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Witchy Woman
A "Halloween Contest" Honorable Mention
by
Andrew Shaffer
Tony Hughes woke up on the morning of October 31st to find himself naked in a candlelit room. For a moment, he was disoriented as his eyes tried to trace the dancing candlelight flickers to their sources: An elaborate candelabra with six tall, white candles mounted on the far wall, near the foot of the bed that he had awoken in. The room was familiar enough--it was his girlfriend Sam’s. His arms were suspended above his head and tied to the queen-size bed’s posts. He couldn’t feel the rope, but saw it digging into his desensitized flesh at his wrists. His legs were tied up, same as his arms. Tony’s heart rate increased as he struggled against the restraints. He could hear Sam practicing one of her Wiccan chants in the next room: “...And tail of rat. This is my spell, so mote it be!”A loud buzzer rattled Tony’s head. Sam threw a door opening in the corner of the room, temporarily blinding Tony with light from the hallway. He closed his eyes, and heard her fumbling with an alarm clock on the table next to the bed. “Shit,” Sam said, dropping it on the ground before finally shutting the damned noise off. “Sit still, baby,” she said.
Doesn’t look like I have much choice, Tony thought. He felt the pressure loosen on his suspended arms until one hit the bed and he rolled onto his side. Sam undid the ropes around his other arm, and freed his ankles at the foot of the bed.
“Somebody’s at full attention,” she said, smiling. Wendy tossed Tony a pair of underwear onto his erection.“Thanks, you’re a peach,” Tony said, as his blood rushed back into his extremities. His jaws clamped together, enamel grinding on enamel, as he gritted through the slow resuscitation of his arms and legs. “So,” Tony said as the uncomfortable feeling subsided, “what’s up with the S&M?”
Wendy, clothed in her red velour robe, smiled. “I was going to surprise you this morning, but you were sleeping like a baby after I tied you up. I started watching some TV and forgot about you.”
Tony threw his legs over the side of the bed. “Consider me surprised,” he said as he slid into his boxers. He picked up his jeans off the floor. He couldn’t imagine how he had slept through the whole thing, but vaguely remembered taking a couple of Darvocet the night before. “It’s seven-fifteen. I have to be at work by eight,” he said. “But I could be a little late to work, if you know what I mean.” He slid up to Sam and began to undo her robe’s belt.
Sam swatted his hands away. “I don’t think so. I’m not in the mood,” she said. Even after four months of dating, she was still a total mystery to him. One minute she tied him up as part of some kind of sex game, and the next she was feigning disinterest in physical contact. It had been weeks since they’d had sex, a drought that he chalked up to passing their three-month anniversary. It didn’t bother him too much, though, since he’d also began seeing an ex-girlfriend on the side that gave him what he wanted without the Wiccan theatrics.
*
At noon, Tony took leave from his job cashiering at Wal-Mart. Every Halloween, Tony refused to work a full day. And every Halloween, Tony and his friends got drunk and raised hell around town. Raising hell was the kind of thing that everyone did year-round in junior high and high school, but once you were twenty-two like Tony you only had one night a year to put on a mask and act like a jackass without fear of retribution. This year, most of their old gang was off at college or working big jobs in big cities. This year it’s just me and Wade Curtis, he thought as he pulled into Wade’s driveway.
Wade met Tony at the front door with a snow shovel, two pairs of gardening gloves, and a trash bag. “Oh no,” Tony said, “We’re not going grave-robbing.”Wade shook his head and made a bee-line for Tony’s car in the driveway. “That’s so junior high,” Wade said. “Now pop your trunk.”
Tony opened the trunk. “Hold this,” Wade said, handing Tony the snow shovel and gloves. Tony accepted them reluctantly as Wade laid down the garbage bag in the empty trunk. “We’ll need some liner here. Don’t want to get your precious Tempo dirty--I know how attached you are to this bad boy.”
“She’s one of the last of her kind, like the Mohicans,” Tony said. He tossed the shovel and gloves into the trunk and slammed the lid shut.
*
As they left the suburban streets for the county roads, Wade laid out his brilliant plan for Tony. Instead of digging up the dead, they were going to scoop up the dead off the side of the road with a plastic snow shovel.
“Stop!” Wade yelled. Tony hit the brakes. Behind them, a pick-up truck’s tires squealed and it flew past them, the driver laying on his horn and giving them the finger.
“You could have killed us,” Tony said to Wade.
“You’re driving, man--you could have killed me. Anyway, I spotted our first roadkill back there.” Seeing that Tony was still a little shaken up, Wade added, “For an old car, she’s got some pretty decent brakes. For what it’s worth, y’know.”
This was of little comfort to Tony, especially since the brakes had just been replaced for the third time in the six years he’d been driving the Tempo--they’d damn well better work. Tony pulled the car onto the side of the road and shut her off. It wouldn’t have surprised him if she were as shaken up as he was and refused to restart. He popped the trunk and put the gloves on. Wade picked up the shovel and jogged along the gravel towards a torn-up animal corpse, twenty yards behind the parked car. The sky was overcast and the air crisp, but no sign of rain yet to drown out another Halloween. The cold November rain traditionally visited a day earlier than November, making little monsters and ghosts and witches and Supermen march door-to-door in winter jackets or raincoats. When Tony finally approached the roadkill, Wade poked it with the shovel. Nothing. “It’s dead,” Wade said.
“What is it? A raccoon?” Tony said. The animal was nothing more than fur and entrails.
“Not a raccoon,” Wade said. “A possum. See the rat-like tail?”
“Isn’t that an intestine?”
“Not that...that,” Wade said, poking at the animal again with the shovel. This time, he nudged it just enough so that he rolled it onto its side, exposing an intact face. “Yep, that’s a possum. Must’ve been killed recently: No maggots.”
While there were no maggots, Tony still felt puking.*
The smell in the car was unbearable, even with the driver’s and passenger’s side windows rolled completely down. The air stank of putrid possum and rotted rat. Tony and Wade had been roadside grave robbing for hours and had harvested a plethora of bodies. “When we’re done, we’ll give them a proper burial. Nobody deserves to die like they did and bake in the sun until their bones are bleached,” Wade said. Tony agreed. Despite the smell, he knew that what they were doing was right. He felt like he was fighting on the PETA frontlines.
“Where are we taking them? Dumping them in the river for a water burial?” Tony said.
Wade cut him off. “My mom’s house,” he said. “She’s at Gary’s tonight, taking their son out. That means we get to decorate the yard. It’s gonna look like someone bombed a freaking zoo.”
*
At six o’clock on the nose, the first neighborhood trick-or-treater braved Wade’s lawn and rang the doorbell. Tony and Wade had finished decorating just in time--the pheasant’s rusty bird cage had been hung in place of the porch plants just three minutes earlier.
Tony opened the door. Because he and Wade had been busy decorating the lawn and porch with the roadkill, he’d almost forgotten to put on a costume. Almost. He’d pulled an old flannel shirt out of the back of Wade’s closet, and was now dressed up as himself, “circa the mid-nineties.”
“Trick or treat,” the kid on the porch said. The kid couldn’t have been even four years old; he barely stood up to Tony’s knees.
Tony bent over and held out a plastic pumpkin filled with Baby Ruth candy bars. “And what are you supposed to be?” Tony asked the kid. Truthfully, he couldn’t tell--the kid had some white paint on his face and wore a black jumpsuit.
“Panda,” the kid said, taking a candy bar.The kid’s mother, standing at the front of the driveway, shifted where she stood--nervous that this strange man was talking to her son, no doubt. Well, lady, that’s just part of the holiday, Tony thought. It would hardly be any fun unless it was a little scary. The little Panda’s fight-or-flight response kicked in, and he ran back to the safe arms of his mother.
It was still light enough out that one could see all of their glorious decorations under natural light. Although the stink was considerably more subdued than it had been in the car, the pungent aroma of death clung to the yard. “Did that kid even notice our handiwork?” Wade said.“No,” Tony said, returning to the couch to pound beers with Wade, “but I think his mom might have.”
“Screw her--we do this for the kids. Like Will Smith says, parents just don’t understand. This should be a Halloween like they’ll never forget. The kind of image that will haunt them for years to come, and help buy some lucky therapist a Lamborghini.” Wade sat on the couch in his costume, a black t-shirt that simply said, “THIS IS MY COSTUME,” in orange lettering.
Besides the rotting remains of the pheasant in the birdcage, the animals were strung up in various poses across the yard. Both Tony and Wade had hammered down Pabst Blue Ribbons as they strung up their decorations:
The remains of the possum lay in the grass, a dog collar strung around what was once its neck;
The cat sat stiff and upright in a baby stroller, a bonnet on its head and a pacifier in its mouth;
A squirrel, crucified in the traditional Jesus Christ pose, on a two-by-four propped against the side of the house;
The body of a crow, arms spread stiff, impaled in mid-flight on a stick;
And a decaying and dehydrated lizard peeking out of the mailbox at the end of the driveway.
Tony and Wade had rigged spotlights on all of their creations, lights that would illuminate the macabre art installation after dark. “So what’s your old lady up to tonight?” Wade said.
Tony shook his head. “Sam’s fucked up, man. She said she had some spells to cast tonight. Apparently it’s her biggest holiday of the year.”
“Yeah, for witches,” Wade said.
“She’s Wiccan,” Tony said. He himself was unsure of the difference between a witch and a Wiccan, if there even was one. “Whatever. She’s at home, casting spells.”
“I can’t believe that she believes in that crap. What is she, thirteen?” Wade said.
“Twenty-nine. She says the spells work, though. Like, there was this one friend that totally fucked her over, stole a boyfriend or something. So Sam casts a spell on this girl and three mouths later, BAM! The girl catches crabs.” Wade looked at Tony, eyebrows raised in disbelief. They both broke out laughing. After a sixty-second laughing fit that left Tony’s eyes watering, he added, “True story. She said it with a straight face.”
“So what do you think she’d do if you cheated on her?”
Tony winked at Wade. They didn’t usually talk about their sexual escapades. “You mean if she ever caught me?”
“I don’t believe in witchcraft, but I still don’t know if I’d cheat on a witch. There are just some ideas that sound bad on principle, no matter what you believe in,” Wade said.“Look who sounds like the thirteen-year old now,” Tony said.
The doorbell rang. Tony picked himself off of the couch, grabbed the candy basket and opened the door to find himself face-to-face with a county sheriff. “Nice costume,” Tony said.
“Is this your residence?” the sheriff said, ignoring Tony’s comment. Tony shook his head. Wade stepped up to the doorway.
“Is there a problem, officer?” Wade said.
The sheriff nodded. “I’d say so. You’ve got dead animals in your front yard, and kids out trick-or-treating tonight. That’s a health code violation if I ever saw one.”
“So you’re going to take them? You can’t do that,” Wade said. Tony nodded.
To their surprise, the sheriff nodded right back. “You’re right. I don’t think it’s funny, if it’s supposed to a joke. Maybe you even worship the Devil. I don’t care. Just move this shit to the backyard. You can do whatever you want in this town, s’long as it’s in your own backyard.”
“Sure,” Tony said.
The sheriff nodded again. “All right. I don’t want to have to come back to this house, for any reason. Got that? Good. A good night to you gentlemen.”
*
Tony and Wade piled the animals on the firewood in the backyard firepit. Tony shook the birdcage and the pheasant remains dropped out. “That’s the last of them,” he said. Wade uncorked the bottle of lighter fluid and squirted it onto the effigy, soaking corpses and wood alike. Next, he struck a match and dropped it into the pit. The flames shot six feet in the air and Tony jumped back. “There goes all of our fun,” Wade said. “I can’t believe they didn’t even last until dark--those spotlights took an ass-long time to set up.”
“Soccer-mom tattle-tale bitch,” Tony said as the flames lit up the backyard. The animals snapped and crackled like a bowl of Rice Krispies drowning in milk. Tony could see small white maggots writhing within the body of the crow as the fire spread in the fire pit. Nothing, alive or dead, would escape the pit.
“Maybe we should cast a spell. ‘An eye of newt, the tail of rat, wings of crow--‘“ Wade said. Tony, who should have been laughing along with him, was white with fear.
“--Claws of cat, and feathers of pheasant,” Tony deadpanned.
“Yeah, something like that,” Wade said.
“It sounds familiar,” Tony said. “Like an incantation. Sam was saying something like it this morning; she was casting a spell. I was tied up and--“
“Too much information, man,” Wade said, laughing nervously.
“It’s not funny, Wade. I thought it was some kinky sex thing. But...but she was doing something else. A spell.“ Tony stopped. A spell that what? That he and Wade had unwittingly brought to fruition. A spell that required specific animal parts to be burned. Sam had used Tony and his numbskull friend to do her dirty work.
Suddenly, Tony felt the backyard spinning around him. A spell that spun the earth? No. No, it was Tony’s head that was spinning. He dropped to his hands and knees as the dizziness consumed him. He had never felt something so immediate, so sudden. His breath grew heavy and laborious as he hyperventilated.
Wade dropped to one knee and put an arm around Tony’s shoulder. “Are you ok?” Wade said. The blood rushing in Tony’s ears made Wade’s voice sound like he was at the end of a long, underwater tunnel.
“I can’t feel my hands,” Tony said. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” He closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath.
“You’re not going to die. I think you’re just having a panic attack,” Wade said.
“No, I can feel it. My chest hurts. I’m going to--“
Wade shook Tony by the shoulders. “Snap out of it! You’re not going to die. You’re just psyching yourself out, is all. I was kidding about cheating on your witchy woman. If you did, if you’re feeling some sort of guilt that’s eating at you, there’s no way a spell can hurt you. This is all in your mind.”
Tony’s breathing began to slow with each exhale, and his arms stopped tingling. There’s no spell, he said to himself. There’s no spell that can hurt me. He sat upright in the grass as he felt the first drop of cold November rain pelt his face.
"You’re right,” he said to Wade.
“Of course I am. Now let’s go inside while these things burn out here and we’ll finish off that case of PBR.”
“Sure thing,” Tony said. “But promise me one thing: Next year, we go back to egging and tee-peeing houses.”
Wade held his hand out and pulled Tony to his feet. “That sounds like a plan to me. But before we do that, I think we should make sure there aren’t any spells involving eggs and toilet paper.” They both laughed.
As they walked back towards the house, the rain finally began to come down. And from somewhere deep within his nest of pubic hair, Tony felt the tell-tale itch of the crab louse...
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© Shaffer, 2006
Andrew Shaffer is an author and artist currently living in Iowa City, Iowa. His publishing credits include the short fiction story “The Ballad of Sloppy Joe” in the Fall 2005 issue of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. Andrew recently attended a summer session at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, studying fiction with author Chris Offutt.