Birthing
The scent of salt and iron.
The Fuchsia Witch is a series of stories woven from life and a little magic. There’s no need to read in order; step in anywhere and you’ll find your way. If you’d like a proper introduction to the witch, you’ll find one here.
The witch’s body has fallen out of sync with the moon. After the births of the bear cub and the little seer, she tries to nurse, but their premature mouths are too weak and her patience too thin; she feels the whole of her being reduced to a set of breasts, revulsion rising in her throat at the thought of being needed and needed and needed. And without being milked, like a cow, like the family goat, she begins to bleed instead.
Now the moon comes full and so does her rage. Her teeth sharpen. She craves raw meat, not to eat, but to tear. To destroy. She wants to crack ribs. To rip muscle away from bone. To hold something’s beating heart. She hunts in the night and washes herself clean before dawn. Blood circles the drain, hers and her prey’s. She’s exhilarated and exhausted and not at all spent when the babies wake to feed on formula and their mother’s joy. She sprouts claws, gouges the furniture, leaves a trail of destruction in her wake. Diaper changes become an exercise in monitoring her razor tipped fingers. She hears whispered curses escape with her breath and then sucks them back in to metabolize the poison in her own body, not to let it escape into the world, into her home, into this sacred space where she raises her sons, makes love to her husband, hosts and feeds her friends. Where this intimate bloodletting continues.
And then the moon begins to wane and she is weeping, leaking salt water and the poison she couldn’t metabolize after all. It leaves fluorescent trails down her cheeks. She cries when her son kisses her. She cries when her husband tells her he loves her, and also when he sometimes says exactly the wrong thing and it is devastating. She cries because she burnt the garlic, because the movie soundtrack is just so moving, because the babies won’t go to sleep. She cries just because water tastes good. She catches the tears in a vial and saves them for a spell; she’ll know when their time has come. She is still bleeding.
And as the new moon comes, she rides high, reborn. Falling asleep at night, she stretches and feels the touch of the dark against her skin. It is a heady thing, to be surrounded by cotton sheets soft and smooth, surrounded by the breaths of the people she loves most in this world, her husband loud and rumbling in sleep, the little boy soft and snuggling hard, the bear cub in one bassinet and the seer in the other, whimpering out soft baby sighs. She smiles at strange dreams, and then she wakes and floats from one child to the next, from one spell to the next, and not even her own bleeding breaks the sheer exhilaration of being alive.
At first, it would seem the problem is that she is actually too in sync. But the extremes are too extreme and there is too little in between, and every moment of it feels real and raw. And through it all she bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. She bleeds heavy and she bleeds light; she bleeds from dusk to dawn and back again, under sun or stars indiscriminately; she bleeds while she is rending and tearing, while she’s crying, while she’s laughing. She doesn't know what spells to cast to fix this, so instead she offers her own blood to the moon. She thinks maybe the bleeding is a purge, that something inside her needed to be shed. But she thought she did that after the birth and now she is so far past that. Maybe at the next new moon, she will walk naked out to their yard, lay herself down on the hard ground, and offer up her entire body. Her blood will drench the earth beneath her. Maybe then the offering will be enough. Or at the very least, maybe then there will be clarity.
And there is, of a sort. Purify the body and the channel will open. She has gotten messages from spirit before, but rarely as actual voices in her head. This one repeats itself, insists on being heard, purify the body and the channel will open. She delays acting on the message. The problem, she thinks, is the channel is already open, an unknown wound gaping between her thighs. So her body begins doing the work for her. First, frustratingly, she loses her taste for flesh, then eggs, then dairy. Purify the body. She devours raw vegetables until they, too, become tasteless, heavy in her mouth. She craves only kitchari, rice and mung beans, her daydreams take on a turmeric yellow filter. Spirit purrs in her. She swallows raw garlic and ginger in lemon juice. It makes her gag and her eyes water, but the heat warms her belly and quiets the voice (purify). She thinks each morning is the last time, but the next day comes, and she drinks it again. She misses the creamy comfort of her morning coffee, of her soft body curled around her favorite mug. But when she picks it up the voice rings loud and alarmed between her ears, the channel!, and she sets it aside untasted. She still doesn’t know what channel is supposed to open. She is still bleeding. And then she starts to write.
Words cloud in her head, they stream from her fingertips and from her tongue and she cannot stop them. They swirl, visible, in the air around her, stick to everything she touches, paste themselves over the walls. They burrow into the fabric of the rug, spread slick over tile. She works hard to see what she’s doing through them, to still be able to slice the onions, change the diapers, drive the car. She darts her head from side to side, not seeing you in front of her, not answering when you speak. And, in fact, you will not hold her attention because these messages are all she hears.
The only time they begin to leave her alone is when they find a home on paper, and even then only when the entire message has been recorded. She writes with a fountain pen in deep green ink, but it dries a bloody brown and the letters smell of salt and iron. Her writing becomes loose, illegible and disjointed from the energy trying to escape through her hands. She cannot write fast enough and so she types. Her fingers fly across the keys, but the sheer force of each keystroke shakes the screen on her lap, and anyway, she can’t sit still, her whole body rocking with the words coming through. She picks up her phone and dictates. Her voice is feverish, rushed; but voice recognition picks up just enough, and when the message is recorded, she edits, rocking back and forth cradling the phone while she reads and rereads, quiet, then louder, then silent, until the passage is complete and her body stills.
A deep breath.
Relief. The cloud of words recedes, for a time. Every day she returns to them and the words begin to trust her. To trust that she will incubate and birth them as surely as she did her sons. Their urgency diminishes but not their insistence. A drum beat of words and messages sounds inside her body, and she begins to dance through the world to this strange rhythm.
She is still bleeding.
The channel is opening.
Words will not be the only things to come through.
Reading chronologically? Click for the previous post or the next one.
Curious about all the witch’s stories, spells, and recipes? You’ll find them in her grimoire.
Kitchari [crying, heart rending, arms wanting to hold someone soft and still their cries]
fuuucking hell. xx