A Forest Witch

1. Autumn

All my life I never knew who my mother was. I didn’t know whether she lived amongst our small little community I’d been raised within or not. I didn’t know if she was dead or alive.

I didn’t even know her name.

The witches in these woods kept their secrets close to their chests and even if she did live among this community the others would never tell me, not that I’d ever dare ask any of them.

They were all excellent secret keepers.

And keeping their children safe from greedy, evil men was supposedly the reason we were all out here in the first place. I was always a bit of a skeptic and had never been able to simply be a blind follower.

It made me a bit of an outcast amongst the small community, but I never minded being different or on the outside looking in. If I’d been meant to fit in then I would have. Or, so that’s what I told myself to make myself feel better.

I didn’t have many friends here and I wasn’t winning any popularity contests. I was more than okay with that though.

Long story short, I didn’t feel like I fit in with my community and I didn’t hide my feelings from anyone.

It wasn’t exactly that I thought I was different or better than anyone.

It was more that I thought there was more to life for me than this. I didn’t mind living in the woods, I loved being one with nature, but I always thought there was a coven out there just waiting for me to come along and complete them.

I wanted that, a coven of my own.

I desperately wanted a family of my own.

I wanted to be a part of something other than a giant community where you were only a small cog in a really big, dysfunctional wheel.

I wanted to be considered special to someone in my life.

I stupidly thought I was destined for it. Mostly everyone else thought I was stuck up for it. I’ve heard people whisper things about how I thought my “shit didn’t stink” and how one day I’d get “taken down a peg, where I belonged.”

I never understood it because I wouldn’t say these kinds of things about others in my community. I wanted peace, love, and happiness for everyone, no matter what they felt about me.

We were all raised together, taught to supposedly share everything we had, and in some cases that included all of our feelings. Which is why I shared mine even though they weren’t received in a well light. You didn’t hide anything from your family, it wasn’t how our community was supposed to operate. Though I was bad because I did things sometimes and hid them, I never lied about it when caught though.

I constantly craved privacy and a little space. All of which made me as much of an outcast as our community allowed one to be. It used to bother me more but now I just lived my life to the best of my ability.

I didn’t mind being an outcast of a sort if it meant I stayed true to myself.

Being true to myself was something very important to me and I wasn’t willing to compromise that no matter what. Not everyone was always true to themselves and I refused to be a liar, even if it would have made my life so much easier.

There were enough liars in this place without me being one also.

Liars and hypocrites, the whole lot of them. But we weren’t supposed to talk about that.

I knew there was a different way to live that normal people without magic did successfully. I even knew that there was another way for witches to live amongst their covens.

We weren’t supposed to talk about any of that either.

The Council of Elders had been known to punish the outspoken amongst us. I had been punished twice already, publicly, before I learned to keep my mouth shut and myself to myself. It wasn’t easy but I managed it. Punishment was akin to public humiliation and torture and that was not fun for a proud witch like me.

This whole place was hard for a witch like me.

I wanted so much more for myself and I didn”t think it was wrong to want such things. We were taught it was wrong to want such things though.

“Get your head out of the clouds, girl,” Nell, the shriveled up old lay who ran the kitchen tents snapped at me. “You’re here to serve up food, not day dream. Every day it’s the same damn thing. I have to tell you, you never get it, and you never change. Don’t make me have to tell you anymore today. I’ve run all out of patience for you and I’m just going to start punishing this behavior of yours.”

Nell was a mean old bird who never had any patience for anyone, least of all me. I didn’t hate people because it felt wrong to do so, but I got real close to it with her. She got mean and ornery simply because she could be and she got away with it. I’d never like someone like her.

People who went out of their way to make other people feel like crap simply because they knew they could get away with it weren’t people I ever cared to have to be around.

But, again, I kept my mouth shut because that’s what I had to do to live in this place. And I’d been told from a very young age that there simply was nowhere else for me to live.

I knew it was a lie.

All the people lied here. There was no proving it or doing anything about it. Change in this place was a losing battle and I’d learned long ago not to fight it.

Nell left me be while I dished out plate after plate of food for the people in line.

I day dreamed about being somewhere else. Somewhere with buildings and indoor plumbing. It was quite the dream.

Clothes that weren’t passed down from person to person.

Things that were just my own and never had to be shared with anyone else ever.

Things I had no business ever dreaming about. We were a community and we were taught to share everything.

When I had scooped food onto the last plate I filled one up for myself. I was starving and carried my plate out of the tent with me. Too many people were still lounging around in there eating and I didn’t feel like being stared at, it would have made it hard for me to keep my food down.

My one true friend I had here was an old woman. She was incredibly wise and had always had a soft spot for me as long as I could remember. And she used to tell me the best stories when I was younger.

She was getting too old now to move around outside of her tent easily and if I wanted to see her I had to make a point and go and visit her when I was allowed free time again.

Everyone was put to work around here, most especially myself.

Anyway, my old friend”s name was Plume and she was convinced I was special and that was why most everyone else didn”t like me. People feared what they didn’t understand and there was a lot for people to not understand about me.

Take my hair for example. It was a reddish purple color that I had never seen on another person here in our encampment. No matter what they’d tried washing my hair with when I was a child the color never dulled or washed away.

And there were strange markings on not only my face but a good deal of my entire body as well.

The Elders said I had been born that way.

I thought it was bullshit and that they were lying about me, and right to my face no less. I figured they had to be tattoos I received as a baby for some strange reason. No one wanted me to know.

That was another thing this place was full of — secrets.

I sat down on the grass and leaves against the base of tree to eat my dinner in peace.

I felt eyes on me and couldn’t help but feel like maybe my whole life was one giant cosmic joke that I shouldn’t be taking part in because in a different world I would have been born for more.

Maybe that’s what the markings on my face meant, that I’d been born in the wrong place at the wrong time but I’d likely die here in this shithole forest before ever finding out.

And that broke my heart.

But that was normal because everything in my life always did.