Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

by Paula Guran

  “Inept” had been Uncle Misha’s kindest criticism. In fact, most of what he had yelled was untranslatable and Boris was glad that his own Russian was as fumbling as his fingers. It had not been a happy evening. He ran his slow hands through his thick blond hair and sighed, wondering—and not for the first time—if he had been adopted as an infant or exchanged in utero for a scholar’s clone. How else to explain his general awkwardness?

  He stood slowly, balancing gingerly because his left foot was now asleep, and practiced a few passes with imaginary na clubs. He had made his way to eight in the air and was starting an over-the-shoulder pass, when the clubs slipped and clattered to the floor. Even in his imagination he was a klutz.

  His Uncle Misha said it was eye and ear coordination, that the sound of the clubs and the rhythm of their passing were what made the fine juggler. And his father said the same about flying: that one had to hear the trapeze and calculate its swing by both eye and ear. But Boris was not convinced.

  “It’s in the hands,” he said disgustedly, looking down at his five-fingered disasters. They were big-knuckled and grained like wood. He flexed them and could feel the right moving just a fraction slower than the left. “It’s all in the hands. What I wouldn’t give for a better pair.”

  “And what would you give, Boris Chernevsky?” The accent was Russian, or rather Georgian. Boris looked up, expecting to see his uncle.

  There was no one in the trailer.

  Boris turned around twice and looked under his bed.

  Sometimes the circus little people played tricks, hiding in closets and making sounds like old clothes, singing. Their minds moved in strange ways, and Boris was one of their favorite gulls. He was so easily fooled.

  “Would you, for example, give your soul?” The voice was less Georgian, more Siberian now. A touch of Tartar, but low and musical.

  “What’s a soul?” Boris asked, thinking that adopted children or clones probably weren’t allowed any anyway.

  “Two centuries ago,” the voice said and sighed with what sounded like a Muscovite gurgle, “everyone had a soul and no one wanted to sell. Today everyone is willing to sell, only no one seems to have one.”

  By this time, Boris had walked completely around the inside of the trailer, examining the underside of chairs, lifting the samovar lid. He was convinced he was beginning to go crazy. “From dropping so many imaginary na clubs on my head,” he told himself out loud. He sat down on one of the chairs and breathed heavily, his chin resting on his left hand. He didn’t yet completely trust his right. After all, he had only been awake and moving for ten minutes.

  Something materialized across the table from him. It was a tall, gaunt old woman whose hair looked as if birds might be nesting in it. Nasty birds. With razored talons and beaks permanently stained with blood. He thought he spotted guano in her bushy eyebrows.

  “So,” the apparition said to him, “hands are the topic of our discussion.” Her voice, now that she was visible, was no longer melodic but grating, on the edge of a scold.

  “Aren’t you a bit old for such tricks, Baba?” asked Boris, trying to be both polite and steady at once. His grandmother, may she rest in pieces on the meteorite that had broken up her circus flight to a rim world, had taught him to address old women with respect. “After all, a grandmother should be. . . . ”

  “Home tending the fire and the children, I suppose.” The old woman spat into the corner, raising dust devils. “The centuries roll on and on but the Russian remains the same. The Soviets did wonders to free women up as long as they were young. Old women, we still have the fire and the grandchildren.” Her voice began to get louder and higher. Peh, she spat again. “Well, I for one, have solved the grandchildren problem.”

  Boris hastened to reach out and soothe her. All he needed now, on top of last evening’s disastrous performance, was to have a screaming battle with some crazy old lady when his Uncle Misha and his parents, the Famous Flying, were asleep in the small rooms on either side of the trailer. “Shh, shhh,” he cautioned.

  She grabbed at his reaching right hand and held it in an incredibly strong grip. Vised between her two claws, his hand could not move at all. “This, then,” she asked rhetorically, “is the offending member?”

  He pulled back with all his strength, embarrassment lending him muscles, and managed to snag the hand back. He held it under the table and tried to knead feeling back into the fingers. When he looked up at her, she was smiling at him. It was not a pretty smile.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  She scraped at a wen on her chin with a long, dirty fingernail. “It seems an ordinary enough hand,” she said. “Large knuckles. Strong veins. I’ve known peasants and tsars who would have envied you that hand.”

  “Ordinary,” Boris began in a hoarse whisper and stopped. Then, forcing himself to speak, he began again. “Ordinary is the trouble. A juggler has to have extraordinary hands. A juggler’s hands must be spider web strong, bird’s wing quick.” He smiled at his metaphors. Perhaps he was a poet-clone.

  The old woman leaned back in her chair and stared at a spot somewhere over Boris’s head. Her watery blue eyes never wavered. She mumbled something under her breath, then sat forward again. “Come,” she said. “I have a closet-full. All you have to do is choose.”

  “Choose what?” asked Boris.

  “Hands!” screeched the old woman. “Hands, you idiot. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Boris,” came his uncle’s familiar voice through the thin walls. “Boris, I need my sleep.”

  “I’ll come. I’ll come,” whispered Boris, just to get rid of the hag. He shooed her out the door with a movement of his hands. As usual, the right was a beat behind the left, even after half a morning.

  He hadn’t actually meant to go anywhere with her, just maneuver her out of the trailer, but when she leaped down the steps with surprising speed and climbed into a vehicle that looked like a mug with a large china steering rudder sticking out of the middle, his feet stepped forward of their own accord.

  He fell down the stairs.

  “Perhaps you could use a new pair of feet, too,” said the old woman.

  Boris stood up and automatically brushed off his clothes, a gesture his hands knew without prompting.

  The old woman touched the rudder and the mug moved closer to Boris.

  He looked on both sides and under the mug for evidence of its motor. It moved away from him as soundlessly as a hovercraft, but when he stuck his foot under it cautiously, he could feel no telltale movement of the air.

  “How do you do that?” he asked.

  “Do what?”

  “The mug,” he said.

  “Magic.” She made a strange gesture with her hands. “After all, I am Baba Yaga.”

  The name did not seem to impress Boris who was now on his hands and knees peering under the vehicle.

  “Baba Yaga,” the old woman repeated as if the name itself were a charm.

  “How do you do,” Boris murmured, more to the ground than to her.

  “You know . . . the witch . . . Russia . . . magic. . . . ”

  Her voice trailed off. When Boris made no response, she made another motion with her hands, but this time it was an Italian gesture, and not at all nice.

  Boris saw the gesture and stood up. After all, the circus was his life. He knew that magic was not real, only a matter of quick hands. “Sure,” he said, imitating her last gesture. His right hand clipped his left biceps. He winced.

  “Get in!” the old woman shouted.

  Boris shrugged. But his politeness was complicated by curiosity. He wanted to see the inside anyway. There had to be an engine somewhere. He hoped she would let him look at it. He was good with circuitry and microchips. In a free world, he could have chosen his occupation. Perhaps he might even have been a computer programmer. But as he was a member of the Famous Flying Chernevsky family, he had no choice. He climbed over the lip of the mug and, to his chagrin, got stuck. The old woman had to
pull him the rest of the way.

  “You really are a klutz,” she said. “Are you sure all you want is hands?”

  But Boris was not listening. He was searching the inside of the giant mug. He had just made his third trip around when it took off into the air. In less than a minute, the circus and its ring of bright trailers was only a squiggle on the horizon.

  They passed quickly over the metroplexes that jigsawed across the continent and hovered over one of the twenty forest preserves. Baba Yaga pulled on the china rudder, and the mug dropped straight down. Boris fell sideways and clung desperately to the mug’s rim. Only a foot above the treetops the mug slowed, wove its way through a complicated pattern of branches, and finally landed in a small clearing.

  The old woman hopped nimbly from the flier. Boris followed more slowly.

  A large presence loomed to one side of the forest clearing. It seemed to be moving toward them. An enormous bird. Boris thought. He had the impression of talons. Then he looked again. It was not a bird, but a hut, and it was walking.

  Boris pointed at it. “Magic?” he asked, his mouth barely shaping the syllables.

  “Feet,” she answered.

  “Feet?” He looked down at his feet, properly encased in Naugahyde. He looked at hers, in pointed-toe lizard skin leather. Then he looked again at the house. It was lumbering toward him on two scaly legs that ended in claws. They looked like giant replicas of the chicken feet that always floated claws-up in his mother’s chicken soup. When she wasn’t practicing being a Famous Flying, she made her great-great-grandmother’s recipes. He preferred her in the air. “Feet,” Boris said again, this time feeling slightly sick.

  “But the subject is hands,” Baba Yaga said. Then she turned from him and strolled over to the hut. They met halfway across the clearing. She greeted it and it gave a half bob as if curtsying, then squatted down. The old woman opened the door and went in.

  Boris followed. One part of him was impressed with the special effects, the slow part of him. The fast part was already convinced it was magic.

  The house inside was even more unusual than the house outside. It was one big cupboard. Doors and shelves lined every inch of wall space. And each door and cupboard carried a hand-lettered sign. The calligraphy differed from door to door, drawer to drawer, and it took a few minutes before Boris could make out the pattern. But he recognized the lettering from the days when he had helped his Uncle Boris script broadsides for their act. There was irony in the fact that he had always had a good calligraphic hand.

  In Roman Bold were “Newts, eye of,” “Adder, tongue of,” and similar biological ingredients. Then there were botanical drawers in Carolingian Italic: “Thornapple juice,” “Amanita,” and the like. Along one wall, however, marked in basic Foundational Bold were five large cupboards marked simply: “Heads,” “Hands,” “Feet,” “Ears,” “Eyes.”

  The old woman walked up to that wall and threw open the door marked “Hands.”

  “There,” she said.

  Inside, on small wooden stands, were hundreds of pairs of hands. When the light fell on them, they waved dead-white fingers as supple and mindless as worms.

  “Which pair do you want to try?” Baba Yaga asked.

  Boris stared. “But . . . ” he managed at last, “they’re miniatures.”

  “One size fits all,” Baba Yaga said. “That’s something I learned in the twentieth century.” She dragged a pair out of the closet on the tiny stand. Plucking the hands from the stand, she held them in her palm. The hands began to stretch and grow, inching their way to normal size. They remained the color of custard scum.

  Boris read the script on the stand to himself. “Lover’s hands.” He hesitated.

  “Try them,” the old woman said again, thrusting them at him. Her voice was compelling.

  Boris took the left hand between his thumb and forefinger. The hand was as slippery as rubber, and wrinkled as a prune, He pulled it on his left hand, repelled at the feel. Slowly the hand molded itself to his, rearranging its skin over his bones. As Boris watched, the left hand took on the color of new cream, then quickly tanned to a fine, overall, healthy-looking beige. He flexed the fingers and the left hand reached over and stroked his right. At the touch, he felt a stirring of desire that seemed to move sluggishly up his arm, across his shoulder, down his back, and grip his loins. Then the left hand reached over and picked up its mate. Without waiting for a signal from him, it lovingly pulled the right hand on, fitting each finger with infinite care.

  As soon as both hands were the same tanned tone, the strong, tapered polished nails with the quarter moons winking up at him, Boris looked over at the witch.

  He was surprised to see that she was no longer old but, in fact, only slightly mature with fine bones under a translucent skin. Her blue eyes seemed to appraise him, then offer an invitation. She smiled, her mouth thinned down with desire. His hands preceded him to her side, and then she was in his arms. The hands stroked her wind-tossed hair.

  “You have,” she breathed into his ear, “a lover’s hands.”

  “Hands!” He suddenly remembered, and with his teeth ripped the right hand off. Underneath were his own remembered big knuckles. He flexed them experimentally. They were wonderfully slow in responding.

  The old woman in his arms cackled and repeated, “A lover’s hands.”

  His slow right hand fought with the left, but managed at last to scratch off the outer layer. His left hand felt raw, dry, but comfortingly familiar.

  The old woman was still smiling an invitation. She had crooked teeth and large pores. There was a dark moustache on her upper lip.

  Boris picked up the discarded hands by the tips of the fingers and held them up before the witch’s watery blue eyes. “Not these hands,” he said.

  She was already reaching into the closet for another pair.

  Boris pulled the hands on quickly, glancing only briefly at the label. “Surgeon’s hands.” They were supple-fingered and moved nervously in the air as if searching for something to do. Finally they hovered over Baba Yaga’s forehead. Boris felt as if he had eyes in his fingertips, and suddenly saw the old woman’s skin as a map stretched taut across a landscape of muscle and bone. He could sense the subtle traceries of veins and read the directions of the bloodlines. His right hand moved down the bridge of her nose, turned left at the cheek, and descended to her chin. The second finger tapped her wen, and he could hear the faint echo of his knock.

  “I could remove that easily,” he found himself saying.

  The witch pulled the surgeon’s hands from him herself. “Leave me my wen. Leave me my own face,” she said angrily. “It is the stage setting for my magic. Surgeon’s hands indeed.”

  Remembering the clowns in their make-up, the wire-walkers in their sequined leotards, the ringmaster in his tie and tails—costumes that had not changed over the centuries of circus—Boris had to agree. He looked down again at his own hands. He moved the fingers. The ones on his right hand were still laggards. But for the first time he heard and saw how they moved. He dropped his hands to his sides and beat a tattoo on his outer thighs. Three against two went the rhythm, the left hitting the faster beat. He increased it to seven against five, and smiled. The right would always be slower, he knew that now.

  “It’s not in the hands,” he said.

  Baba Yaga looked at him quizzically. Running a hand through her bird’s-nest hair and fluffing up her eyebrows, she spoke. But it was Uncle Boris’s voice that emerged between her crooked teeth: “Hands are the daughters of the eye and ear.”

  “How do you do that?” Boris asked.

  “Magic,” she answered, smiling. She moved her fingers mysteriously, then turned and closed the cupboard doors.

  Boris smiled at her back, and moved his own fingers in imitation. Then he went out the door of the house and fell down the steps.

  “Maybe you’d like a new pair of feet,” the witch called after him. “I have Fred Astaire’s. I have John Travolta’s.
I have Mohammed Ali’s.” She came out of the house, caught up with Boris, and pulled him to a standing position.

  “Were they jugglers?” asked Boris.

  “No,” Baba Yaga said, shaking her head. “No. But they had soul.”

  Boris didn’t answer. Instead he climbed into the mug and gazed fondly at his hands as the mug took off and headed toward the horizon and home.

  The women in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s tale inherit their magical powers, but they also pass acquired knowledge of proven spells down through the generations—much as the rest of us pass on family recipes.

  Genetic witchcraft or witches as a separate species is a popular—and varied—fantasy trope. L. Frank Baum’s witches of Oz were born as such, and chose to be either good or evil. On the Bewitched television series, Samantha’s family were all witches and “warlocks.” The Sanderson sisters are sibling witches in the film Hocus Pocus (1993). In both the book by Alice Hoffman (1966) and movie (1996) Practical Magic, the “craft” is passed down through generations of Owens women. The sisters on the television series, Charmed, are descended from a powerful line of good witches. Kelley Armstrong’s The Otherworld books have both an all-female witch breed and an all-male sorcerer one. Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ novels feature a female-only species of witches. Witches in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy are a female race who mate with human men; their daughters are witches, but not their sons. Witches in Kim Harrison's The Hollows novels are not human. J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world is based on those with inherited magical abilities living among mundane magicless muggles.

  Bloodlines

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Elena flipped the picture of San Antonio de Padua on its head and placed thirteen coins before him. She split a coconut, bathed it in perfume and whispered his name. When neither worked, she phoned Mario. Five minutes later she was yelling at the receiver. My mother was shaking her head.

  “She should have given him her menstrual blood to drink. Now there’s no way she’ll bind him. He’s out of love.”