Wandering Witch by Vic Connor

Author:Vic Connor [Connor, Vic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Helvetic House
Published: 2016-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

I looked at her. “I love you,” I said.

“I love you,” she said. And suddenly, desperately, we were kissing, and I raised a fist against the heavens as they showered fire on us and the flames broke around us like water on a rock.

Anna Sophia’s voice jolts me out of my memories.

“Was that when you went to Uncle Misha together?”

I start.

“Yes. Of course, you’d know some of this already, wouldn’t you?” I should have thought of that, instead of losing myself in recollections I spend all my days going over anyway. “Did the Great Trapper tell you about that?”

“Yes,” she says. Quickly, as though she is worried I might think I was boring her, she adds, “But I don’t know very much more than that, not all these details. Just that you’d been there and that … and that, at some point, you gave Mom your heart.”

“Yes…” I say. “My heart. It’s a silly phrase, you know, you hear people say that their beloved has stolen their heart. But I suppose I felt that Sereda had. And I actually am able to make that saying real. So yes, I gave Seredushka my heart as a sign of love, a sign of trust. And she hid it. I didn’t ask where.

“There’s not much else to tell. After we had left the Great Trapper, time passed. We were happy although there was a blight on Sereda’s soul: the sorrow left by the break with her mother, the thought that her mother hated her. Then one day a raven came bearing a letter. It was from Baba Yoga, of course. She told us she’d repented, she’d forgiven us. She asked us to forgive her rage and said that she wanted to make amends. She wanted us to be a family. She wrote that immortality was lonely and we who were afflicted with it — that was her word, ‘afflicted’ — should be friends.

“I didn’t trust her. Not a word. Not just because I remembered what had happened the last time she had talked about loneliness. I knew that this woman, this being I’d known for millions of years, this walking cloud of utter darkness, had never been up to any good. Even the slightest action she’d taken that might have seemed in her favor had been done for her own purposes. There wasn’t a redeeming spot on the entire sulfuric, stinking surface of her soul. So I told Seredushka we had to ignore the letter.”

“What happened? Why didn’t you?”

I shake my head regretfully. I don’t know how the child will take what I’m about to say. Am I about to praise her mother — or condemn her? I have never been able to decide.

“I told you, most people’s souls are mingled shades. It’s how they can deal with an imperfect world where there are no absolutes — and it’s because they mindlessly waste all their precious energy. It’s how they can bend when they have to, how they can convince themselves to ignore their feelings when their reason tells them to.

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