Little Witch

Majick Bum Majick Bum, Sit on the toilit, Tap three times, Sparckles tollit seat.

Wand in hand, the girl continued her magic tutorial, guiding me through the basics of simple witchcraft.

I was born into a dynastic coven. Kind of. My mother is evidently a witch. Everyone knows she is a witch. It is widely understood that she is a witch. And yet she has never done anything to indicate that she is a witch other than give off vibes. Not in a bad way, you understand. She’s a perfectly nice woman. Approachable. Unintimidating. A bit befuddled. Somehow, a known witch.

My witchy vibing mother was, for a long time, a lone ranger. Oh, I had my teenage dabble, of course. My own little coven and I travelled to Blackpool one night to enact a ceremony on the sea shore, huddling on a scrap of grass opposite a fish and chip shop in the midnight darkness. I do not remember what the spell was designed to achieve, but we certainly had a good night. On another, warmer, occasion, we wrapped photographs in specifically dyed ribbon and buried them in the shallow soil accumulated under an opportune bush in the back alley behind my house. But I was not, it seems, born to witching. Witchy vibes remained my mother’s, and my mother’s alone.

But then my daughter arrived. My daughter, fire and raging seas, whirlwinds and a dancing breeze. Potent fingered and button nosed, witchy vibes like medusa’s hair, broiling about her pink cheeked face. They say things can skip a generation, after all.

My daughter’s witching credentials were confirmed by her grandfather one afternoon, when she was five years old. Laying a card trick before her, he told her "and now, if you're a witch, that one will be the same card as that one". And lo it was so. "Oh, I always suspected you were a witch!" I said, watching on. "But the question is, are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

Wide eyes and rosebud lips lifted to my face. "I'm a good witch!" sang my honey-haired doll child, and handed me a spoon "Try my mixture".

Playfully, I put the spoon to my lips, swallowed conspicuously, and as my throat contracted around this imagined potion, flames entered those peridot eyes, her brows sharpened, her pink lips flushed blood red and light glanced off white teeth beneath. From this creature abruptly brought to life a cackle arose, "It's poison! Poison!" And then more spoons, and more and suddenly five spoons were at my mouth. "Now you will die immediately!" she shrilled before her glee carried her in a whirlwind back to her cauldrons. Clutching my throat, I fell to the floor and died, my father's stunned face fading from my eyes as my little Lucifer's mirth filled my ears.

Around a year later, I recall asking my sweet six year old what she had played at school during lunch that day. “We had a game where we made money and water out of bones and blood.” She told me, in her small voice, the fruit of my womb cosy in her car seat as we travelled home. “We had a big box for the bodies to be delivered in, and three buckets, for the heads, and the bones and the blood....*long explanation of the mechanics of the process*...and then we give the money and the water to the village because they don’t have any.” Robin Hood, with a macabre twist. I wondered if my mother had ever extracted money and water from dead bodies.

It was around this time, that my little witch wrote a spell book, from which the above spell is taken. Leaving her with pencil and paper while I took a shower one day, I emerged to find that she had written a handy beginners guide, seemingly in Middle English, while I was in the shower. Spell number one- majick bum. Then there’s flieing pezza, maick my wond apir, help me sleep (poignant, and one she has still not mastered), macke my mum pees (concerning), fliying, disepirents, lafder poashan, pen dispir “(tap on yor pen. Wear has my pen gon”), and a list “ov majick whords”. Most concerning though is the page entitled “road crash”. Still, I very much appreciate how she rejects the polarisation of good and bad. A moral relativist in the making, I think, which is a position I appreciate in my witches, don’t you?

And so it is that I find myself somehow the lynchpin in a small dynastic coven. My mother, my daughter, and I. My mother has celebrated the passing on of this legacy by making her granddaughter a small witch's store. A starter set of her own imagining. I was never gifted such a thing. She has told me, my daughter, that I look like an old witch, so perhaps my powers lie elsewhere, but she, we all know, has potency throbbing just beneath her skin. You can feel it, when she lays her small, still rounded hand, a hand entirely familiar for being my own, and yet also, so like my mothers, upon your skin, and allows her healing intent to flow. While the world is in flux all around her, the fluxes inside her small, tender self, build momentum, and ripples become waves become storms. Every day she is called upon to find courage, to overcome, to try. And through all of that, she keeps shining. I call her my weather witch. When her storms rage, we are so easily swept in. But when her sun shines the world is brilliant. Sharing her brilliance is a wonderful thing, but I will always, always, ride through the storms with her, my darling girl. That, I suppose, is what a coven does.

And if you want to know if this story is true, or all made up, ask yourself what a story is, if not a spell to shape truth to the witch's will.