The Manick Witches: A Tale of an Extraordinarily Average Coven

“Simmer, cauldron, effervesce! Help our magic manifest! Weave our workings something savage…”

“…In the pot goes heart of cabbage!”

As the little girl threw in the cabbage, the three teenage witches stood there dumbfounded. Their domestic kitchen was already cramped enough with them inside, so they were utterly bamboozled as to how this child snuck in unseen.

“Enough,” the head witch Amelia Manick shouted, she herself barely shy of eighteen years old.

She threw her witch hat across the tiny room in anger. She then wagged her wooden spoon at her two friends. “Who let the tike in here?”

“Sorry, Mel,” said Elsbeth Frost, “she’s my little sister, Annabel. My parents couldn’t find a sitter and my dad had that warlock convention in Worcester…”

“Just keep her away from the cauldron,” Amelia exclaimed, adjusting the boiling stockpot on their gas stove, “I won’t have this preschool menace messing up our spells with kitchen scraps!”

“Well,” said Ligeia Cross with a smirk, “the kid seems better at rhyming than you, at least. I mean, really, Mel, ‘effervesce’ and ‘manifest’ aren’t exactly spot on…”

Elsbeth laughed while Amelia silently fumed. She glowered at them.

“Liggie,” Amelia growled, “it’s not like we have a centuries-old family grimoire or Hecate’s friggin’ cellphone number! We have Beth’s hand-me-down warlock notebook and a collective B in English class; I think we’re doing ok.”

“I won a junior poetry competition!” Annabel said with pride.

“Beth, she’s still here,” Amelia whispered starkly.

“Sorry, Mel.” Elsbeth said. “Come, Annie dear, go play with the cat.”

“But I want to help!” cried Annabel.

“Not now, just go in the other room,” urged her sister.

“But Bettie!”

“Go, you pest! We have important witchery to do!” Elsbeth said, her nerves beginning to fray.

“Fine!” Annabel said curtly.

When Annabel skipped out of the kitchen, the girls breathed a sigh of relief. There was some strange glimmer in Annabel’s eye that they didn’t trust, but the trio were too busy crowding around their ‘cauldron’ to pay her much mind.

Amelia nodded triumphantly. “Good, now with that bothersome thing dealt with, where was I?”

“Heart of cabbage,” Ligeia said, the hint of a smirk creasing her otherwise deadpan face.

Amelia shot her a look and then sighed. “Hmm… thank you… yes… Smelly cabbage, vapor foul, accept you now a quill of owl!”

Elsbeth looked at Ligeia, who shrugged. Amelia looked her two friends over with increasing disappointment.

“Well, the owl feather! Drop it in!” Amelia said with bated breath.

Elsbeth swallowed hard. Ligeia found a sudden interest in the wallpaper.

“You forgot the feather, didn’t you…” Amelia asked.

“Well,” began Elsbeth, “the magic store was clean out of owl feathers. It’s a popular item and it’s difficult to source ethically…”

Amelia crossed her arms and began tapping her fingers on her elbows.

Elsbeth continued, “… but on the way home we found something that we could probably use instead!”

She fished a tiny red feather out of her pocket. “Look! A cardinal feather! It’s so pretty!”

Amelia’s forehead reddened with rage. “A… cardinal feather? A songbird is scarcely a replacement for the paragon of wisdom and knowledge, is it?”

Ligeia chuckled. “What? Cardinals are wise! They have an excellent sense of direction.”

Amelia groaned at the joke and snatched the feather from Elsbeth’s hand. “Fine! It’ll have to do… what the hell even rhymes with cardinal? A turn of fate quite sad and remarkable… please take instead this quill of cardinal. Boom! There we are, in the pot you go.”

“That is the tiniest quill I have ever seen…” said Ligeia.

Amelia plopped the feather into the pot. “What next?”

She took out a scrap of paper from her pocket and began reading her tiny, barely legible handwriting. “Ah, yes…”

She exhumed a dusty, mummified bat wing from her other pocket. “Bubble cauldron, and boil right, predict for us what we ask tonight! Bad futures we do wish combat…”

Annabel suddenly sprang up between them all and dropped a tuft of fur into the pot. “… so boil now this bum of cat!”

The cauldron then began boiling strongly as the three older witches jumped back. Amelia was seeing steam rise behind her eyes. In that moment as well, her cat walked in the room, its backside looking a little barren. Annabel stood between them all with an electric razor in one hand and a guilty but proud gleam in her eye.

“Mrrrrrooooooooow!” the cat yowled.

“Hawthorn and juniper! What did you do to Mittens?” Amelia shouted in fury.

“Get that psychopath away from me,” Elsbeth said calmly.

The others, including Amelia’s cat, looked at her with confused expressions.

“What? That’s what Mittens said.” Elsbeth explained. “I can speak to animals. I thought you all knew this.”

Amelia stood there totally flabbergasted. She was seconds away from berating the lot of them until she was distracted by the increasing spattering from the pot. A hollow metallic voice rang from the roiling liquid with bits of cabbage heart, cat fur, and the single cardinal feather making the rough outline of a face.

“Such a resourceful coven of four you are to take such a meagre casting so far! So, fear you not this visage bleak, and ask of me the thing you seek.” it said.

“Four?” Amelia and her two cohorts asked in unison.

“I’m a witch!” Annabel smiled proudly.

The voice spoke, “In rhyme your questions I demand, elsewise I cannot understand.”

Amelia groaned and fumbled with a reply. “What do mean the words said by thee? We are not witches four but three!”

The voice answered: “Four witches you lot ought to be, the small one is your prodigy. But hark, I feel my power wane, the magic does from me drain. So endeth my prophecy, and this spell shall cease to be.”

Ligeia shouted. “Amelia, what about our question?”

A realization hit Amelia’s eyes. “Wait! Cauldron, come back… eth…”

The water in the pot stilled and instantly cooled and the contents they threw in dissolved into nothing.

“Prodigy, that’s what daddy calls me,” Annabel said smugly.

“So, Amelia,” began Elsbeth, “does this mean we don’t have a pop quiz tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” she said morosely with a hint of disgust, “I guess that means we’ll just have to… study…”

“Yay!” shouted Annabel.