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Crazy Aunt Purl was what everyone called her, but she was no one’s aunt. She just arrived one day and became the village witch.
“Purl’s the name, and casting spells is my game,” she said, and she spat in the dust for good luck. “You can buy my help or barter for it, or leave me alone – doesn’t matter. But don’t mess with me.” She shook a bony finger at the wary villagers. “First offenders get a curse of suburban turmoil. Second offenders get thumbscrews. Third offenders …” she shook her head. “Well, I get fussy with them. They end up with crooked brains and must live the rest of their days where the walls are soft.”
A dumb little man muttered, “Yeah, right,” and she flashed her gnarled hands at him. In a puff of purple smoke, he turned into a small rusty pot that a plain-Jane mom rushed up and grabbed, wailing, “She turned him into a pan — Dan! Oh, my Danny!”
After the fearful murmurs died down and the sobbing woman left with the pan clasped to her chest, a sarcastic mom piped up to ask, “What about fourth offenders?”
The old witch’s odd lavender eyes lit up. “Haha, someone of more than ordinary courage. Just my type. Now that’s damn interesting.” She cleared her throat and proclaimed, “There never ARE any fourth offenders.” And with those chilling words still ringing in the air, she parted the crowd to stand in front of the young woman. “What’s YOUR name?”
“Jezebel,” the woman said, sticking out her chin and shifting her baby to her other hip. “What’s it to ya?”
“You’re hired. Come into my den and we’ll make arrangements.”
“But I don’t want a job, not with you, and what makes you think I’ll—“
The witch whirled. “Because I said so, and I am bossy. I need someone with spirit.” More quietly, she added, “And because you look like you and that thin baby need the milk money … if you’re not too chicken.” Purl harrumphed and began talking more loudly again. “I need a sturdy wench like you to clean my writing tools, fetch water from the well, dust my bookshelf, help me summon and capture the flying colours of magical smoke, do a little cooking and minding the fire, and come running with the mop when I have an ink spill.”
Jezebel wrinkled her pretty nose. “Argh, ink. You don’t use a good mop for that!”
Purl shrugged. “Do as you like. Just mind my rules of thumb and we’ll get along fine.” She gestured at the tot. “You might as well bring that with you. And don’t worry – unlike some witches, I don’t eat babies.” She strode toward the cottage she had claimed.
The crowd breathed sighs of relief, but only Jezebel heard her add, “Not anymore.”
Jezebel just tossed her red curls and followed the witch. “I’m not afraid of you, and I’ll show you. Come on, Mikey.” She hugged her son. “Milk money or not, here I come.”
Soon they settled into a routine, with Jezebel and Mike coming over every afternoon to cook and clean and help Purl. They eventually became quite fond of the cranky old witch. And although Jezebel was never able to manage a spell on her own, she did learn the witch’s most carefully kept secret — she had a heart as soft as a marshmallow. Purl loaned Jezebel her favorite book of fairy tales, The Chronicles of Rhodester, and only sighed when Jezebel returned the book sheepishly, with the leather edges chewed by Mike’s emerging baby teeth.
Purl was like that — she talked a tough game, but it was mostly talk.
Purl rose at the midnight hour to hand over an infant’s sleeping potion for an exhausted and grateful mother with a colicky baby. When the penniless village bell maker, Jo Leigh, brought her wheezing elderly dog to Purl’s door, the witch just sighed and reached for a small vial of her costly Cures-All elixir, accepting a small set of tinkling wind chimes in return. Purl helped out when a storm threatened the village children’s choral concert, shouting to quiet the thunder, even though she was already hoarse with a cold. (Her awed, quaking neighbors avoided her for a month after that display.) She also dropped a few coins each month into the coffers of each ittybiz shop in the village, supporting their work. Purl even turned Panny Danny (as he was forever after called) back into a grumbling little man at Jane’s urging.
With love potions, healing incantations, and righteously applied curses written in scribbles and words, Purl was soon admired and appreciated for her skills, but most people other than Jezebel and Mike kept their distance. She was, after all, still a witch.
Purl did all things madly, from riding her broom around town to dancing with her guard dogs, the ninja poodles, in the pale moonlight. Daisy, the curly cat, was often perched on her shoulder, whether Purl was stirring her cauldron, chasing an infestation of plot monkeys from the cemetery, or quieting the Friday night pub rants when the menfolk drank too much beer.
“She just walks around with it,” the drunken sots said, gesturing to the dainty, smirking cat. “It ain’t natural.”
And Purl would just tuck her magic wand in her pocket, stroke the purring Daisy, and respond, “You don’t say. It’s not the magic that bothers you – it’s the cat?”
She was never chosen as citizen of the month and she never won the drawing for a free facial at the village’s Me, Myself, and I boutique. She just crumpled the passive-aggressive notes that her neighbors left in her mailbox when they complained about the poodles yapping, and then quietly cast a Yap No More spell that — not so accidentally — spilled over onto the neighbors too. When truly annoyed, Purl would cast an appalling “Gorilla buns” spell on the women or, for rude men, a curse that didn’t allow them to drink deeply of anything but water for a month. Only rarely did she feel shut out enough to say the F word.
But she sputtered three variations — “Oh frick and frack and fudge almighty!” — when she came back from gathering poisonous mushrooms and found Jezebel sitting outside in the afternoon sunshine, playing with baby Mike instead of working. “Look here, girl — I had you working on elements of a major spell. I’m not paying you to do a whole lot of nothing!”
Jezebel just shrugged and gestured to the door. “Hey, there’s a dead guy in the living room. Your mess, not mine.”
“Well, I didn’t leave one in there,” Purl said, storming toward the cottage, ignoring Jezebel’s eye rolling. “After Ellen stopped by for her weekly love potions — during my breakfast as usual, the wretched wench — I headed straight for the forest to forage. Just ask Allison — she saw me, too.”
Inside, a few minutes later, Jezebel found Purl sitting beside the dead man, patting his cool hands, a crumpled sheet of parchment in her lap. Purl looked up, tears tracking down her wrinkled face. “It’s Zed. The last of my apprentices. He had a letter for me, explaining that he was under a curse that an angry father put on him for, um, a bit of trouble with a certain Swiss miss. There’s not much else in the letter of interest to anyone but me — just a few confessions of an idiosyncratic mind. He … he wanted me to know what happened to him if he didn’t live long enough to ask for my help.” Purl choked up. “If only I’d been here when he arrived. Maybe …”
Jezebel patted her shoulder, and Mike pulled up on Purl’s bony knees. The witch put down Zed’s hand, brushed the letter out of her lap, and picked up the now-chubby little boy. Purl smiled faintly when a plump little hand tweaked her warty nose. “I didn’t even tell Zed when I left the last village,” Purl murmured. “Our working relationship just wasn’t suburban bliss anymore. I got tired of how he’d begun to swagger around, ever since he got his witching license. He was too cocky about his abilities. He’d tell maidens he was going to ‘rock your day,’ and he’d offer them a sip of a smelly love potion, which most were wise enough to refuse. And he was always fighting with writing — you know, ‘pencils at dawn‘ and all that blustery guy talk.”
Jezebel smiled thinly. “Men with pens.”
“Exactly.” Purl dried her eyes. “I wish sometimes they would act out of character and just cultivate Zen habits. I tell you, I am through with trying to teach men anything. There’s not a one of them that can charm me into thinking otherwise. No, when I die, all my knowledge will die with me.” Her face was sad, but resolute.
Then baby Mike struggled to be let down to explore, and Purl placed him on a soft rug with his favorite toys — an enchanted tin pot and spoon that banged loudly to his ears but was only a soft whisper of sound, like fairy bells, to the ears of adults. They both smiled at the little one for a few moments as he crawled around the rug — he was always the cute overload for their lives, even on the saddest of days. Soon, Jezebel left briefly, returning with the parson and a stout man from the village to remove Zed’s body and prepare him for burial. After the men left, the two women were quiet as they gathered their herbs and other ingredients listed in Purl’s spell folio for brewing important potions. They were about to start the afternoon’s brewing when Jezebel realized they hadn’t heard the little boy’s usual fairy bell tinkling. Not once.
They rushed over behind the bench where the tot usually played, and gasped. He was smeared from head to foot with trails of rogue ink, holding a pen that must have fallen from Zed’s pockets. His right hand alone was one big ink blot, like a purplish-black glove. The crumpled parchment was smoothed out and marred with fat little fingerprints, and streaky lines adorned the paper’s once-blank back side.
Purl squinted. The lines looked a little — actually, quite a bit — like a horse. His favorite animal. While she stared, the simple line drawing nickered and then kicked its tiny streaky hooves into the air. Mike clapped, chortling.
“Did you see Mike draw this?” Purl asked, her brow knitted. “It’s more than a picture. It’s a spell. Child-size, to be sure, but still quite good.”
Jezebel, her face white, shook her head.
Purl looked thoughtful, and then a smile began to warm her face. “Say, I have a capital idea.”
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