Titaness
by Leslie Fox
How It Came to Gingerbread
By Virginia M. Mohlere
The Wicked Witch dips her toe into the water of the bath and hisses: it’s too damn hot, but she’s naked and cold, and she doesn’t want to wait for it to cool down. Like the spell to heat water, the one to cool it often works too well. Anyway, the sting only lasts a minute, so in she goes. She leans back and lets the heat seep into her bones, until she feels almost good. She has a new lump of pumice lying by the tub; she’s going to attack her corns with it as soon as they’ve softened up.
The witch likes to lie back in the bath with her eyes closed and dream of what she was like as a young girl. Her skin was milky pink, not liver-spotted and sallow, sagging in great folds. She only grew the wart on her chin when she acquired a familiar that suckled it – this makes her shudder even now, though the lewd, piebald stoat died years ago in the jaws of the Black Dog. If the death was supposed to have punished her, it was not successful. The stoat liked to stand in the middle of the table any time she bathed or changed her clothes and scream, “Dugs! Dugs! Big as jugs! Trap and smother you like a rug!”
She shivers, and a bit of water sloshes over the side of the tub. If she had known, when she made her pact with the Devil, that she would end up so very ugly, short-sighted, sore in every bone, and with a stomach so sour that she lives off of thin gruel, she would have paid better attention.
But Janey Cooper had wanted her man, and her father’s money hadn’t been enough to get him. So Janey stood up in church and accused her of making love spells in the forest. She had lived with Granny back then, in the hut that is now the pig pen, and she had had a name. Agatha? Yes, Agatha.
“I saw her by the stream, singing over her herbs while she washed them!”
She named blueberry leaves, mullein, and wolfsbane. In retrospect, this makes the witch suspicious. At the time, she wouldn’t have known the use of that mixture. That Janey Cooper did is telling.
Granny sat in the pew, blinking and deaf, while Agatha stood and explained that it was sorrel she had been washing to go in their turnip and onion soup and that the “song” had in fact been 3 Hail Marys. This satisfied Father Bernard, who had assigned the Hail Marys in confession when she admitted to kissing – what was his name? Thomas? Henry? Phillip, like the king. They were to be married, and she was finally going to escape her home in the woods. She and Granny were going to live in a house where the wind didn’t blow straight through, eat meat more than two or three times a season, and live on a real farm with an actual water pump and beeswax candles for holidays. And she would be loved.
The witch snorts. It didn’t work out that way, but Janey Cooper didn’t get him either. The chit ruined everything, sure enough. Agatha went into town with her basket of mushrooms and bunches of herbs and fiddleheads, and the friendly faces had become stony. More doors were slammed in her face. Phillip’s parents had died young and his farm was a ways out, so Agatha actually heard the rumor first: she was not only a witch but also a seductress. She was drinking a dipper of water from a rain barrel while two matrons around the corner wondered which of the town fathers she had seduced and how long it would be until she married Phillip in a hurry.
The only reason she didn’t drop her basket before running home was that it was the only one they had. At home she laid on her cot and trusted Granny’s deafness and blindness to hide her catching breath and the way she balled her thin blanket up in her fists. Janey Cooper had been a bane since her hair-pulling days when they were young. Agatha hated her with a ferocity that practically glowed.
After that, even though she was the one who was supposed to be a witch, it was like she was cursed. Any trip to town got her a pinched bottom and one fright or another, or at the very worst a gang of children following her chanting, “witch, witch!” and lobbing clods of mud at her. Father Bernard was promoted to a nicer parish, and the new priest was too young and fanatical to listen to her. He suggested that if his heavy penances weren’t working, perhaps she should take the veil. Five of Phillip’s ewes abandoned their lambs, so he was too busy to visit. Then Granny died.
This got Agatha a little bit of a reprieve: the town paid for Granny’s shroud, and some loaves of bread and pottages came her way. She hoped this meant that Phillip would marry her sooner. He promised that he would.
But the Sunday when Phillip had gone to the next town over to sell off some of his endless lambs, Father Etienne’s sermon was about the spiritual and physical dangers for a girl living by herself in the woods: wasn’t there anyone who could take Agatha in, to safeguard her virtue and her soul? She stared at her knees and felt her cheeks burn during the long silence that followed. She bit her lip and thought uncharitable things in the direction of the pulpit.
The smith showed up at her hut two days later, leering and blocking her way, saying that he would “take care” of her, though Agatha knew his wife and had seen the burn scars on her forearms and her broken teeth.
He had his arms around her, and she was resisting, but silently, because she knew that no one would hear her. The smith’s breath was foul with beer, and she could feel that her struggles only excited him more, but she wouldn’t stop. She was going to be Phillip’s wife – she had to fight for that.
It had to have been a curse, because just at that moment, Phillip stood in the doorway, and all he said was,
“So it’s all true! Agatha, how could you?”
And he left. The enormity of it did not strike her until later, nor did she notice for many years that it was the last time anyone called her by name. At the time, she took advantage of the smith’s brief shock to escape him and grab Granny’s walking stick. She cracked him good on the side of his head and he staggered away.
Phillip escorted Janey Cooper to church the next week. Agatha stared at them and ground her teeth. No one would buy mushrooms from her anymore. Eventually, she couldn’t even buy bread. She had three coppers left, but no one would sell her anything. She ate mushrooms, herbs, and birds’ eggs when she could get them. She learned where the children set their rabbit snares and fishing lines and stole their catches. She became afraid to sleep, because it seemed that men were always skulking around her hut. She took Granny’s walking stick with her wherever she went, and a dozen town fathers communed with it. Every time a man’s head jarred the stick in her hands, she felt a shiver in her chest, anger and joy at the same time.
Church became a misery. No one would speak to her, much less sit with her, and Father Etienne was insistent that she become a nun.
She had begun to consider it: the town didn’t want her, Phillip didn’t want her, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had enough to eat, and winter was only a couple of months away. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to serve God. She had always wanted to be a mother, but that no longer seemed likely. At least in a convent she would have meals and a roof.
Then Renardine Miller came to her door. Agatha could have fallen over with shock. The miller’s wife had not been kind to her even in good times, but here she was in the doorway, with a covered basket over her arm.
“I need a love potion,” she said. “My husband never comes to my bed anymore, and all we have are sons. I need a daughter, you understand? Someone to care for me when I’m old.”
“But I don’t know–” Renardine flipped back the cloth on her basket, and the scent from it made Agatha’s stomach growl.
“I brought meat pies, to pay. I see how scrawny you are. Please.”
Agatha wanted to cry: the food smelled so good. But she had never lied in her life.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to help you.”
Renardine’s expression slid from pleading to ire. She grabbed Agatha’s arm hard.
“Listen, you slut. You’ll give me what I need and you’ll take the food. You hear me? Or I’ll have the town fathers out to burn this hut with you in it. That will make my husband as stiff as your potions, I have no doubt.”
Agatha tied together a couple of old fiddleheads with some lovage so sorry-looking that she had hesitated to eat it. She mumbled something about tea and the full moon, until the miller’s wife seemed satisfied and left. Agatha ate one of the meat pies, had a long cry, and that was that. She had become a witch.
It was surprisingly easy. She kept bundles of green stuff from the forest and made up little rhymes, and there was a steady stream of girls from the village who all wanted love spells. Janey Cooper was not one of these – Phillip sat next to her in church every Sunday. The miller’s wife told everyone she was with child.
After two months of this, Agatha was in the forest late at night and saw the Devil. She had felt all her former good cheer leave her. It was easier to bear being poor and cold when Granny and Phillip had loved her. To be despised made her guts twist up. The village wives came to her for fake potions; they left her with muffins, meat pies, and tiny crocks of gristly stew. They thanked her but wouldn’t touch her, and if she went into town, they crossed the street to avoid her. Men who would stare into the distance and ignore her even if she spoke to them directly would scratch at her door at night to beg for her favors.
Agatha’s anger tore at her. Her jaws ached, as did her back. Her hair, which had been thick and curly, hung in clumps around her face. She didn’t want to wander around in the dark, but the smith’s broken head had healed, and he had started coming around again. He was one of the few men of whom she was actually afraid.
She saw a light ahead, which was strange enough that she crept toward it as quietly as she could. Agatha assumed that some of the villagers were up to something secret, which could be valuable. If it was a tinker, she determined to run straight home, smith or not.
A beautiful naked man stood in a small glade. He glowed a little green. Agatha stood still and fingered the cheap tin clasp on Granny’s cloak. The man was cleaner and better looking than anyone she had ever seen. If it hadn’t been for the glow, she would have thought him some noble out lost in the woods.
He turned to look at her. He smiled, and not only did he have all his teeth, but they were straight and white. Thick golden hair curled away from his forehead, and his eyes were pale. He made Phillip look lumpen.
“You are out very late. In the woods.” Agatha sighed at the sound of his smooth voice. She stared at him until his smile widened just a bit. She felt herself blush.
“Sir, I – yes.”
“Do you enjoy rambling in the darkness?”
He was naked but not erect, and he had made no move toward her. Agatha relaxed just the tiniest bit.
“No sir. I thought it better to be away from home.”
The man’s smile fell, and he nodded.
“Indeed. The smith.”
Agatha’s hand clenched on her clasp – a rough edge pricked her thumb, and she gasped. The green man frowned.
“How could you know that?” she asked.
The man’s answer confused her.
“Would you be my daughter?”
Agatha blinked at him for a double handful of heartbeats. He was very clean and well-fleshed. Any daughter in his house would be warm and full, and a smile so kind could mean a happy home. No one had touched her, spoken to her in kindness, since Granny’s funeral: her loneliness was a physical pain. To be a daughter. She could barely imagine how wonderful that would be.
“Oh, yes sir.”
Then, too fast for her to see, he was standing right in front of her, too close. Agatha gagged at a sudden stench of brimstone and rotting flesh. The man grabbed her hand – his flesh was painfully hot – and licked her hurt thumb. His tongue was scratchy, like a cat’s. Agatha wanted to scream, but she couldn’t open her mouth because of the smell. There was a roaring sound like flames, but inside her head. Then he was gone.
She staggered and breathed the sweet night air. Her head felt tight and hot. She stumbled home without any care for the smith, the cooper, or any other wretched man. She fell onto her bed and slept until late the next day.
The witch snorts and whispers the rhyme to reheat her bathwater. The priests always made it sound as if making a pact with the Devil involved lechery and dancing, not just the word yes, a cut thumb, and the reek of dead bodies. They never said you could wake up the next morning literate and knowing more spells and correspondences than you even knew could be counted. She scrubs at her corns.
She awakened and wasn’t Agatha anymore – she was, no matter what the townsfolk had thought before, a Witch. For the afternoon and evening she sat in her hut and tested her new knowledge. She called up food, knowing that a tavern two towns to the north would be missing a tankard of cider and a bowl of mutton stew.
She wished for a sky-blue cloak and it came to her, smelling of lavender and very fine, from a lady’s bower in a country far away. She slept deeply for the second night in a row, with a full belly, a mattress stuffed with sweet straw, and several thick blankets to keep her warm.
The next day, the brand-new witch walked into town, wearing her new cloak and with five silver pieces in her purse. She could summon anything, but she wanted the townsfolk to see her with money in her pocket. She wanted them to look at her and see how she held up her chin. Using a cantrip that rolled over her head from back to front and forced the shop mistress to help her, she bought salt, sugar, and tea. Then she stepped out of the shop and ran straight into Janey Cooper.
Janey stopped dead and looked her up and down.
“Whoring doesn’t seem to suit you, witch, even with that new cloak,” she said.
Agatha would have wept in horror, but the witch felt that same sensation of things moving forward through her head.
“You look fat and happy, I see.”
Janey grinned.
“I have a rich father to feed me.” She leaned in. “And once I’m married, I’ll be even fatter with all of Phillip’s children.”
The witch stared at her. Janey Cooper did grow fatter, but never with babies. From that moment she grew steadily, until her needlework could not keep up with her girth. Phillip broke their betrothal when she grew too large to leave her bed. The witch would travel in spirit to watch as Janey laid weeping on a pile of straw on the floor (the bed frame having broken), filth rubbing all her crevices raw and her body aching with its unnatural size. By the next summer she was dead, in a colossal fart that stank up the whole village for a day. The witch summoned a sweet cake, in celebration. Her little unnatural breeze kept the smell away.
Once the witch had a few days’ worth of solid meals in her and she was confident that her new knowledge was not going to desert her, she started to plan how to get Phillip back. She finally knew at least twenty real love spells, but her uncanny learning told her that it would be a false love, more like compulsion, and this was ugly to her.
But speaking of ugly, no matter how often she washed her hair, it fell in greasy knots over her shoulder. In desperation, she ate nothing but cream buns for most of a month, but she couldn’t seem to gain an ounce. Her bones stuck out and her breasts sagged, and she felt as if she smelled funny, even bathing every day.
The witch laid in her soft new bed and gritted her teeth. The face in the mirror was too pinched and haggard to warrant attention, and no beautification spells would stick to her face. She stood in the village and watched Phillip hold Janey Cooper’s arm less tightly as she grew past healthy, past plump, past fleshy and into something frightening, mostly because it happened so fast. The villagers saw her watching and crossed their fingers.
Everything was ruined. The witch raged over all she had lost: Granny, Phillip, her beauty, and the certainty that she had a place in the world and that God would bless her if she was good and obedient. Then the Black Dog came to visit.
It was waiting for her outside the door of her hut when she returned from town. It wasn’t particularly ugly or mean-looking, but it stood waist high.
“Nice little shithole you have here,” it said.
She knew immediately what it was, and fear cut through her, but she snapped, “Watch your language, Dog.”
It laughed.
“Fair enough, witch.”
Then it leapt on her and took from her the balance for every spell she had done, while she laid on the ground and tried (unsuccessfully) not to cry. When it was finished, the Dog licked her cheek and said, “Well done, baby witch. I’ll see you again.”
It disappeared; the witch curled into a ball and howled for her Granny as she had done when she was a little girl. But Granny was dead, so presently she drew herself up and hobbled inside, where she was shocked to find all her fingers and toes intact and not a bite mark on her.
So it was back to herbs and nursery rhymes for the townsfolk. She put real magic into a spell just often enough to keep them trusting but afraid, and the witch discovered that bending their minds did not really count. She could demand money rather than barter, could force shopkeepers to wait on her and not warrant a visit from the Dog. Pushing so far as to make the town fathers leave their beds and build her a cottage in the middle of the night was too much: once her new house was complete, the Dog appeared on the bedstead, chuckling.
“You got greedy, little witch.”
She paid him his due, but it wasn’t nearly so bad the second time.
“I have my little snack,” it said, “but this isn’t like the balloon woman. You see how we have it? You got this nice snug cottage, I have my part, and you’ve barely cried at all.” It licked her cheek again. “I’m sending you a present.”
The stoat showed up three days later, and the witch found that she could filter spells through it to limit the Dog’s visits to only four or five times a year. The stoat also liked to sneak around the village houses and bring back news to her that she used like coin.
But she never again pushed at the edges of her power just to see what she could do. The witch had looked inside early and seen the little dot of talent that was all the Devil had given her. Between that and the Dog, she kept her ambitions and her desire for revenge in check. Phillip married a dreary girl from another town and the witch didn’t even blight their ewes. She made herself be content with proper meals and a roof over her head, plus a bit of a treat on Sundays – just to spite Old Scratch, with his Dog and his stingy gifts.
The witch sits back in the bath, rewarmed again. She has scoured her feet until they buzz, but the corns will grow back. They always do. She has lived alone for so many years that she has gone strange in the head. She has broken up marriages, aborted babies, and gone out in secret to bless the fields in times of drought. All the time she keeps a running equation in her head of what spells she has made and what they cost.
But as she wrings out her iron-gray hair, the witch thinks that either she has gotten used to pain over time or the Dog has become more gentle.
“No.” She jumps. The Dog is sitting in the corner. The witch glares at him.
“You couldn’t give an old woman some warning?”
The Dog pants in the way that she has come to recognize as laughter.
“What do you care? I’m a dog.”
The witch snorts.
“If every dog were like you, cats would be man’s best friend.”
The Dog barks and actually wags its tail. The witch stares at it, suspicious of this new behavior. She has done no spells of note since the last time it visited.
“Why are you here?”
The Dog walks over and rests its chin on the side of the tub.
“You’re not the baby witch you used to be.”
She crosses her arms over her wrinkly breasts.
“Clearly not.”
The Dog sighs.
“Don’t be stupid. That’s not what I meant. You’ve laid in this water thinking about the weepy girl you were and everything you lost. You know how that works. It all balances out.”
The witch leans forward.
“What are you saying?”
“All these years of love spells and beauty potions, and you haven’t paid attention to what you are.”
She stares.
“Look inside,” the Dog whispers.
The witch sits back and closes her eyes, turning her mind to her infernal algebra and the small, glowing kernel of her power. But her power is no longer small – it blazes in her inner eye like a green bonfire. For many years she has counted on her small gift and constrained herself to simple spells, never reaching for anything more because she did not want to pay the price.
“It grew,” the Dog says. “The more power you have, the less each spell costs you. For years you have conserved yourself, feeding the power with little spells but never tapping it dry with large ones. You were never greedy, not since that first time.”
The witch opens her eyes, and the Dog is glowing a little green around the edges.
“We are pleased with you, my Master and I. So we have a plan for you to consider. It seems there is a shortage of children’s souls among the powers, and here you sit in a patch of forest surrounded by towns filled with the little buggers.”
The witch grins slowly. Now that she has seen it, she understands the new mathematics of this greater power. There is much more to be gained and a good deal less risk.
“What do you want me to do?”
The Dog’s glow flares.
“We think redecorate, for a start. What are your feelings on a candy theme?”
Her house becomes a wonderland: the smell of gingerbread masks the sulfur and rot surrounding all things that glow green (e.g., the fire). She builds windows made of sugar glass with panes of licorice and marzipan. The sweet magic glass shows a fantasy of every treat she had wanted but never had as a poor little girl in the woods: soft beds piled high with white pillows, brightly colored toys, a cake cooling on the table.
From the outside, the witch looks as if she sings while she sweeps the floor or ladles endless cups of hot milk. The front door is candy shiny and scented with clove. The witch smiles at the effect, glistening and clean, with cookie shingles and color everywhere, just made to attract any person under the age of ten. Then she whispers a spell that will reach out to draw them in, all the children she never bore who will stumble across the threshold and become hers.
The witch understands the language of un-wanting, having been unwanted herself. All the furtive children find their way to her candy house and her oven, and their souls go shrieking into the little green funnel in the fireplace. The twitchy, nervous children cannot believe their luck. The broken ones silently shove gumdrops into their maws and let themselves be led. Her spell was constructed to sing to children who would not be missed; and they are all so amazed by their good fortune that she hardly has to work to take them. They are desperate for kindness, worse even than she was back in the glade, these starved and bruised infants. They walk straight into the house, straight into the cage.
The witch and the Dog chuckle to each other about their success over ale and child pie, once a season, when it comes to empty the funnel for its Master.
“To think you wanted to make one of these,” the Dog says once, peering into the little cage at the sniveling brat she is preparing for the ritual that will rip out its soul for safekeeping. She shrugs.
“I had a narrow view of the world.”
“You were ignorant.” The witch ignores this. The Dog would like to take its old payment from her, but her body is unassailable. She has too much power now. Her flesh less interesting than ever. Her ecstasy, as she flies out into the stars and listens to the song of the universe, is entirely intellectual. She tries to take the Dog’s waggling as a compliment. She fails.
The witch has plans. Each soul weeping in the funnel is a deposit, like in the banks of the great cities. Her account grows with every transfer.
“No please no,” the little voices scream, but all the witch sees is her magical balance growing. She will be the daughter of her Master indeed, snug in his very warm home, his Dog at her feet.
The aching meat will fall away, and she will find her reward. Her cup is filled nearly to overflowing: her own fingers have that pale green glow. She can afford to be careless, to let down her guard for the first time in decades. Her own soul will go laughing into the funnel (she has been ready for years). This will be like the Dog, painful and gruesome, but so much lies on the other side. She will have her home and fire. They are waiting for her.
See more of Virginia M. Mohlere’s work at
– MungBeing: a piece about collaboration and poetry http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_12.html?page=31#1028 and a short fiction/dream about peace http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_8.html?page=40#593
– Cabinet des Fees: two short stories, “Demeter & Persephone: 1969” http://www.cabinet-des-fees.com/issue1/demeter.html and “All My Mommies” http://www.cabinet-des-fees.com/current.html
– and Mythic Delerium 16 – a poem, “Beauty, Sleeping” http://www.mythicdelirium.com/#current