![]() The problem is that Hailey looks just like her mom, which means she looks just like the Noon Witch. But when her daughter throws back the argument that you didn’t want to do it, so why should I? well, that’s hard for a mother to reason with. That’s the Noon Witch’s place in all this, and it’s noble and necessary. Reminding people of the balance required, and the Earth’s ultimate power. Her mom has tried to explain that it’s not about hurting people, it’s about protecting the Earth. ![]() Meaning Hailey can warm up her food without a microwave and use her curling iron without plugging it in-baby Noon Witch type things like that-but her mom thinks she could learn the bigger stuff if she committed herself to it. And the magic was passed down, after all, even though it got pretty diluted along the way. Especially now that her mom is officially retired. Really, Hailey feels she has much more in common with her dad, who likes sailing on the weekends, than with her mom, who used to give men kidney failure by the thousands, so she extra resents being called the Noon Witch, even though, technically, that’s what she is. His name was Nate, and he didn’t speak a lick of Russian, and he is Hailey’s father. She moved into an apartment in Simi Valley and it happened again, this time with the general manager at an organic U-pick orchard not far inland. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, when so many people were leaving that she figured even a demigod could go largely unnoticed, the Noon Witch went too. Apricots and cherries, lemons and nectarines. Much later on, in fact-after decades of puttering half-heartedly from wheat field to wheat field, after deciding she needed a change and reading a brochure about the high-desert agriculture of LA. And really, she’d just lost the verve for it, was how Hailey’s mom explained it to Hailey later on. But the field equipment got bigger and louder, and the new tractors with the sharp teeth in front made things complicated. She’d go through the motions, watching them flush red and slur their speech, watching them stumble dizzily about, vomit once or twice, and eventually tumble to the ground. After his death, she tried to get back into it-it was her calling after all, divinely preordained, et cetera-but it was never quite the same. While Grischa was alive, she dropped the Noon Witch stuff: the appearing-magically-among-the-crops stuff and the inflicting-men-with-heatstroke stuff. And when his days were through, the Noon Witch lived on, as Noon Witches tend to do. She lived out the rest of his days with him in a modest cabin full of love and laughter-and rats too, altogether too many rats for her liking, but that was how things were back then and there wasn’t much you could do about it. So she did the only other thing she could think of, and they were married the very next week. He was a field hand in one of the southern districts, a rough-faced wheat harvester named Grischa, who had dirt everywhere, even in the creases of his eyes, and who recited classical poetry as he worked.Īnd Hailey’s mom, the real Noon Witch, couldn’t bring herself to strike him down as she had all the others. At the beginning of the last century, she fell in love with a man-an unfortunate thing that happens sometimes-and it changed the course of her life completely. She’s retired now, or as retired as a Noon Witch can be. ![]() The one who used to show up in the fields at the hottest part of the day and make all the workers sick? The one who signaled her arrival with whirling dust clouds? And whole communities would hold bonfires and ritual dances and sacrificial offerings to try to ward her off? You know, the Noon Witch. It’s her mom who’s the real Noon Witch, the one from all the storybooks. Dyes her blonde hair purple, eats her Pop-Tarts cold, couldn’t wait to turn sixteen so she could drive her hand-me-down Corolla an hour to the newly built theme park off the I-5. Let’s call her by her other name: Hailey. One thing the Noon Witch particularly hates? Being called the Noon Witch. She makes long lists in her journal-she hates the word “diary”-of things she likes, like roller coasters and nail polish, and things she doesn’t, like movie theaters and snakes, until every page has two neat columns, with nothing in the middle, in the insufficient, black-and-white way of being eighteen. She’s just at that difficult age when you’re desperate to figure out who you are, so you lean too much on your likes and dislikes to try to cobble together what you think should be your personality. The Noon Witch isn’t an overcritical person. Used to like the electropop group all the girls at school like, until they used too much synth on their latest album, so now she hates them too. She likes the color purple, hates police procedurals, loves breakfast foods, thinks scented bath products and anchovy pizza are gross.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |