{Sally of Thorns}

“Say it, freak. Say it! You little witch.”

A gang of adolescent girls surrounded the cowering figure of Sally Wickham, pale and gangly, freshly seventeen.

“I wasn’t staring,” she said meekly, her eyes blackening, hands shaking, hugging her satchel tight against her chest.

Janice Kitwell- fair-haired, tall, legs tan and smooth, frame slender and athletic, towered over Sally with two bony hands on her hips.

“You’re a freak! And a queer. Say it! We all want to hear you say it!”

“I wasn’t looking at you, Janice,” said Sally, suppressing an oncoming fit of pitiful weeping. She held back the tears, knowing it was just what Janice Kitwell, the Alpha in a pack of wet-fanged, snarling wolves, wanted to see.

“They should have a separate locker room just for you, freak. Then we all might be able to get undressed without you gawking at us. If you want to see a naked girl then go home and get undressed in front of the mirror.”

Janice lurched, held her stomach tight, brought a balled fist to her mouth as if she were going to vomit, then smiled maliciously. “Sorry, the thought of you naked almost made me puke.” She rolled out her fleshy pink tongue and gagged overtop of Sally.

Humiliating giggles erupted from the small crowd, barricading Sally into a corner of the locker room with near supernatural force, pinning her against the cold metal lockers like an invisible gale.

“Look at her,” said Janice, silencing the malignant giggles of her posse. “You’re just like an animal, aren’t you? What’s in your bag? Raw meat and bones?”

Janice snatched Sally’s tattered black satchel from her loose, shaking grip and dumped its contents onto the floor. The group of girls stared at the spill, their faces contorted and repulsed. Before them was an assortment of cloudy medicine vials, light-refracting crystals, several handmade talismans fashioned from wood, ink-stained parchment, tattered journals, the bleached bones of dead animals, and several worn books without titles.

“Holy shit,” said Janice, nudging the bones with her foot. “You really are a witch! What a freak!” She covered her mouth with her hands, laughing, looking to the others for approval.

Another screeching fit of laughter. Sally winced and hid her face in her chest. Tears forced their way through Sally’s clenched eyes, and she wept uncontrollably until the girls dispersed, throwing their wet towels and acrid gym clothes in a heap on top of her.

Alone, unable to control her sobs, Sally wished that the floor of the locker room would melt, creating a sink hole that would engulf and drown her in some hidden subterranean world. There she would suffer no more cruelties at the hands of Janice Kitwell.

____________________________________________________

The city of Thorns, named after General Joseph Thorns, a Revolutionary war hero who triumphantly oversaw countless coups against British forces, was a dark and desolate town. The world’s kind fashions, no matter how forceful the attempted breach, seemed to collide against the cold hard shell of Thorns, which repelled and slaughtered any life-giving, nurturing essence brought to its people, like an electrified bug lamp. When one walked the lonely derelict streets, they would seldom receive any form of jovial exchange- no smiles, no nods, no friendliness to speak of. Closeted by the implacable town, Sally went through each day saddened by extinguished hopes, believing her lowly, tormented station in life was the beginning, and end, of her existence.

The hallways were mercifully empty. Sally took a few more books from her locker, and left the school grounds, scuttling with her head down passed a group of cheerleaders outside the front doors, Janice Kitwell included.

“Keep your voodoo shit away from us, freak,” shouted Janice, two red and black pompoms at her feet.

Sally jumped at the shout, like a rabbit sitting silent in a thicket, torn from a moment of tranquility by the rip of a bullet beneath its feet, and ran home.

Sally’s home was a dilapidated icon, or feeding grounds, for the public’s incessant derision unto the Wickham family. Not a week would pass by without a flaming bag of dog shit lighting up the dingy porch, or toilet paper festooning the gnarled trees in the front yard. When Sally was thirteen, a fist-sized rock came smashing through the living room window and hit her plum between the eyes, leaving a raised purple bruise larger than the stone itself. The next day at school, she was inducted into a dismal and inescapable realm of verbal abuse and mockery that would last, it seemed to Sally, forever.

Around this time, having no friends, being without athletic talent, musical ability, or artistic vision, she buried herself in books. While other girls in Thorns were reading the latest Vogue magazine, or vacuously ingesting the pornographic narratives of erotic romance novels, Sally gave all her attention to folklore, wiccan manuals, and, most ardently, Languages of the Otherworld, by L.H. Omari, in which she firmly and potently believed.

The nameless books that Janice Kitwell spilled onto the locker room floor were Sally’s private spell books, as she called them, and contained wiccan chants and passages used to heal, communicate with the dead, or, in some cases, maim enemies. This was dark magic- spells that Sally had feared to use. More than once had she instigated the arrival of grotesque visions and dreams, eerie voices within the walls of her home, all through meditation and chanting among her relic accouterments of life and death. How it worked, she was never sure. The strength of the spell depended entirely on the severity of her mood. After the scene in the locker room, (and a long timeline of other misfortunes), Sally Wickham was livid, spoiled and gone to rot, (as she thought of it), by the foul girls and their tormenting, and she was tempted to use every ounce of her anger to violently curse them all.

Her eyes were still red and swollen from crying when she arrived home, and the maniacal laughter of the girls in the locker room, specifically Janice Kitwell's shrill cackle, haunted her thoughts. It troubled her to think, despite the traumatizing bullying and humiliation, that she ostensibly longed to be a member of Janice’s pack of She-Wolves, yipping and howling in grotesque merriment over the limp body of a maimed animal. Then she thought of her cowering figure in the locker room, the vicious taunting, wincing at the reality of it, and vowed to never become affiliated with that crop of villains.

It became obvious to Sally, after an hour spent meditating among several of her wiccan tools, that the world was relentlessly cruel, and there was no escaping it. She had no plans for revenge; whether administered by her own will, or the will of a summoned daemon, nobody would suffer, nobody would hurt as she had. Oh, but what she could do! What she could do to them.

What Sally could do, and what she would do, was a generous gesture of mercy. As Janice Kitwell was the commander-in-chief of every attack, she would be dealt with first, and after the leader was wiped out, (Calmed Down, or Made to Reconcile), she thought, justice and peace would find a way to her.

It was Love she lacked. So why not put love directly into her heart, her soul? Make she who was once cruel now show unhinged affection. Make her love me.

Sally sat in the middle of a crescent of crystals and lit the final candle. Bones were arranged in spots along the arch of crystals, all jawbones facing downwards. Directly in front of her knees rested a giant rose, its petals deep red and velvety, freshly snipped from her mother’s garden. Night came swiftly, and a thick veil of suffocating humidity spread through the air.

Sally chanted, quietly at first, then the monotone tenor rose in volume and made the candle flames sputter and crackle. Sally’s voice grew hoarse and deep. The language she used was not of our world, but a dialect she pained to learn perfectly, one from L. H. Omari’s mysterious Otherworld.

She repeated the unintelligible phrase many times as the candles continued to glow deeper and brighter, and the rose before her shook and curled at the petals, shrank and expanded, and finally, after the final repetition of the chant, exploded with engorged thorns the size of a hawk’s talon. They pulsated and spewed a viscous fluid that shone like engine oil in the candlelight. The spell was complete, evident to Sally from the severe fatigue that always tailed a deep spell like this. She weakly wrapped the dripping rose in a cotton cloth, extinguished the candles with a single swipe of her hand above them, and seemed to drift through the air into bed, where she fell into an immovably deep slumber.

Janice Kitwell’s eyes bulged with greedy satisfaction when she saw the massive rose hung in her locker by a string. Attached was a small note written on the back of a torn envelope. Janice cradled the thorny rose delicately, shocked by how heavy it felt. She flipped the note around and read:

To Janice. Let your love run wild.

-S.

“It has to be Seth Kingsley,” she said to herself. “He’s been goggling me for weeks. Ugh, what a creep.” Janice’s look of repulsion quickly turned into one of breathless fear.

The engorged rose pulsed and squirmed in her hand, like a wriggling, spiky worm. It leaked a sticky fluid like dark velvet mucus and seemed to hiss before a serrated, curled thorn pierced her finger, the oily black mucus mixing with her ruby blood.

As she let out a high-pitched yelp of pain, the school bell rang loudly and blocked out her shriek. She threw the rose on the ground and marched to the nurse’s office to get her wound cared for, dripping blood on the floor as she went. The nurse fretted and squashed her face in disbelief at the substantial amount of flesh torn away by the thorn. Janice was given a bandage and her finger was wrapped excessively so that it looked like a small cotton rolling pin was mounted in its place.

Within thirty minutes of the thorn prick, Janice’s body began to feel numb and weightless as if she was floating. Her only sensation was the distant throbbing of her finger, which seemed to echo through her body like a ceremonial drumbeat. A sweet slideshow flashed through her encumbered vision: people smiling, warm sunlight, white sheets billowing in soft wind, flowers being visited by honeybees, all while a shy voice sang eerily in the background. At the climax of the vision, Janice gasped for air, craning her neck backwards at an extreme angle, her long blond hair dangling down to the floor. She snapped up with the alarming quickness of a bear trap and looked wildly around the classroom, the students around her staring with confused faces.

Sally noticed the spell had taken affect once Janice began smiling at her in the hallways. Little flickers of smiles, like bouncing shadows on a jack-o-lantern. There was something about the smiles that gave Sally happy shivers down her back; her spell was working, and she now had a great secret to keep.

The spell grew stronger. Janice began to speak words to Sally that weren’t injected with poison. It started off with an odd tick of the head, a twitch, and a “Hello, Sally.” By the end of the day it was, “Hi Sally,” more relaxed, even obsequious, “Did you have a nice day? Can I walk you home?”

Two months passed and Sally had grown fond of Janice’s cursed state of obsession. It was the second tray of cookies that day-delivered straight to Sally’s door. The day prior she finished all of Sally's math homework for her and bought them both movie tickets. Janice became a zombified servant, drooling over Sally's every word. Sally resolved to undo the sly curse, but she didn’t know when she would do it; Janice made excellent cookies, and it was nice to get escorted to school every morning. The bullying began to fade away like a thick wall of fog, and Janice's constant devotion to Sally sparked the interest of some of Sally's male classmates, who, rumor had it, unanimously decided that Sally was decent looking.

It was a brilliantly clear and sunny October day. The air of Thorns was perfumed with the crisp scent of dry leaves, and the thick green verdure of Summer had wilted and become awash with deep earthy browns dotted with busrsting clusters of red and organge hues.

Sally and Janice walked side by side to school. Children rode passed them on bikes, laughing and making engine sounds with their mouths. Birds chirped and swooped gleefully, diving daringly, cutting through the air in brilliantly choreographed patterns.

A man approached in the distance, kept steady pace, and when he reached Sally and Janice, he raised a weak head, his lips trembled, and he said, "Good morning," a quaking smile on his face.

Sally smiled in return and enjoyed the bright sun warming her cheek.