Salem

Did it always feel this way?

The lightness in the bones.

The twist in the neck.

The air that felt too close to the skin, even as it brushed through the hair.

No, not hair.

Not anymore.

Feathers.

The jaw is stiff, aching from being closed. The lips want to move, but there are no more lips. When the mouth opens it is narrow. When it closes there is a click.

The heart beats and it is too fast, too quick. There is no depth, no touch of the earth with every steady pound of blood pulsing through chest and neck and skin. The earth is gone, the earth is below; a stretch of darkness skating beneath wind and sound as I fly.

I fly.

The two words collide together in my mind; a realization so heavy that it should send me crashing down and down. But instead it lifts me higher, pushes the air through my face and shivers there, coiling past and through as I rise higher and higher.

I fly.

I blink and the world changes shape. I see everything with everything, and my senses are overwhelmed. I can see the trees with my cheeks. I can see the stars with my lashes. I can see the river water with my brow. And the smoke—that great plume of white from a fire long dead—I can see with my very soul.

So.

My arms do not ache from being bound, but being spread. My night dress that I thought too thin for the dark is the down of feathers. The rigid way my toes curl isn’t from clenching them too hard against heat and pain. The unfamiliarity I feel with my body isn’t from death, but from life.

New life.

Different life.

I do not know if I am grateful or devastated.

I let out a cry and it becomes a screech in the night, tearing through the shadows and over the pine of the trees. I do it again, louder and longer, and below I see flickers of movement in the forest. Jerking movements of heads turning this way and that, wondering where my haunting sound is coming from. They’re still down there, around the pyre as it smolders. The fire is gone, but they are still there. There is nothing more to witness, but they are still there.

We are wretched creatures, we humans.

But I am no longer human, and so, perhaps, my wretchedness has washed away.

I wonder—as I circle that clearing in the woods, where the wood spire reaches up from a pile of ash and death—if I was spared. Did the world hear me, when I had cried before? Did the world listen, when I begged for mercy?

I close my eyes against the rushing wind and remember. I remember that they had dragged me from my home at night, yelling words that I couldn’t register in my sleep logged mind. The door had been thrown open, yellow torches had filled my home, and before I could wake from slumber they screamed at me.

Monster. Demon. Witch.

My eyes had barely opened when my wrists were bound. They ignored my pleas as they dragged my skin through the dirt. I shouted my innocence as they gagged my mouth.

I am not a witch. I heal, I do not hurt.

The anger that I was too stunned to feel before surges through my chest, and I beat my wings against the night air. I seethe from their betrayal, and a cold spreads from the hate. They had come to me with their hands open, begging for herbs to soothe their pain, for tonics to ease their minds, for salves to save their lives. And I had shared my knowledge, shared my herbs and my tonics and my salves the way my mother had shown me, as her mother had shown her. There was no magic, no manic conference with demons and nightmares for unsightly powers. Only common sense, and the work of my hands.

I had helped them, and they had turned on me.

When they had taken me into the woods I feared the end. Would they sink me in the river, stones bound to my feet and the rush of water to sweep me into the dark? Or would they take me to the trees with rope, hoping that the weight of my sins would bring me to my end? But then I had seen the pyre, like a hideous stage set in a clearing amongst the evergreens, and the scream that tore my throat was now the screech that echoed from my beak.

It was to be fire.

I had cried as they tied me. Wept as I called out to faces I couldn’t see in the dark. You know me, you know who I am. I have helped your child, your brother, your mother, your lover. I live alone at the edge of the woods in the house my grandfather built. You have known me my whole life. You know who I am.

I am not a witch.

But my truth had been drowned out by accusations read from a book, the words twisted into something else, something that was used to blame. I shook me head against their preaching, cried out louder. I told them that this wasn’t the way, this wasn’t right. But none listened. Or, if they did, they had been silenced into submission, for fear that the mangled words would turn onto them.

And since none on the earth would listen I had lifted my voice to the heavens. Above me the stars had been drowned by their torches, and when I asked the moon and the clouds for salvation they gave me nothing. When flames touched brush and the heat started to build I panicked, searching above me for something, anything, to save me.

I have done nothing wrong. I have hurt no one. I am not a witch.

I had thought the sweep of white had been the ghosts; the haunting whispers we all thought drifted through the woods. When it happened for the second time I focused on it, sought it out. Ignored the blistering of my ankles even as I shrieked with pain.

Save me. I have done nothing wrong.

The third time the ghost perched on a branch, and I stared up into its wide face, with eyes black as coal and the shine of new rain on stone. This creature, with its wings spread wide and then folding into itself, settled down to watch me. A specter made real, present as the village condemned a medicine woman they had branded a witch.

In those last moments, when the air was too thick in my lungs and my breath was a strain with every desperate gasp, I begged that regal ghost to save me.

Take me away, lovely spirit. This earth betrays me. Let the heavens have me. Let me fly away.

It was a prayer, I think. A prayer for mercy amidst the anger and the hate and the fear. A moment so honest that it must have been the reason the ghost had tilted its head; must have been the reason its eyes honed in on mine.

Let me fly away.

I bank to the left, and I splay my fingers that are no longer fingers. Flying is easy when your bones are hollow, and I am weightless in the sky. I move as if this had been my body all along; that the flesh of my past was only a memory. I dive and thread through the trees. I fly, and I at once feel astonished at the movement and unfazed by its happening.

In one moment the heat was wrapping itself around my throat, climbing along my bound arms and eating at my shoulders. In the next I am alight on the wind, the hum of the world louder now than ever before. I circle and I descend and I am reaching for the branch with my taloned feet, my wings folding around me the same as the ghost as I settle on my perch above the clearing.

I stare at the pyre, at the embers that still burn despite the hours that have passed. It is still well before dawn—before the world wakes to see what the night has done—but I don’t need the light. I can see where my feet stood on that wooden stage. I can see the rope that had held me there, now hanging loosely from the post. And I can see my linen dress where I left it, singed at its edges but left behind long before the body had succumbed to the flames.

I remember their screams. Where they had once cried witch they then gasped in disbelief. Steps took them back. Hands clasped over their open mouths. Above them the pale phantom screamed as it dove from its perch, its black eyes wide as it plummeted straight for mine.

I don’t feel when our spirits collide. I can’t feel where I end and the ghost begins. I am suddenly lighter, hollow, stealthy and silent. I am in one instant a woman, in another a creature.

Let the heavens have me. Let me fly.

I gaze below, at the few that litter the clearing. The rest of the village has gone home to their beds, to lay down their heads and pretend it was all a feverish dream. They had thought to rid the world of a witch that night.

They had not expected to ensure the birth of one.

The few left behind stare up at me, their faces contorted into confused disbelief. Some point while others murmur. Some whisper while others leave.

It’s her. She has been reborn.

It’s her. She has been saved.

It’s her. She has come for revenge.

I tilt my head, the sound of the world righting itself in my mind. The people falter. I stretch my neck, and they stiffen and wait. I flex my wings and I screech. They hurry away, taking their fright with them and creating stories out of the night. Stories of a woman turned into a haunting spirit, formed in nature as repentance for her sins. Or perhaps she was a woman turned into a watching ghost, forged in flight as payment for her innocence.

Beware the specter in the woods.

Beware the watching shadow.

Beware the barn owl’s eyes.