Hex

  1

  In October the waves looked icy and dark blue. They rolled up and crashed along the jagged black rocks that lined the shore. Reaching up, thunderously crashing down, and crawling back into the ocean. The rolling and crashing became sinister and haunted. Long gone was the summer, trailing off into an obscure memory. The temperature dropped significantly since then, and the warm rains transformed into electric storms raging across the Atlantic.

  At sunset, the sky was an impressionist painting grasping onto reality, but falling into abstract tendencies with each new stroke of light that made its way across the sky. It illuminated the earth, lighting it one last time before plunging into the depths of the night. It cast a shadow on the changing leaves, making them glow bright orange and yellow. They were unleashed from the grey skies they were locked under, as they died and fell to the ground.

  A gust of wind blew an umbrella across the back yard, throwing it into the angry ocean. The shadowy waves jumped up and consumed the pink cat ears, pointing the edges down past the setting sun's reach. I took a deep breath in, savoring the last aroma of fall air still lingering near my window, then took a step back and fell back onto my bed. I hit the white comforter letting my long hair sprawl across the pillows.

  The comforter matched my skin, I could only tell them apart by the thousands of freckles that flecked across, like an artist who'd dropped their paintbrush. My hair was the kind of brown that could be ignored. It was boring except for the coiled texture. Both of my parents were Irish, so I was damned whichever way my genetics were scrambled up.

  Strewn into the curtains above me were strands of flowers, sewn together with bunches of long grass I'd found outside while gardening. The stems of the flowers deep in decay matched my unusual hue of brown eyes. I couldn't get myself to throw the flowers away, they were one of the last good memories of my mom.

  My phone suddenly buzzed on my wooden side table rocking my lamp. It buzzed three more times before I finally sat up to look at who was calling me.

  It was my friend, Fiona. We were in our third year of college together at MassArts. I’ve been back home for the past week for my mother’s funeral. I loved her, but she’d picked bad timing. I was in the middle of studying for my midterm when I had to leave.

  I wasn't shocked when my dad called to tell me that he found his beloved wife lying on the kitchen floor, soaked in blood with a gunshot wound to her head. Before he even called the paramedics, he called me. He screamed before he could get any words out, and through the sobs that followed, I could barely make out what he was saying.

  It took him three tries to get out intelligible words.

  ‘She shot herself'.

  I let him sob on the phone for several minutes before it was quiet enough to convince him to call 9-1-1. As soon as I heard the beep that ended the call, I got in my car and drove straight home. By the time I got there, they wouldn't let anyone into the house. It had been roped off like a crime scene.

  Due to the violent nature of my mother’s death, they quickly ruled it what it was. A suicide. After my dad and I had been interrogated, we were allowed to go home. Neither of us wanted to sleep in that house while there was still blood on the floor. So we checked into a hotel for a few days, and hired a cleaning crew to get rid of the evidence in the kitchen.

  I stayed with him through the entire process, from funeral arrangements to burial services. I knew he wouldn't be able to do it alone because he was so torn apart. I also made him go back to his own therapist so that I wouldn't have to plan another funeral in a few months.

  My mom had been in and out of psychiatric institutions for the past eight years. She suffered from delusions and hallucinations. Even for a family of witches, it was way out of the ordinary and not something that could be related to magic. We checked. It turned out that witches could still have severe psychosis.

  She was only having auditory hallucinations at first. But after six months, she started experiencing visual hallucinations too. The final straw to see a doctor was when she tried to kill my dad in his sleep with a pillow.

  So, she spent the next three months institutionalized and sedated to get her on the right concoction of meds to make her somewhat normal. Once, she was stable for more than a week and allowed to come back home. A few weeks after her release, she started hallucinating again.

  My dad would wake up in the middle of the night and find her outside in the snow. Rocking back and forth,chanting. We tried to decipher it but found that it was just gibberish. She spent the next year in a different hospital. Right after my Junior year of high school, she was almost back to being able to function on her own. She almost seemed like my mom again.

  We would go shopping together, and sometimes we would venture down to the marinas to watch the boats float in and out. We used to do that when I was younger. It was our favorite pastime before I was old enough to go to school. She stayed home with me, and we would spend our days exploring the shoreline, imagining where we'd be sailing if we were pirates on a ship.

  It felt good for an entire summer, so I applied for college. I didn't want to leave if my dad would have a hard time looking after her alone. I was his only support.

  When I got my acceptance letter my mom called everyone she knew, and threw a huge party for me. That summer was when we made our flower garlands. She hung hers in our green house downstairs.

  Things continued to go well through my senior year. She was more and more like herself as time went on. She attended my graduation, and cried the night before while looking through baby pictures. We talked about what colors my bed set would be in my new room, and whether or not I would like living on my own.

  We figured out how long the train rides were, so I could come home one weekend a month. She would take the train on one of the other weekends so we could explore Boston together. We made many plans for while I was away at school, but a little bit after I'd started, she had a hallucination.

  My dad convinced me to stay in school because it would disappoint my mom if I dropped out. So I stayed, knowing my mom was getting pumped full of new drugs and having long stays at a mental health facility.

  The last six months she was at home. They thought that she would be okay under the care of my dad. But she kept bouncing back and forth from doing well, to having a flare-up.

  We teetered the idea back and forth over a few phone call but ultimately decided that we should seek out a new medication combination. Maybe something stronger. The psychiatrist had agreed to see her once more to re-evaluate her medication. But three days before the appointment, she was too dead to go.

  I sat up finally when I heard pots and pans clinking around the kitchen. My dad was up and he was going to cook. My dad was a chef, and owned his own restaurant in town. He'd been out since the beginning of September when my mom started to get worse again. His Sous Chef Danny took over everything for him.

  At home he didn't cook that much because he would get home from work, and be tired of cooking. My mom became good pretty quickly, so she did most of it while I was growing up.

  When she got sick we ate out, or dad would bring home meals from the restaurant. Hearing him bump around in the kitchen was both amusing and exciting. Amusing because he barely knew his way around his home kitchen, and exciting because I knew he was going to cook something good.

  My phone buzzed on my nightstand, reading ‘Fiona’. I ignored it again, not wanting to talk to her yet.

  I shifted my weight toward the end of the bed, laying on my stomach. My altar sat against the wall by my door. It was a simple altar. I mostly did smaller scale protection spells and shadow work. I didn't need much for that. Just a small metal bowl as a cauldron, and three black candles.

  My parents never really taught me any advanced magic and generally kept their lives aw
ay from it. They stuck to herbal medicine and protection charms. I'd been planning on finding out more from Fiona but, we never had free time between schoolwork and going to parties.

  Above my altar was my spice rack. I had it lined with my favorite herbs that I used the most. We had an entire wall dedicated to herbs in the kitchen, but the ones I liked, I kept close to me.

  I had mini versions of them for school and bulked up before I went back. I tried to stock up on supplies that I already had instead of buying new stuff all the time. My dad ordered candles in bulk for himself so I just took my share of those.

  Next to my dresser was a black bookshelf that stretched to the ceiling. My mom made it for me when I was a kid and slowly added books to my collection. Most of my books were informational and witch related. I had a few scattered in there that were fictional. I favored the classics like Dracula and The Scarlet Letter. Mom was always big into reading, so I think that’s where I got it from.

  I never saw her without a book in her hand. She read everything. My dad even built her massive bookshelves in his office for her book collection.

  She read to me for as long as I could remember, but I eventually graduated to reading on my own. Though, one of the things that comforted her when she was hospitalized was to call me and read to me excerpts of the book that she was reading.

  I hadn't eaten all day, and the smell of dad’s cooking was creeping its way up the stairs. I slipped my bare feet into black slippers that were flattened almost to the floor.

  They were a present one year from my dad and I just never got around to buying a new pair. They actually came in a stocking, from Santa. Even long after I figured out Santa wasn't real, my parents continued to leave gifts that were signed from him.

  They said it added to the magic of the holiday.

  We didn't celebrate Christmas. We celebrated Yule the week after Christmas. They just liked the idea of Santa. So we would celebrate our own version of Christmas without stories of a savior not meant for us, but with tales of fat men bringing presents to children and small elves making toys.

  As I grew up and found out that all children believed in Santa, I was surprised due to the strong belief and acceptance of magic in those stories. Yet, they wouldn't accept us for our magic.

  We weren't allowed to use magic in front of non-magic people. I didn't really agree with that because I relied a lot on magic for daily things. I created spell bags for different things in school, and new a few short spells for general luck. Some witches had extra powers, like me. I could manipulate energy on a small scale, if the object was already moving. I didn't really talk about it because I didn't think it was a big deal.

  My parents knew about it, but because they had no interest in magic, they never wanted me to use it. In my defiant teenage years, I tested them a few times by threatening to run away if they wouldn't teach me how to use my powers.

  Even as an adult I had a hard time finding information on it. I'd asked Fiona about it, who asked her mom. But she said there wasn't a lot on it and not to dwell. She said a lot of witches had powers they didn't use.

  I stood up to grab the purple silk robe that was hanging on the back of my door. Throwing it over my shoulders and tying it in the front, I walked around my bed to pick up my phone and the empty coffee cup.

  The door squeaked as I pulled it open and shut it behind me. The stairs were only a few steps away from my door but the floorboards made noise every time my foot came down. Each step creaked and hummed along with the clapping of the bottom of my slipper.

  I was sure my dad heard me coming down the stairs.

  Not that I cared to sneak up on him or anything. It just meant he would probably have a cup of coffee started for me before I got to the last step. My dad shared my caffeine addiction and fully supported it. He knew coffee always came first, even at seven in the evening.

  When I got to the bottom of the stairs, the smell of fresh coffee beans mingled with the pie in the oven.

  The stairs let out into the hallway, between the front room and my dad's office, facing the front door. The walls had ugly wallpaper, which my great grandmother put up when it was her house.

  The house was built in the early 1800's along with most of the others in town. It was a Mid-Atlantic style house, painted a sea foam grey.

  Not the original color.

  It was repainted in the late 1980's by my Gran. She said she was sick of having a muted yellow house. Apparently, that was a popular color for houses at the time it was built.

  It never made sense to me that she painted the outside of the house for an update, but left the ugliest wallpaper on the inside.

  The front room was similar, it was the room we would entertain guests when they came over. Most of our guests were our extended family when they came into town. It was my least favorite room of the house. Not only because it was distasteful, but I had many unpleasant conversations sitting on the dusty antique couch.

  It had the same wallpaper as the hallway resembling flowers, maybe peonies, against a burgundy background. It was hard to tell because it was so old the outlines began to fade. The furniture was made in the Victorian era because no one had updated the room since then. It didn’t keep well because no one used the room, so no one cared to clean it.

  The centerpiece of the room was a large, white, and gold embellished fireplace in the middle of the wall. It was distinguished and remarkable. It was well maintained from the beginning and timeless. We rarely put fires in it, only on special occasions like Yule or Samhain.

  On top of the wallpaper were portraits of various family members. Some of the portraits were painted as they lived well before the time of cameras. The oldest ones date back to the early 1400's. Our family came from a long line of Celtic Witches. We originated in Ireland and England, later coming over with the first settlers to America. Our line started out living in Salem, but migrated to Rockport during the Salem Witch Trials. Most of the people who were tried and convicted were never actually witches.

  When they grew suspicious of us, we left town with a protection spell that made it look like we were never there in the first place. Once we settled in, we got word of what happened after we left. If we had stayed, we surely would have been killed.

  Most of the people who live in Rockport, were witches. As more of us moved there, we claimed it as a safe haven for witches in Massachusetts. The first Witches Council was formed there. It started in 1782 with Mildred O'Clery. One of my mother's ancestors. The position was passed down through the bloodline of the first born child.

  It grew larger and larger, until it became the official governing body for witches in the United States and Canada. I was grateful it went another way in my bloodline, and didn't get passed down to me. I didn't want that kind of responsibility.

  Fiona's mom was a member of the council. She was elected when Theresa Byrne didn't have any kids. Although there was no official hierarchy structure, all of the other councils looked to Rockport and typically followed what they did.

  The one law we all had in common was that we stayed hidden from non-magic people. It was the only rule that everyone followed and one of two laws that were punishable by death.

  My dad was a record keeper for the Council, but wasn't an official member so he wasn't bound by any contract with them. He was only in charge of keeping track of executions. He kept the list hidden in his office, inside a file cabinet that was enchanted to stay closed for all except him.

  It was always messy there. His Mac was buried in the mountains of paperwork, taxes, receipts, bills, and other things he needed to run his business. The walls updated in a deep shade of blue, the trim and crown moulding painted white.

  His desk was a dark mahogany and a cracked leather armchair sat behind it. It was worn and dull from the years of it's over use with a few of the brass buttons missing from the edges. He couldn’t let the chair go when the office was redone. My dad would stay up well into the early hours of the morning catching up on his work and sp
ent most of the day-time at the restaurant cooking.

  He could afford to have Danny move up to be the Head Chef, and hire a new Sous Chef. But, without my mom at home, he had nothing left to retire for. Not even me.

  I turned the corner back toward the stairs, walking to the kitchen on the right. To the left was the living space we used most, besides the kitchen and the greenhouse. A more rustic looking stone fireplace, took up a lot of space on the left wall.

  The room was painted murky green. It was a color my mother had chosen when I was only five. The couch sat across from the fireplace. A stylishly placed vintage piece my mom and I found together when we were antiquing in Maine. The previous owner told us it was made in 1809. The matching velvet chaise sat in the corner of the room. They contrasted the forest walls with their deep gold.

  My mom had hand made pillows that were thrown on all the corners of the couch, as well as in the middle of the chaise. She made them out of old curtains from the 70's that used to hang in what was my Aunts childhood room. The colors complemented the walls, swimming with browns and oranges alike. The pattern was floral, a common theme throughout the house.

  The kitchen was freshly redone. My mom gifted it to my dad for his birthday two years ago because it was big, but outdated. The countertops were mostly cement, with the exception of a wooden block countertop on the island. The cabinets were a brilliant pearl white and it took a lot to keep them looking pristine. My dad scrubbed them once a day, even when he didn't cook.

  The floors were saved somehow, after living through a few decades of laminate. The original hardwood was sanded and refinished, making it look a bit like a farmhouse kitchen, complete with a ceramic farmhouse style sink.

  The far wall housed all of our communal herbs. The shelf stood sturdy against the wall, ten feet wide, and going all the way up to about two feet from the ceiling. In front of it was a long table we used for preparing bottles and spell candles. We hung twine through the shelves to hang and dry herbs that we cut from our garden.