The Pebble and the Witch

Transformation magic is easy. Gold into straw, carriages into pumpkins: the witch had done it a thousand times before. The man knew this. Or, perhaps more accurately, the pebble knows this.

The pebble sits in her pocket. Its companions are a dirty, wadded up tissue and a piece of strawberry wrapped candy. It has been in her pocket for a while now. It would not be there, had the man not wronged the witch.

They first met at the village tavern. She caught his eye, and they started talking. That night, he walked her home, and that morning, she walked him home. They began seeing each other regularly after that. They went on walks in the forest and talked and laughed for hours.

When they got hungry she would snap her fingers and transform leaves and twigs into fruits and cheeses, and they would go on talking. They soon spent all their time together.

In the mornings, before he left for work, he would make her breakfast and her favorite cold coffee with cream. In the evenings, after dinner, she would snap her fingers and transform water into whiskey or whatever he felt like that night. They fell into a quiet rhythm: one that the witch had always wanted and one that the man hadn’t realized he didn’t want. Sometimes, he tried to talk about it, but most of the time, they both ignored it.

The man started to have doubts. He began spending more and more time at work. The witch felt him pulling away and latched on harder. The man responded by staying away for days at a time. The witch caught him with a coworker.

They argued. Night fell. They argued. Dawn broke. They both said things they could never take back.

After he left, the witch sat at her table seething through tears. She thought about what she could do to him.

She could go with one of the classics and transform him into a tree. She’d heard of someone else, a warlock, who’d done that and chopped the guy up into firewood after. That wasn’t enough though, so he’d sent the logs to the guy’s family to keep them warm through winter. He even carved a branch into a toy for the guy’s children.

The witch considered her other options. She could turn him into a centipede— he was basically vermin already, after all — and she could keep him in a little glass terrarium, his legs scuttering away against glass too smooth to find purchase. He would never be able to leave her then. He wouldn’t be able to survive without her. He would be absolutely at her mercy.

Or what if she transformed him into marble and chipped him away bit by bit, slowly forcing him into a form of her choosing? She could carve him eyes but no mouth and force him to watch all their arguments, over and over again, so he would know that she was right and was wrong. She could do it. She could grind him into dust if she really wanted to. It’d be easy.

But that’s not when the man became the pebble. It isn’t as simple as that.

###

The man didn’t come back. She waited for him for days. A neighbor told her the man shacked up with the coworker. Of course, no surprise; he’d always been a rake. One day, the coworker had the gall to come and ask for the man’s stuff. The witch spat in her face and handed over a box full of ash.

Months passed. The witch’s rage simmered down into a bitterness thick enough to coat her tongue. She poured it into a cork-stoppered bottle but couldn’t stop herself from tasting it from time to time.

Years passed, and she partook of the bottle less and less. Eventually, it got pushed behind all the other jars of cumin and oregano, newt eyes, and frog toes. One spring morning, she found the bottle again while looking for a packet of strawberry candy. It was sticky with dust. She tasted it and found that the syrup had lost much of its bitterness, even developing delicate, floral notes.

She thought of the man for the first time in a while, and wondered how he was doing. A quick spell gave her the answer: a sailboat, a storm, followed by a memorial service.

###

The grass above the grave had shriveled into wilt. Rain left dark, dirty streaks over the headstone. Weeds had grown over the base.

The witch looked down and didn’t know what to feel, so she laced her fingers into the weeds and ripped. Dust shook loose from the roots. She tore at the dirt, leaving angry bald patches, followed by more meticulous plucking. Soon, the grave was neat and tidy. She pulled a wadded-up tissue from her pocket and wiped at the granite as best she could, clearing out the dirt that had settled into his name. With a snap, she transformed the dead grass into a bouquet of lilies and propped it against the stone.

For a long time, the witch stood at the foot of the grave. She didn’t try to think about anything in particular. Too much time had passed to remember all the details, and this emptiness filled her with the vague feeling like finding out a favorite perfume had evaporated into resin. She couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like or what his skin smelled like or even what his eyes looked like. Instead, all she could think about was how that glass of cold coffee looked on the counter, with leisurely swirls of cream mixing into the bottom.

Dusk brought a chill in the air. She began to walk away but paused with a sudden thought. She snapped her fingers and picked up a pebble from the grave. She tucked it into her pocket, where it sat next to a dirty, wadded-up tissue and a piece of strawberry-wrapped candy.