The Sorceress of Mount Sangre
The first night after the funeral, barely twelve hours after burying his brother-in-law, he finds her in the living room staring out the window. An outline standing still in the dark. His eyes adjust and the figure takes the shape of his wife. The back of her head of curls, her hand draped at her side. A magical transformation that fills him with relief. It’s 3:00 and the cup of coffee in her hand is ice cold. A slimy film wavers on the top.
She hasn’t spoken really since they left the gravesite, since the last tepid thank you, since she agreed with the last person to comment on how young her brother had died. She hasn’t said anything except to tell him that she wants to lie down, one thing, and a second that she isn’t hungry. He’d told her he was going to bed several hours ago, and the silence he’d been met with had the same tenor as a strong curse. When he’d apologized instinctively, she had too, her voice creaky. The third and last thing.
He takes the cup from her and leads her into the kitchen. Her manicure that she’d been taken to the day before is chewed jagged. They both squint when he turns the light on, assaulted by the sudden brightness. He dumps the mug of coffee down the drain and looks around. Ghostly reflections wobble on the shinier surfaces. There’s a whole pot of coffee made, stewing on the machine’s burner, which he switches off before turning to his wife. Her face does not belie any crying, but her hands shake as she twists the bottom of her sweatshirt looking at the floor, as if she’s ashamed.
She seems more herself here, in the light of their own home, wearing clothes he knows her in, standing in places he’s seen her stand too often to count. Hospital lights had drained the color from their life for a week, and grief and worry had added a further ghostly layer to her pallor. New black clothes that are now draped over the back of a chair in the bedroom.
They are home, where things are soft again and the stringency of loss is dulled, but like a shadow, he sees the other version of his wife lingering just beside her, a mirror of her that reflects her worst times. He imagines the impossibly sad version of his wife that is hovering in their lives now sneaking in and taking over when he least expects it. Maybe they’ll share the rest of their lives with this changeling.
“You didn’t have dinner. Are you sure you’re not hungry?”
A sigh that makes him flinch. It says, are you fucking stupid, of course I’m not. It says, please try anyway.
She eats a few bites of the peanut butter sandwich he makes for her before taking her back upstairs. Settling into bed is easy. He has always turned to her and draped an arm over her, which he instinctively does and she accepts. A few hours later, just as the first light is coming through the window, she jumps from the bed, jostling him from a nascent sleep, and he hears her vomit in their bathroom.
Annoyance flares up and he hates himself for it, but he’s exhausted and wishes, through the painful fog in his head, that things were different. Easy again. He decides not to get up and check on her and waits, back turned to the bathroom, convinced that this is better. The sound of water running, the snap of a light switch.
Back in bed, she curls up with her eyes open and he knows she doesn’t sleep, but at least she’s there and safe. He reaches his hand toward her to say sorry for not going to her earlier. The house is quiet and there are a few hours where nothing is expected of him but the pretense of rest, and giving his wife space.
When the alarm goes off, she turns away after accepting a kiss on her temple. Love nearly overpowers him in that moment, and then disappointment as she glances briefly up at him, her expression blank. She is only filled with grief, and there is no room for him, for them, certainly not for appreciation at anything he might do for her. Inside, he bristles, then fights to quash it.
“You might feel better if you try to get up.”
She nods and stares past him, but while he watches her in the mirror as he shaves, she pulls herself up in the bed. Her hair is matted, and a confused scowl splits her face. She hates this even more than he does, he reminds himself. He did not lose his brother, he reminds himself.
After showering and getting dressed for work, he leaves her sitting against her pillow, computer in her lap, but staring just beyond the screen.
“Can I bring you any breakfast?”
“Um. Maybe a coffee? And a glass of water. You’ve been trying since yesterday to get me to drink water.”
He can’t help but smile at her brief active participation in the morning. When he leaves her drinks on the bedside table, she mumbles something to him in a whisper he doesn’t quite catch, but her eyes are soft when he looks down at her.
Their first date, seven years ago. He had been trying hard to impress and met her at a Christmas fair, where they used their drink tickets slowly over the course of several hours and he watched as she bought her brother a carving of a bird and tucked it in her purse.
It had been a perfect late November night just after Thanksgiving, all shining brightness in the sky, puffing frozen breaths, and glittering lights on the trees that left such a pleasant fragrance on their clothes. A strand of tinsel caught in the button of her coat. Stopping for fresh donuts from a cheerful cart.
He ached to leave an imprint on her and decided, watching her blow on her hands to keep them warm, to see if he could extend the evening. Many times he’d driven past the sign for a psychic outside an unassuming house nearby and on a whim, asked her if she wanted to go. It was only four blocks away and the sign said prices started at five dollars. She’d laughed bemusedly, and then, after a pause where they met eyes and smiled at each other, agreed with unrestrained excitement in her voice.
They turned up ten minutes later at the house of an older woman who appeared at the door with two regal, long haired dogs with long snouts. Each, one gray and one white, stood as tall as her waist. He paid the five dollars and was given a sharp look by the psychic, who told him that if the reading was for his girlfriend that he should stand in the hall. When she emerged with the psychic fifteen minutes later, the two were smiling. The psychic’s hand lingered on her shoulder as they said goodbye.
He can’t bring himself to go home right away after work, unable to immediately face the magnitude of her grief. He pulls into a fast food place and orders a large coffee and large fries and drives to a park where he sits in the purple of a recently set sun and eats in peaceful solitude. Two young women laugh while sharing a cigarette on a hill in front of him, and the off leash section is full of bounding dogs.
His phone beeps several times in his pocket and he dreads looking at it, dreads the thought of something terrible happening, because now he knows how easily terrible things can happen, but it’s just his mother, asking how things are. She’s been texting her daughter-in-law and hasn’t heard back. Guilt starts to bubble up in his stomach and he goes back to the car and pulls up to the drive through of another fast food place.
“Hey, you don’t have to text back, but if you need anything let me know, okay? I’m bringing home food for dinner.”
The shut bedroom door. No answer when he knocks, but he can see her in the bed when he creaks the door open. Her curls, clean and brushed, are spread out on the pillow beside her. She is watching a movie on her phone.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Food.” He jiggles the bag in an attempt at playfulness. She attempts a smile. Attempting is what they’ll do tonight.
“Leave it downstairs. I’ll be right there.”
She says thanks as he closes the door.
The cat is asleep on the kitchen table in a circle of light from the fixture above, green eyes following him when he sets the food down on the counter. They go to sleep without it being eaten.
Second night. Water running in the bathroom wakes him. He tosses and turns until he knows too much time has passed and gets up to see what’s happening.
She’s sitting on the edge of the tub wrapped in a towel, watching the now cold water run down the drain as her eyes flutter closed and then fly back open. Steam drips down the mirror.
“Come on to bed.”
Her skin is damp and hot and the bed fills with the smell of soap. She drops the towel to the floor and crawls under the sheets.
A dream about a girl he dated in college. They met just before the summer holidays at a party, or maybe it was right as school started, and he kissed her after they walked out to sit on the porch, the both of them drunk and giggling. The girl had put her head on his shoulder and squeezed his thigh to show she wanted to be kissed. He’d taken her to breakfast the next morning and felt the world could sense how happy he was and was congratulating him. The dream is hard to wake from. As he is jolted out of sleep, briefly confused by his surroundings, by the darkness of the real world. His wife, still unclothed, is breathing evenly beside him, her hand with the chewed down nails clutching his shoulder.
A subdued card with flowers on the front signed by all his coworkers appears on his desk. During a meeting in the afternoon, he tries to think of the last name of the girl from college and doesn’t hear anything clearly until the rustle of papers when everyone starts gathering their notes to leave, when he blinks back into focus, stumbling over the loss of an hour. His boss pats his shoulder on the way out.
He spends the rest of the afternoon goofing off on his phone, thinking in the back of his mind that even if someone noticed that no one would say anything. When he comes across something funny that references his wife’s favorite movie, he almost sends it to her, but finds himself wondering for a moment what the point is. She will not laugh and he knows it. He decides to send it anyway. She doesn’t respond and he spends several minutes staring at the picture in their text thread, bereft of acknowledgement, and sighs, annoyed that his effort hasn’t produced any notice. He imagines her face brightening for a moment. Maybe he did that at least. Maybe she decided after seeing it to put the movie on and was briefly distracted and that was all she had energy for. Or maybe she saw it and locked her phone again and turned away.
Third night she takes a pill to help her sleep. She is still as a frozen pond the entire night, but he doesn’t rest because he makes sure she stays that way, that she gets the sleep she needs. A few fitful moments of dozing that always end in panic when he bolts awake, scared that she will be gone when he wakes up. But she’s still there.
He burns pancakes in the morning. The cat sits on her lap and she nibbles at food. Dark rings of exhaustion surround her eyes, which are glassy and unfocused. There should be something that will help, but he knows there isn’t. The cat puts a paw against his wife’s cheek and she nudges back. Is he jealous of the cat?
“I’m going to the store. Do you need anything?”
He turns back to the stove without a response. The pancakes sizzle with an uncomfortably cheerful noise.
“Did you hear me?”
In the window he sees her reflection, eyes closed, cheek to cheek with the cat. He’s definitely jealous.
“No,” she says.
“No what?”
“I don’t need anything.”
“Well I’ve got to go anyway. So. Let me know.”
The supermarket is his last stop, after he has dragged out the errands hours past when he should have been home. But he has to go, has to buy something, because he left saying that’s what he was doing and now he can’t come back without groceries. He fills the cart quickly with sporadic junk that he knows won’t get them through the rest of the week.
When he gets home, she doesn’t ask him where he’d been.
On his lunch break the next day, he mostly ignores his sandwich while starting texts to three different friends trying to explain how he feels and ask what he should do, but he doesn’t send any of them. They haven’t been in touch since his brother-in-law went into the hospital anyway.
He instead finds himself still not back to work ten minutes after he should have been, scrolling, scrolling. It’s not even fun, but what is right now? The office bustles around him like he’s invisible and he can’t decide if it’s comforting.
He texts his wife a picture of the cover of an old fantasy novel he finds on the social media of a local book shop that each week features a particularly bad illustration from previous decades. On it a fierce woman with a crazed look in her eyes, hair and scarlet robes flying behind her, stands at the base of an erupting volcano flanked by two frankly moronic looking dragons flaring their nostrils.
“I randomly thought about that psychic lady the other day. Why is this her?”
He doesn’t expect a reply because it was honestly a bit of a stupid thing to say and he’s not sure if she remembers. Did the woman even look like that? Doubtful. The thought just crossed his mind and he was lonely for his wife. He goes back to work already not thinking about her responding because it seems like a given she won’t right now. A few minutes later the ping of his phone startles him.
“Ha, yeah.”
She lets him hold her on the fourth night. A chasm of exhaustion envelops him as soon as their skin meets. He’s asleep instantly, and wakes in the middle of the night to her pressed against him, stroking his hair. She stops when he opens his eyes, and he mutters “don’t” almost before he’s had the thought. Her heart beats against his back and she resumes. It’s the last thing he remembers before sleep pulls him back.
The doctor, a woman with close cut hair and large blue eyes, elegant in her appearance, had put her hand on his wife’s shoulder in the moments after it happened and the room was getting still. She knew this routine well. The doctor’s delicate hand stayed just long enough, then she stepped back. The room was filled with his wife’s sobbing, loud and conspicuous, that eventually tapered off into hiccups.
Several hours later, in the car on the drive home, she was silent and he swore her eyes sometimes flash with anger, and at him. It didn’t make sense, but nothing did. His wife glared out the window until her face eventually softened and her body drooped down into the car seat and she fell asleep.
She doesn’t want to go away, she says on the fifth night. No hotel, no out of town trip. Well, she confesses after a moment, the thought lighting up her eyes in a way that grips at his stomach, I want to leave, but I don’t have the energy. I want, she says with a sigh that completely deflates her, to be just gone. Here, then there. Magic. No work. I just want to think it and then I’m somewhere else.
“What’s that in those movies with the wizards?” he asks. He realizes that he’s been holding her hand for several minutes, the normalcy of it not bringing it to his attention right away. “They just say the name of where they want to go into a fireplace?”
“Still too much work,” she says, and almost laughs. Pink rises to the apples of her cheeks.
That night when he comes to bed after brushing his teeth, she asks him to show her more of the book shop’s posts with the bad cover art. She flips through them with him with a half grin twitching on her dry lips. He pulls the sorceress and her dragons back up.
“The psychic you took me to was named Barb. Remember that?” she asks. “Barb the psychic.”
“Sounds violent. I don’t think I will.”
He hadn’t meant to joke, and felt bad afterward for attempting humor. There was a pause and a sharp laugh escaped her, so surprising that she blinked in shock a few times after.
“What’s her name? In the book?” She nods toward his phone screen. Her hand grazes his. She has, he can see, tidied up her nails by clipping them very short and removed all the somber polish.
“Probably Morgana or Lilith or something.”
“Definitely not Barb.”
“Definitely not Barb,” he agrees.
When she’s asleep, he buys the sorceress book from the shop’s website. He can only hope the woman his wife is in five days still gets the joke.
They watch a movie on his phone in the car on the sixth night, because she can’t settle in the house and wants to go for a drive. They wind up in the park he was at a few nights ago. Already there’s a bit more light than there was then, a few more people out.
In the flickering candle-like blue of the phone’s light, he watches her face and thinks that she might really have relaxed. She pulls up her hair as he’s seen her do so often. The moment of normalcy catches his attention and ignites hope.
“Can we do something different tonight?” she asks on the way home.
“Sure. Of course.”
“Will you sleep downstairs with me? I don’t know why, but I can’t face the bed.”
At home, he pulls out the sofa into a bed and brings down the spare pillows and blankets from the closet. The clean smell of fresh bedding that has been tucked away for months reminds him of visits to relatives as a child, or sleepovers where friends’ parents would drag things out for him. The memory lifts his spirits some and he finds himself smiling, then smiling at her. They make up the couch together and he kisses her on the forehead.
“Thank you,” she says.
Sleep comes quickly for her that night, and it’s only after it happens that he realizes his entire body has relaxed after a day of being held tense. The sudden realization of his relief induces a dread that he might be a terrible husband and man for being happy an evening with his sad wife is over. No, he reminds himself, I’m happy because her night is over, that this is one less one to get through, and she’s resting well. The cat jumps up on the couch and curls into himself right next to her pillow, reaching a paw out toward her.
After writing a quick note and leaving it on the coffee table for her, he slips on his shoes and grabs his keys. Keeping an eye to make sure his wife is still asleep, he closes the front door behind him as softly as he can. Outside, the night is windy, and the sidewalks are damp from rain. Droplets fall from autumn red leaves.
The walk has no real purpose, but he finds he can’t stop once he’s started. After half an hour, he finally sits on a bench at the entrance to a park. A fountain, drained for the winter, sits to one side, the figure of a stone woman looking at its center.
He takes his phone from his pocket and catches his reflection in the screen when he checks for messages, of which there are none. Across the street, a house is well lit even though both on either side are dark. A cat sits in the window, watching him shiver, and lifts a paw to clean its face. The wind numbs his ears and pulls up a picture of his wife and her brother on his phone as a light comes on in one of the houses facing him.
By Heather Whited
Heather Whited graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2006 with a BA in creative writing. She lived in Japan and Ireland before returning to her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee to obtain her graduate degree. She now lives in Portland, Oregon.
She has been published in the literary magazines Straylight, Lingerpost, The Timberline Review, A Door is Ajar, Allegro, Foliate Oak, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Windmill; The Hofstra Journal of Art and Literature, Chantwood Literary Magazine, Cricket, Storm Cellar, Forge, Gravel, The Hungry Chimera, The Broke Bohemian, The Arlington Literary Journal, Wax Paper, Projected Letters, Borrowed Solace, Edify Poetry, Evocations, Fleas on the Dog, Change Seven, Splash!, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Dillydoun Review, Gold Man Review, Delay Fiction, The Bangalore Review, Syncopation Literary Journal, Half and One, Litro Literary Magazine, The New Plains Review, Barzakh, and soon Club Plum.
In 2015 she was an honorable mention in Gemini Magazine's annual short story contest and in 2018 and 2020 she was a finalist in the Adelaide Literary Award contest. In 2021 she was a finalist in The Tatterhood Review's Novel Excerpt contest (now Landing Zone). In 2022 she was a semifinalist in Driftwood Press's annual short story contest, and in 2022 she was a finalist in Quarterly West's short story contest. She is a contributor to The Drunken Odyssey podcast and Secondhand Stories Podcast.