I woke up to see a witch peering in my bedroom window.
She was little more than a dark shape with a predator’s hungry eyes, razor-wire skinny but somehow female, staring in through
the partly open drapes. Sunrise lit up the thin, silvery hair that straggled out from under her hat. I should have leaped
up screaming. I should have run at her with any weapon I could find.
Instead I thought, I hope she’s not standing on my basil plants, hazy and unworried. Even half asleep, I knew that there was no such thing as witches. I’d long forgotten the most important
thing the theatre had ever taught me—that the human body can hold two truths at once. Even truths that seem to rule each other
out: There’s no such things as witches, true. And I was looking at one.
I didn’t understand she might be a real person until our eyes met. Hers widened in surprise. She lurched sideways and was
gone, leaving me with the impression of a craggy old-lady face with a sour, turned-down mouth.
I bolted upright, heart rate jacking, letting out a strangled sound that wasn’t quite a scream. Too soft to disturb the kids,
but it woke up my husband.
