The Witch

Julia Winterson grew up in a middle-class family in a gated suburb far from her mother’s hometown of Ferroburg. She didn’t worry about much more than a new dress or what color to dye her hair. When she was fourteen, her grandmother moved in following a heart attack. Julia didn’t pay much attention to her; she dressed oddly and filled the garden with weird, smelly plants. Then one day, Julia came home from school crying because Billy Perkins had shoved her, down the stairs. Her grandmother came into her room, sat on Julia’s bed, and asked her, “Do you want to lie there crying, or do you want to know how to handle this boy?” Julia looked into her grandmother’s eyes and dried her tears. Her grandmother spoke to her well into the night—of how to find the weakest link in every soul and how to press it to cause agony in a person’s heart— and Julia listened carefully. The next day, she spoke a few words into Billy’s ear, and he ran away crying.   “Baba” never talked about where she came from. She referred only to the “Old Country” in an accent thick with heavy consonants. She kept Julia close to her and taught her how to see someone’s inner thoughts by asking them just the right questions, or to find and awaken their fears. They snipped leaves from Baba’s plants and mixed them into foul-smelling concoctions. Her father started calling Baba “the Old Witch.”   When Julia’s application of the "iron eye” drove a classmate to suicide, Baba refused to speak to her granddaughter for thirty days. On the thirty-first day, Baba told Julia more of the truth: that Baba herself had done awful things as a child, and that her art extracted a heavy price threefold for crimes. Julia swore she would use what her grandmother taught her for good, and make threefold amends for the pain she’d caused. Baba died two years later, leaving Julia her old house in Ferroburg. In her grandmother’s kitchen, Julia found a guide to plants and herbs, and cookbooks annotated in her grandmother’s hand. She found other, secret books with black covers. Beyond the house she found a whole community that had depended on “the Witch of Silver Street” and had fallen apart in Baba’s absence. Given the choice of college or legacy, Julia chose legacy and embraced her new role as the Witch.