Part II – The Witch Comes Courting

(When the Veil Tore Open)

December 2023 – The First Whispers

Winter clamped down hard. The creek froze solid enough to walk across. Snow piled on the tin roofs until the ridges looked like the spines of sleeping dragons.

Michelle’s cabin had no insulation worth speaking of. She burned green wood and cursed the smoke that came back down the chimney, but she stayed. Something kept her boots nailed to the puncheon floor: stubbornness, or the way Clarita’s truck tracks were the only ones that ever appeared in the snow outside her door.

Clarita told herself she was “checking for hypothermia risk.” She brought split oak, jars of venison stew, and a kerosene heater she claimed was surplus. She never stayed longer than it took to stack the wood and growl, “Don’t burn the place down, Red.” But her eyes always lingered on the way Michelle’s lips wrapped around the spoon, on the curve of her neck exposed when she pulled her hair up to keep it out of the Fire.

They still fought, but the words had started tasting like foreplay.

Then the rabbits began.

Seven nights. Seven rabbits lay out on Michelle’s porch in a perfect circle, throats opened surgical-clean, bodies still warm, no blood on the boards. On the eighth night, Michelle woke at 3:17 a.m. to the smell of apples rotting in a grave.

The red safelight in her makeshift darkroom bled across the walls like fresh slaughter. She was developing a roll she’d shot at dusk: Clarita standing on the ridge, silhouette sharp against the bruised sky, shotgun over one shoulder, looking like every dangerous thing Michelle had ever wanted.