Kissing the Witch Read Free

shrinking. My husband had taken to referring to me as if I were someone else. How is my dearest wife today? he would ask, and I
would stare back mutely and think, I don’t know, how is she? Where is she? Who is she? Bring her here, so I can ask her how I am to live this life.
    One day he found me kneeling in a corridor, over a bundle of brown feathers. A tiny swallow: it must have flown down a chimney and battered itself to death. I was sobbing so hard he thought my
time had come; he was stumbling away in search of the midwife when I turned to him and held out my hands. He peered, his face almost touching the skewed feathers, and for a moment I feared he would
laugh, but his face was grave as he raised it towards me. My love, he said, what is a bird to us, or we to a bird?
    I had no answer to give him. When he tried to lift me up I was too heavy for him; my legs were frozen to the ground.
    As I knelt there, aware of his steps dying away, I felt a tremor under my thumbs. When I brought the bird nearer to my face, I could sense a tiny pulse. Not quite dead, then: half-way to
alive.
    In the week that followed, I fed the brittle creature drops of milk from my smallest fingertip and kept it warm in my fur collar. Everything waited. I refused to think about myself: my
exceptional fortune, my perfect house, my excellent husband, who could make any woman happy if she let him. I simply waited to see if the bird would live.
    One day it swallowed. One day it stood. One day it flew, and the next it got a glimpse of sky and tried to smash through the glass. I could have kept it beside me, a silk-tethered plaything, but
what would have been the use of that?
    I took it to the highest window in the house and let it out. The kick of its wings was surprisingly strong. The air smelt like frost, but there was still time to reach the summer land. I stood,
watching the bird wheel over the rooftops. Flesh weighed me down like a robe. The child within me was kicking, a mute clamour for release.
    Next time. Next year. I would get away somehow, sometime, with or without this child, heading somewhere I knew nothing about but that the sun would shine down on my naked head. I would be hurt
and I would be fearful, but I would never be locked up again.
    My life was in my own hands, now, beating faintly, too small yet for anyone to notice. I cupped freedom to my breast. I would feed it, I would love it; it would grow big enough to carry me
away.
    The bird circled back, and hovered outside my window for a moment as if it had something to say.

In a whisper I asked,
    Who were you
    before you took to the skies?
    And the bird said, Will I tell you my own story?
    It is a tale of a rose.



III
The Tale of the Rose
    I N THIS LIFE I have nothing to do but cavort on the wind, but in my last it was my fate to be a woman.
    I was beautiful, or so my father told me. My oval mirror showed me a face with nothing written on it. I had suitors aplenty but wanted none of them: their doggish devotion seemed too easily won.
I had an appetite for magic, even then. I wanted something improbable and perfect as a red rose just opening.
    Then in a spring storm my father’s ships were lost at sea, and my suitors wanted none of me. I looked in my mirror, and saw, not myself, but every place I’d never been.
    The servants were there one day and gone the next; they seemed to melt into the countryside. Last year’s leaves and papers blew across the courtyard as we packed to go. My father lifted
heavy trunks till veins embroidered his forehead. He found me a blanket to wrap my mirror in for the journey. My sisters held up their pale sleek fingers and complained to the wind. How could they
be expected to toil with their hands?
    I tucked up my skirts and got on with it. It gave me a strange pleasure to see what my back could bend to, my arms could bear. It was not that I was better than my sisters, only that I could see
further.
    Our new home was a cottage; my father showed