Butterfly Witches

by Lucy Zhang

Shiebi AL

Now

When witches die, they become butterflies.

The butterflies ascend further and further until they vanish through small cracks in the cavern ceiling before emerging on the other side where they see the sky for the first time. The witches live without sunlight, instead relying on magic to power lamps, each bulb at the center of a transmutation circle drawn with carbon pigment and a paper cut’s worth of blood.

Here, in a white and periwinkle cottage bordering the cavern, is a not too old nor too young witch. A witch old enough to remember when they still lived at the surface, could smell the salt from mercurial waves chasing sandpipers and washing away sandcastles, could feel the warmth of the sun when it rose and the cool darkness when it disappeared without the price of a pricked finger.

When they spot butterflies fluttering in spirals — a tight cluster of luminescent wings dispersing into a light dusting of chitin — most witches stop what they’re doing, clasp their hands together and close their eyes. But not this one. This particular witch walks through the main city, eying the security bats click clicking as they flap their wings and monitor their designated territories. The bats cannot be stationed everywhere; surely blind spots exist. If it comes to it, she might need to shoot one or two down — just a piercing through their thin membrane stretched over finger bones, nothing magic can’t heal. Then she’ll blast a hole through the ceiling’s weakest point, already cracked and weathered from countless spells meant to reinforce the spot against natural disasters and outsiders.

She doesn’t want to have to die to see the sky and ocean once more.

Before

When witches cried, their tears restored life.

They grew back blueberries ravaged by deep freezes, potatoes destroyed by a sandstorm of red dust fanning wildfires, toppling trees, blanketing buildings in debris. Their tears cleared arteries, sealed wounds, vanished cancerous cells, leaving good cells untouched.

Most witches stayed in one place, working as doctors or advisors among humans. However, here, under the Milky Way, sitting on a broom crafted from a deformed mass of tree, was a witch who traveled, never in one place for more than three days, a nomad who defined her home as the entire world she’d explore and savor and understand.

The witch had been flying to Spitsbergen to see polar bears and guillemots when she noticed smoke rising from below, staining her broom black. From within the smoke came an onslaught of butterflies, flapping their wings against the fumes, trying to blow the smog aside. The butterflies came in thousands, quivering and vibrating, their cumulative tremors louder than the night breeze, like shrieks suspended in air.

The witch magicked away her pointed hat and her black cloak and conjured a green dress and a bow headband. She landed near the city closest to her, making her way to the origin of the smoke. For a while, she saw only crowds of people, heard only jumbled voices, smelled only rancid smoke — like a mix of melted plastic and bad barbeque and burned hair and charred pork fat. Her eyes watered.

At the time, the witch was young. She hadn’t stayed put in one place long enough to understand how humans and witches interacted. She knew only what she saw at this very moment: humans tossing rocks and rotten oranges and blemished apples at creatures in long, pointed hats and black tiered skirts, heads lolled to the side, hands tied behind a stake. An orange collided with a forehead; a witch’s head bobbed before stilling, lifeless. The orange rolled into the fire licking at their feet, flames consuming their black boots and then their cleanly clipped toenails and recently moisturized heels.

Among the crackling of flames and thuds of fruits and rocks, the witch, hiding behind the crowd, heard voices: Death to the witches! Serves them right for killing our people with their diseases and evil. A man laughed as the apple he threw hit the still unburnt flesh of a witch’s breast, glandular and fatty tissue absorbing the impact of his aim and softening the apple’s drop to the ground.

Weren’t these witches still part of this city’s people? Were they women then, but not human? What disease? What was evil? She wanted to ask; she needed to understand before she let this unsettled confusion fester into fury.

Witches have only ever healed others, she wanted to say as she clasped her hands together, gripping her knuckles, and closed her eyes.

One day

Witches will live at the surface, let a familiar scent fill their nose — one of the ocean, of sulfur, a pinch of green, a briny finish. Or maybe it’ll be the scent of plants whose secreted oils now permeate the air from rain, or ozone from a thunderstorm, or juniper trees with ripened pea-sized berries. They will build houses whose walls contain full-length glass windows to let in sunlight at day, hints of moonlight and romance at night. Witches will live together with, or maybe separately from humans — that part remains to be seen, she thinks, as she demolishes the cavern ceiling.

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Lucy Zhang is a writer masquerading around as a software engineer. She watches anime and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. Her work has appeared in Barren Magazine, X-R-A-Y, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.