

***

“I knew it was you all along,” she raises her head from her bed and startles me.

I thought she was asleep. And yet, part of me knows I always wanted this, to have her awake, for her to see me. The flames have already started to rise, devouring the gilded long tapestries, the silken ivory curtains, the mahogany gold-lined armoire, the empty bottles that she hides under it all.

“You have her eyes.”

I pause. I am just about to reach for the far window, the only one I left unlocked so I could make my escape. In a second the flames will touch her white damask bedspread, her sheets, her nightgown, and, given the amount of chemicals I soaked everything in the day before (five years it took me to create this phantasmagoric solution, odorless, ten times more flammable than kerosene) the home and existence of world-famous socialite, Gretel Radovich, will be mere ashes flecked with gold.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment too, you know,” she calls out, as calmly as when she first met me, the day she agreed to hire me to be her housekeeper two years ago.

There was nothing I could have done to save her, even if I wanted to. And the truth is, I didn’t want to.

The smell of Gretel’s burning hair rose and I remembered my mother. I hurdled out the window and slid down the drain pipe, embers singeing my skin, etching it black, the color of night.