Witch Baby Read Free

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    Witch Baby wanted to jump onto the bed, throw back her arms and say, “I know!” But instead she just watched. My Secret Agent Lover Man, who didn’t look at all like Witch Baby now, stared as if he were hypnotized. Then he noticed the article, which had slipped into his lap.
    “Two glowing blue globes,” he said, gazing from the piece of paper to the lamp. “I’m going to make a new movie, Weetz. One that really says something. Thank you for your inspiration, my magic slink!”
    Before she could speak he took her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers.
    Witch Baby turned away. Although her walls were papered with other pieces of pain, although her eyes were globes, he had not recognized her gift. She did not belong here.

Drum Love
    I n the garden shed, behind a cobweb curtain, Witch Baby was playing her drums.
    It was the drumming of flashing dinosaur rock gods and goddesses who sweat starlight, the drumming of tall, muscly witch doctors who can make animals dance, wounds heal, rain fall and flowers open. But it beganin Witch Baby’s head and heart and came out through her small body and hands. Her only audience was a row of pictures she had taken of Raphael Chong Jah-Love.
    Witch Baby had been in love with Raphael for as long as she could remember. His parents, Ping and Valentine, had known Weetzie even before she had met My Secret Agent Lover Man, and Raphael had played with Witch Baby and Cherokee since they were babies. Not only did Raphael look like powdered chocolate, but he smelled like it, too, and his eyes reminded Witch Baby of Hershey’s Kisses. His mother, Ping, dressed him in bright red, green and yellow and twisted his hair into dreadlocks. (“Cables to heaven,” said his father, Valentine, who had dreads too.) Raphael, the Chinese-Rasta parrot boy, loved to paint, and he covered the walls of his room with waterfalls, stars, rainbows, suns, moons, birds, flowers and fish. As soon as Witch Baby had learned to walk, she had chased after him, spying and dreaming that someday they would roll in the mud, dance with paint on their feet and play music together while Cherokee Bat took photographs of them.
    But Raphael never paid much attention to Witch Baby. Until the day he came into the garden shed and stood staring at her with his slanted chocolate-Kiss eyes.
    Witch Baby stopped drumming with her hands, but her heart began to pound. She didn’t want Raphael to see the pictures of himself. “Go away!” she said.
    He looked far into her pupils, then turned and left the shed. Witch Baby beat hard on the drums to keep her tears from coming.
    Witch babies never cry, she told herself.
    The next day Raphael came back to the shed. Witch Baby stopped drumming and snarled at him.
    “How did you get so good?” he asked her.
    “I taught myself.”
    “You taught yourself! How?”
    “I just hear it in my head and feel it in my hands.”
    “But what got you started? What made you want to play?”
    Witch Baby remembered the day My SecretAgent Lover Man had brought her the drum set. She had pretended she wasn’t interested because she was afraid that Cherokee would try to use the drums too. Then she had hidden them in the garden shed, soundproofed the walls with foam and shag carpeting, put on her favorite records and taught herself to play. No one had ever heard her except for the flowerpots, the cobwebs, the pictures of Raphael and, now, Raphael himself.
    “When I play drums I don’t need to bite or kick or break, steal Duck’s Fig Newtons or tear the hair off Cherokee’s Kachina Barbies,” Witch Baby whispered.
    “Teach me,” Raphael said.
    Witch Baby gnawed on the end of the drumstick.
    “Teach me to play drums.”
    She narrowed her eyes.
    “There is a girl I know,” Raphael said, looking at Witch Baby. “And she would be very happy if I learned.”
    Witch Baby couldn’t remember how to breathe. She wasn’t sure if you take air in through your nose and let it out through yourmouth or