A Digression on the Subject of Witches
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a lonely little girl wandered through a dark wood.
The little girl had a real name, but everybody called her Carrots.
She climbed up onto a low branch in a tree—she was the sort of little girl who would climb as high as there were convenient handholds, but no higher—made herself comfortable, and thought about the universe.
She didn’t stumble upon any remarkable insights.
She was an ordinary little girl, not a philosopher-king.
Despite this, the universe said, Hmm.
If you’re the sort of person who reads, you’ll be aware that fairy tales ought to be taken seriously in their essence, if not in their particularity.
Fairy tales, like fairies themselves, are not overly concerned with factual accuracy.
They sometimes mislead. You should, therefore, take the following explanation of a peculiar phenomenon with a grain of salt: It’s a little-known fact that, in the Kingdom of Evermore, just as caterpillars turn into butterflies, lonely little girls sometimes turn into witches.
The loneliness that creates a witch can’t be the temporary loneliness of a child whose parents have left her alone to fend for herself for an afternoon.
It’s a deeper and more abiding loneliness than that.
It’s the sort of loneliness felt by a little girl who, for whatever reason, walks alone into the woods and climbs up into trees to think about the universe more often than she’s invited to birthday parties.
It’s the sort of loneliness that, over time, curdles into something that isn’t loneliness at all.
This was the way in which Carrots was lonely.
Carrots was eleven years old. She wasn’t an orphan and didn’t have a cruel stepmother, and she wasn’t bullied by the other children for some distinct physical attribute.
She was simply a little girl who was slightly too plain, slightly too loud, and slightly too intense in her contemplation of peculiar subjects.
She wasn’t a round peg being forced into a square hole.
She was, in a world of round holes, a peg that at some point in the manufacturing process had been made very slightly oblong, to the degree that the cosmic carpenter assumed that he was probably just hammering wrong and set her aside to try again later.
This was always a particular source of pain for Carrots.
If she were bullied for being the lone child with flashing green eyes and flame-colored hair in a village of dull, ordinary-looking children, that would be one thing.
She’d be able to anticipate going on an exciting hero’s journey and meeting lots of people who would recognize her remarkable qualities for what they were.
Carrots, unfortunately, was shunned by the other children not because they were nasty provincial little bullies but because she was the sort of child who read a lot of books, thought she understood more about the world than she actually did, and didn’t understand how to play with the other children without annoying them.
This made her very lonely, but she told herself that she didn’t care about those dull, silly children in the village anyway.
All of this was made worse by the fact that the pain felt by a lonely little girl is taken seriously by almost nobody, including the little girl herself.
She is forced, therefore, to imagine herself into a world where she is a more important and interesting person experiencing a more important and interesting kind of pain.
It is this specific combination of loneliness, pain, and inward-directed imaginative power that creates the ideal alluvium for germinating the seeds of witchcraft.
This condition of proto-witchery is not, strictly speaking, limited to little girls, though they experience it more frequently than any other type of person.
Just as, under the right circumstances, towering trees can be found growing inside dark caves or clinging to the sides of sheer rock faces, this type of little-girl loneliness sometimes finds its expression in an embittered young widow, a forlorn and delicate elderly man, or, in one notable case, a desperately unhappy forty-five-year-old sergeant major struggling to reacclimate to civilian life after many years of fighting overseas.
It is, however, an absolute fact that unhappy little girls are the ideal existential ceramic crock for fermenting the supernatural sauerkraut that is a fully developed adult witch.
Despite this rich, dark loam of little-girl loneliness being endemic in girls between the ages of seven and seventeen, it is not sufficient for a girl to become a witch.
It’s generally more likely to produce an adult with a slightly above-average level of interest in stories about notorious and gruesome murders.
Even in the intensely magical forest of Brigandale, all that this sort of loneliness creates is a small divot in the fabric of reality.
Most lonely little girls are too busy living in reality to notice a crack in it.
That day in the tree, Carrots looked at reality, noticed a handhold in it, and pulled herself up.