Songs For The Witch Woman
She danced like the earth was on fire. Her raving acolytes, now fully bound, maintained their ghastly refrain. The voices rose to a bellowing din which carried such entrenched anguish, it dredged up emotions long innominate from non-admission; Emotions now bleating wretchedly for concession with the desperation of an animal in a snare. The bittersweet catharsis of their disentombed agony shepherded the inculcated fawns into a discomposing rapture, the cognitive impasse of the two resulting in a swell of egoic dysphoria which threatened to swallow them in some hermetic act of karmic reckoning. Somehow, their feet remained quaveringly planted on the ground. The bound carried on with their primal dirge, though it seemingly now echoed from somewhere up above. The stale scent of parched earth and stagnant water drifted through the darkness, though no manner of straining could extract from it any light or form. Still, she danced. Her footsteps thundered in a frenzied stampede of rhythmic blows, pummelling the ground above like hailstone. The dissonant symphony of song and storm reverberated in stereo, surrounding the sound space in a cacophonous orb. The enveloping mass of energy was suffocating. Suddenly, the night fell still. The air was cool and stung my lungs as I doubled over and gulped it in. I stared at the ground where her heels had drummed out their rallying cry. The soil was completely undisturbed. As I stood, my view reverted to my hands, expecting evidence of a snake bite or some other venomous culprit to blame for my delusions. To my dismay, the book remained open to the very page I had recited from. It had worked, then. Though not completely. What had gone wrong, I wondered. Too grateful that it had to question the woman's disappearance any further, and overcome by a sudden wave of fatigue, I turned back. The sky was as black as her eyes had been, yet the glint which had shone in them seemed to have dimmed the starlight above to a murmuring glimmer.