Mistrial crossed the hedge at the end of town out into the swamps to seek out the great rambling victorian and its proprietress, the great Kate Hex and her coven, the Nightjars. The edifice had once resided in Candlestick proper, but its foundation had since slid out into the swamps. It now had no fixed address, and the accepted method of finding the place was to go out and get lost and once panic set in you were probably not far off, and that proved true on this visit. Half mad with insect bites, scratched up by snags, caked in mud, she arrived at the wrap-around porch and there sat at a patio set was a woman with a fairly prominent brow ridge so it hid her eyebrows and seemed smooth and bald, shading her large eyes and making her look mad and intense. Her, salt and pepper hair was knocked back in celtic braids and she smoked a yellowed, flaky cigarette. “Howdy,” she said, with an amused air, her front teeth stained brown down the center and her lips were dry and chewed. “Are you. . .” Mistrial trailed off, breathlessly. “I am.” She said, “good to meet you, kiddo. We saw you comin’ a long way off. The girls had a good laugh at your expense.” “That seems to be the trend.” “At least you’re awares. Gonna make yourself at home now?” She gestured to the seat across from her. Mistrial dragged herself up the steps and sat down. “Where’d your sneakers go?” “I just. I lost them out there.” “Okay. Just askin’. Some of the girls that come out here don’t have no shoes - no shame in it - comin’ out here barefoot and pregnant.” “How’d you know?” “Sweetie, it’s my business to know,” she leaned in and ashed in the coke bottle tray, “And business is good,” she winked and flicked her cigarette out into the lush green. The cicadas vibrated in the kudzu waterfalls as she lit another one. “You don’t exactly make it easy to find you.” Mistrial said. “It’s the vagaries of the swamp. A lot of motion under the earth, haven’t you noticed? Like somethin’s tryin’ to wake up down there.” A low, grumbling thunder buffeted through a seam in the dense heavy cloud cover, “sky, too, by the looks of it.” Kate leaned around the patio overhang and blinked into the diffuse light overhead, “so how you payin’? I have to have somethin’ for my troubles, don’t I?” Mistrial took off a silver locket with a blue howlite cabuchon inset from around her neck and handed it over, “it was my grandmother’s.” Kate bounced it in her palm, “That’s overpayin’ a bit.” “You didn’t know my grandmother.” A silence prevailed and for a moment Mistrial felt she could Kate’s regard of her: a flabby, sweaty, weak little woman who didn’t have the motivation to change out the powder blue nightgown she had lived in in that dark bedroom for how long she could not remember. “Are you really a witch?” Mistrial blurted. Kate eased back, “haven’t you ever heard that to name a thing robs it of its power?” “How do you become a witch?” “Either I don’t remember or I can’t say. It just gets in you. Starts swimmin’ around inside, and then before you know it you’re out in the swamp under a full moon jerkin’ off a goat cause he said it’d be funny.” “How do you join a coven?” “Oh, now see, you’re lookin’ at it from the outside. I’m you’re thinkin’ golly, that sure would be a step-up from my situation - big ol’ house out where no one can bother you - but you have yet to meet the ratchet bitches I live with. Speak of the devil. . .” The screen door swung open and a skinny woman in flip-flops with some sort of neurological jumpiness brought out a rattling tea set on a tray and set it between them, on it were two thick flush-colored granite mugs. “Valorie,” Kate stopped her with a touch, looking up from the shadow of her brow, “who the fuck’s that second one for?” Valorie looked at the set a while, fingers working at her jersey tee and her pyjama pants, lost in some mental calculus. “Valorie. Think deeply.” For a brief moment she became very still, all her agitations fixed on a point, and then surged forward to grab the extra, apologizing profusely to Kate and hurrying away, splashing the black liquid the way tol the screen door and let it bang shut behind her. Kate smiled neatly, just short of enthusiasm, “Guess she thought I was still fuckin’ around town,” she laughed hazily. “I wasn’t fucking around.” Mistrial said. “Didn’t say you were,” Kate looked at her sidelong, “but it sounds like you have a bigger problem on hand,” the tan smoke roiled up thick from her dry lips, up past her mossy eyes, “out here, we solve our problems.” She extinguished the last nub of cigarette and from the screen door issued some final directions regarding the decoction before letting it bang shut behind her. Mistrial drank the foul broth and set off to lose herself in getting home. Her parents were there waiting for her. Her father’s square head was beet red, his corded forearms wrapped tight around his paunch. Her mother stood behind him, her puffy, squinted eyes set deep in exhaustion. Mistrial tried stepping around them and they began smacking her, anywhere they could get a shot in, all the way out the yard, standing at the swinging gate as it rocked wildly. Into the fading light she went alone in her soul past raucous houses, aching in her bones, in her guts, deep inside. To the overgrown yard of an elderly couple nearby, and sunk into the squidgy grass. The earth that smelled like dogshit, and there she dry-heaved until her diaphram pulled her belly button so far back it touched her spine, like a little button being pressed, and sent her off into an abyssal sleep. She woke up to a dog lapping at her legs, and in rousing, she made the discovery with him, wadded up inside a dark membrane, there was a little pink person. Its tiny fingers fanned out across her thumb. He tried to snatch away and she kicked at him and no matter how much she yelled and threatened him he dogged her all through the town streets, smiling his idiot grin. She ended up in the center of town with the other destitute, wrapped up with their belongings like packages destined for the longboat down the nile. As she stared into the tesselate bricks, a common refrain of hers patterned itself in her head - nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be, nobody me - a little poem she had always told herself. And in the circuitous route of memory she saw Kate Hex’s eyes looking into her. Seeing the whole of her insides and out, all at once. And in that harsh gaze her fear burned away. Her jealousy. Her sorrow. All of it. And she knew what she must do. She fished in the trash and found an oily paper sack and slid the fetus in, then headed on over town to his home and waited nearby so when he came around and checked his box for parcels she could watch as he shook the little thing into his hand. When he looked up, astonished at this small horror, and saw her in the high nettle of the abandoned lot across the way, in that moment of recognition between them, a dark laughter bubbled up - not of her own - but something new altogether.