I awoke to witchcraft this morning.
I witnessed the effects of heat traveling through wires protruding from wounds in the wall. The heat caused water to boil and chickens’ eggs to congeal and harden in response. Heat from another source, a black box with glowing red eyes, attempted to melt a metal pan, instead searing its cargo—slabs carved from the carcass of a dead pig—and rendering the animal’s fat into frizzling pools of popping, sputtering liquid.
As I gazed out the back window, I saw strips of water, crystallized by cold air into shapes crafted by Frank Lloyd Wright, clinging to the surface of the wood deck as if the boards were ice’s saviors and patron saints. I envisioned the expanse of wooden strips as a massive shrine, a temple built in dedication to wiccan worship.
Warm air poured from slits in the floor, filling the house with comfort that’s out of place when the weather is as cold and brash as a murderer’s scowl. Roasted beans, ripped from bushes in South America, exuded an odor at once offensive and alluring, as if a high temperature had transformed the beans into pellets imbued with aromas of skunk spray and the sweet smell of Aphrodite in heat.
Magic swirled around me, a whirlwind of wizardry that permeated my soul and transported me to a time far, far in the future that never was and can never be. Light, spilling from glass orbs on posts and inverted teardrops, filled the room and washed away the invisibility adhering to my eyes.
Suddenly, the sun hissed and a blinding light pierced the veil of grey clouds that enshrouded the house witchcraft inhabited. Witchcraft fled, but it hides among the molecules of bright, fresh air; it will return, bringing with it wonders too impossible to accept, too fabulous to believe, too intense to ignore.
