LJ Idol S11 Week 2: Living Rent Free Inside Your Head
“I love you.”
It’s whispered gently in her head and reverberates somewhere above her left eye, where her grandmother is buzzing around today.
Arvilla stirs clockwise six times, taps her wooden spoon thrice against the copper cauldron, and speaks the magic words. Then, with her grandmother’s love humming in her mind like a kiss, she decants the watery potion into the six waiting vials on her desk a few feet away. The wood face of the desk is scarred and mottled with years of potions accidents, knife scores from hasty chopping, and hard use. But it serves her just fine, just like the rest of the house. Two chimneys, a hearth half the size of the house itself, and a roof half made of vents on various pulleys to keep the place cool even in the heat of summer with the fires blazing.
It’s a good house.
She corks the six vials after blowing a kiss into each, and smiles when they shift from a slippery yellow color to a deeper purple.
“You’ve such a deft hand with potions. I know, there’s plenty else for a girl with your talents to be doing,” her grandmother says. She’s moved a bit, her voice coming closer now to her ear.
Arvilla rolls her eyes. “I like my life, grandma. I like it here. What would I do without this house? Besides, why can’t you go bother mother, hm? I think she’s in the bahamas right now, wouldn’t you rather be there?”
She can feel her grandmother huff inside her head. It feels like half a sneeze. “Such a rude child she raised, why would I spend time with her. And you could do plenty. World’s a big place, mija.”
“Hush, grandma,” she says back, and goes about cleaning the day’s cauldrons from the hard fire scale and slimy remnants of pond frogs.
Albert comes at half ten, as he often does, to flirt with her and pick up the day’s potions for delivery down to the town; she charms a pigeon to peck at his window let him know they’re ready. He’s a fine boy, if one likes such things, with a clean set of clothes and a pleasant demeanor. He’s never pushy or unkind, and she likes the way he smiles-- she could use that in a magic working, easily.
“Morning Witch Arvilla,” he says with a quick and cheeky bow. She blinks and lets down the wards on her door and he strolls in.
“Morning Albert. Grandmother is in residence today,” she says, because it’s polite to disclose these things.
“Ah, and good morning Grandma,” he says, a little more reserved already. But he’s met her a half dozen times already, if not more, and he still smiles at Arvilla because Albert’s a cheeky boy indeed.
“See,” Grandma says against her ear still, “The world is a big place.”
Arvilla resists the urge to roll her eyes, because poor Albert won’t understand. Instead she smiles back at him, hands him a basket full to bursting with vials that clink gently against the cloth that holds them safe.
“Your deliveries for the day. If you could go to Susan first that would be best, her son is about to find himself in poison oak. And mind the road as it bends past the willow tree, a bird told me there’s a sink there.” If she left for the grand old world she’d have to find a new batch of birds to befriend. Possible, surely, but she likes these birds.
“Ah, yes. Thank you Witch Arvilla,” and he bows again and takes his leave. She blinks the wards back into place, banks the fires with a whispered spell, and then goes to put on her boots and her seal skin cloak: it’s time to go collecting.
“I do love you, mija,” her grandmother says again. Arvilla knows this, knows it into her bones, and she smiles at the words as she cuts the heads off cattail reeds and plucks sparrow eggs from their nests.
“I know you do, grandmother. And I love you, too and always will. But my life is simpler than yours, and I like it that way. I don’t need to run and find a water spirit to marry or a city to overthrow and run.” Both are stories from her grandma’s past that have equal shaking truth to them. Her mother used to tell them as bedtime stories, whispering in Arvilla’s sleeping ear that she could have these things, too, should she want them.
“But what if you change your mind, my darling, and it’s too late to find your water spirit and your city?” Ah, Arvilla smiles, of course her grandmother knew her mind; she is in it after all.
“Then it will be too late for that, but not too late for something else.” And, Arvilla thinks, that will be okay. “Life is only choices, one after the other. If I make one that I don’t like, I’ll just make another one next time.”
A frog leaps and Arvilla’s hand snakes out to grab it from the air. She smacks it dead and adds it to her basket.
Her grandma is silent in her mind for the rest of the day, only humming occasionally once they return to the house on the hill and it’s nearly dark. Arvilla revives the fires, flutes open the vents with a careful management of the rigging, and sets her frogs out for roasting. Tomorrow she will brew the wart ward for Mrs. Elleson, the stress reducer for Franklin’s daughter, and the fertility prayer for Mary, who came to her in secret with tears in her eyes.
These are her people, this town she cares for in her house on the hill. She’s their witch, and she won’t shirk that for the world.
Her grandmother kisses her from inside her head, right above her left eye. “I think I understand, mija. Thank you for being patient with an old woman. Now, do you think sparrows eggs are truly the best choice for young Mary? Eggs are so volatile.”
Arvilla laughs, a tired laugh from a long day of tramping around the mud and swamps in the south. “They have such hope, grandma, in their little shells. I think they are.”