The Poor Witch     Luna   秦红涛   190110708

The Witch of Terror

“Katherine, my sweet, get the melon seeds ready. The story will begin.” As usual, Grandma said this to me. At six o'clock, the old ladies in the village gathered at our house on time to share stories about witches. Grandma, as always, began with her low voice: “Witches are old, ugly, dry, thin, and wrinkled. There are just a few drops of water in their deep, sunken eye sockets, barely nourishing the eyeballs that are about to fall out. They like to eat human flesh, and they like to cut it into small pieces. What's more, they also like to marinate it in jars full of sour peppers.” Grandma then added: “We cannot touch big moths because they are the incarnations of witches. If you accidentally touch one it will remember your appearance and smell. When night falls and everyone falls asleep, the moth will turn into a witch and walk up to your bed, staring at you, laughing strangely. Then you slowly feel her presence. Suddenly, you will startle from the dream, and then open your eyes, screaming hysterically, ready to run. But at this moment, you realize that you aren’t making any sound at all, no matter how wide your mouth is, and at the same time, you seem to be fixed on the bed by a strange force. You can’t escape, even if you try your best to move. Only endless pain spreads from the toe to the scalp, just like lying on your back and sleeping for thousands of years. The most terrifying thing is that you can clearly feel her beside your bed, outside the curtain, without breathing, only a shadow.” I'm sure this was true. I experienced it once when I was seven years old. However, when I woke up the next day, I told my grandmother but she said, “Shh, don't talk about it, or something bad will happen.”

Strange Green Forest

Mrs. Mary changed the subject. “The woman living in the entrance of the village is suspicious. I suspect she is a secret witch. She often goes deep into the mountain opposite the village. That mountain is full of thick trees, but from a distance, it seems a little strange because there is a row of trees growing vertically in the gully of the mountain that are especially dense and brightly colored. The old man said that this is because the gully is full of dead babies, who unfortunately died at birth or were abandoned by their parents, so the piled corpses became the fertilizer of the trees and made the trees that grow in the ravines lusher.” The people in the village have abandoned the area. Only the mysterious old woman often entered and exited the forest.  

“Katherine, come and give your grandmother a massage, or she'll throw you back into the mountain,” Old lady Anna joked. I replied angrily:

“Yes, but who threw me there?” Mrs. Anna replied, “Who knows, maybe it's that crazy woman.”

“Who?” I asked.

The Poor Woman

Mrs. Mary waved to me. “Catherine, come here and I'll tell you. It is said that a mad woman in the village disappeared a few years ago. She was a poor woman. When she was 18, her parents sold her to a family in our village as a concubine. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter. Unfortunately, because there were too many children in the family, they threw her daughter into the ditch across from the village and lied to her that her daughter had died after she was born. A few months later, the poor woman’s husband died, and her family drove her out and make her live in a cowshed next to the house. The cowshed had only a roof, no walls, and it was full of cow dung. Before long, this 20-year-old girl ran out of our village madly, shouting, ‘My daughter was not dead.’ Since then, there has been no news of her.”

“Was her daughter really dead?” I asked.

“Catherine, go and pour us a cup of tea. Now, hurry up!” Before I heard the answer, my grandmother urged me to go.

The Strange Woman

It is said that the woman living in the entrance of the village suddenly moved to the village a few years ago. However, she did not choose to live in groups with most people in the village. Instead, she built a dilapidated wooden house in the nearest position from the mountain in front of the village, especially the strange green gully in the middle. Moreover, she never interacted with the people in the village, and she often went in and out of the strange gully, so people were afraid of her and thought she must be a witch who would eat people.

Although everyone is afraid of her, the strange woman; they still live their ordinary life day by day without thinking about how to drive the witch out of the village. Unfortunately, but also fortunately, people seem to be like this. Over time, they seem to become accustomed to all fear, sin, suspicion, sadness, or happiness. Everyday people just live like this.