The Sun hangs low over the village of one street. Gripping a basket full of yarn, the witch shuffles past homes with smoking chimneys and arrives at the cottage at the end of the lane. The wooden gate glides open under her wise old hands.
Elena gazes out of the front window of her cottage, nursing a long–since finished cup of tea. She cycles through the day’s chores, crossing them off one by one and starting over again and again. There is nothing left to do but wait for an appropriate time to go to bed.
She could knock on the neighbour’s door, brandishing the pie she made today so it doesn’t seem like she’s just begging for company, but she is too tired to watch all her happily–wedded neighbours dote on one another, stealing glances with secret meanings—too tired to pretend she doesn’t notice how the others frustrate and deride one another. Either way, she would rather be alone than be pitied over her husbandless home.
Elena surveys the pinks of the horizon with vacant eyes and notices an old woman standing in her yard. The moment they lock eyes, the witch motions expectantly to the door with a practised flick of the wrist. Elena cracks open the door, with a smile she hopes is polite but unwelcoming. She thought she had locked the front gate.
“What brings you here, Elder?” Elena asks.
“Elena, my dear. May I come in?”
Elena chuckles airily, searching for a way to say no.
“These kids have no manners,” the witch grumbles to herself, sighing as she waves her hand before Elena’s face, “Let me in.”
Elena holds the door open for the witch, whose eyes dart hungrily around the clean little cottage. A rocking chair sits before a crackling fire and a pie is cooling on the counter. With a proud smile, the witch settles into the warmed rocking chair.
Elena watches the witch set down her basket and pull a pair of knitting needles from the deep pockets of her robe.
“I appreciate your visit, Elder, but I’m quite tired and—”
“Nonsense. Come help me untangle all this yarn.”
Elena kneels in front of the tangled skeins of yarn overflowing from the witch’s basket and searches for an end.
“That’s more like it,” the witch mumbles.
. . .
The witch’s nimble fingers cast on effortlessly as she knits row after row with the speed of someone no longer concerned with making an error in her craft.
“It’s been lonely, hasn’t it?” the witch says after a time. Elena shrugs noncommittally. “Be honest with me.”
Elena prepares to deflect the question but, transfixed by the rosy pink yarn flowing smoothly from her hands to the witch’s needles, she finds herself saying, “Yes.”
“It’s about time for you to find someone to love, is it not?” the witch asks.
“All the men around here are spoken for.”
“You’ll find one sooner than you think. What kind of man are you looking for?”
To Elena, looking for a man means letting her mind wander up into the sky. There, she imagines someone holding her hand while she walks through the forest, kneading her shoulders the way she kneads dough. She is familiar with the feelings she longs for but she’s never tried putting them into words.
“Oh, I don’t know. Someone…kind,” Elena replies.
“Naturally. What about someone smart?”
“I suppose, but that isn’t the most important thing either.”
“What is?”
“A good heart.”
“We’ll get there. Brains aren’t important to you?”
“Good sense is important, sure. But I wouldn’t like to be with a man who talks to prove how smart he is.”
“Someone who doesn’t talk down to you then?”
Elena nods, “someone who listens.”
The witch hums agreeably and drops a curious ball of conjoined ovals to the floor. She leaves one long string behind, and begins a new row of stitches. Elena’s eyes follow the yarn in her fingers to the deep, winding grooves on the surface of the deformed ball. Then she looks at the witch, who peers up from her knitting to look back at her.
“Why are we doing this?” Elena asks.
An almost tender smile spreads across the witch’s face, “Because I care about you. Now, tell me more.”
. . .
Though she privately finds the witch to be nosy and crude, Elena dutifully searches for the words to describe the man she imagines meeting one day, and the witch has another question for every answer.
“It would be nice if he isn’t a heavy drinker,” Elena says.
“How about every once in a while?”
Mounds of knitted pink bundles pile up on the floor, each one linked to another by the single strand of yarn that Elena pulls free from the basket.
“He ought to keep himself clean.”
“But he shouldn’t be disinclined to work up a sweat, no?”
The yarn is so cooperative and the rhythm of the witch’s hands is so mesmerizing that Elena doesn’t notice the sunset surrendering to the Moon.
“He should notice when supplies are running low and think ahead to harsh winters,” Elena says.
“As a hunter or a farmer?”
Elena doesn’t notice the yarn mutating into different shades of pink between her fingers.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be with someone who just knows you?” she asks dreamily. “Someone who’s known you for years, who can tell when you’re upset and knows just how to cheer you up. Someone who sees what you need without you having to ask.”
“Some would call that unrealistic,” the witch retorts.
“I suppose.” Elena grimaces into the yarn. “Falling in love just seems like more trouble than it’s worth. It seems wonderful in the beginning, but it can all fall apart so fast.”
“It can come back together just as fast, you know.”
“But is it worth it? Every time?”
The witch smiles to herself, “You’ve been watching your neighbours, haven’t you?”
Elena bristles with guilt. There is a man across the street with a wife who couldn’t keep away from him when first brought home from town. She would come outside while he was cutting firewood just to kiss him and go back inside; and soon after he would follow her in. Before long, she started to complain that there was never enough wood. Now, their bitter fights are punctuated by fleeting, passionate reconciliations that Elena can hear too much of from her cottage.
“I don’t know how they put up with each other,” Elena says.
The witch shrugs, “He got what he wanted with that one: fiery, full of life, with eyes only for him. She loves him so much she devoted her life to him, so who do you think she blames when she’s in a foul mood? She wanted more from him than he had to give, and now all he does is disappoint her. He sure didn’t expect that.”
Elena thinks about the way she catches her neighbour’s wife looking at him—like her saviour and then her tormentor; her treasure, then her captor. Like she owes her life to him. Like she is watching for what he will do to her next.
“Maybe I want someone more like an old friend,” Elena says finally.
The witch drops a long, curling tube of yarn on top of a thicker, shorter tube, “Don’t you worry about getting bored?” she asks.
“I’m bored already. But peace is better than war, don’t you think?”
The witch considers this, then asks: “What about sex?”
The flow of yarn stammers between Elena’s fidgeting fingers.
“You do think about sex, don’t you?”
“Of course I wonder,” Elena murmurs.
“What would you like it to be like? Don’t be shy.”
“I suppose…” Elena fiddles with the yarn some more then laughs to herself, “I suppose I would just like to feel beautiful to someone.”
The witch nods approvingly as she finishes knitting a strange shape Elena has never seen before.
“That’s a fine answer.”
. . .
The Moon is at its peak by the time the witch announces she is almost finished. For a while now she has been working on an odd blanket that protrudes with sleeves ending in short, slender branches. It is large enough to cover all the little bundles that came before it.
“Do you think someone like this exists?” Elena asks, just as the yarn runs out under her fingers. She is shocked to find the basket suddenly empty, save for a pair of shoes atop a pile of folded clothes.
Casting off the last stitch, the witch stands for the first time in hours and holds the cream-coloured piece up before her. It resembles a cloak with a hood. And limbs. Lit up from behind by the fireplace, its tall shadow softens the wrinkles around the witch’s wide grin. The pink oddities strewn across the floor pulse under the embers.
“What is this?” Elena asks. Her voice sounds rather far away. She doesn’t know if she’s whispering or if she is being drowned out by the beating of her heart.
“Oh, you’re going to just love it,” the witch says, delicately draping the cloak over her arms. “Lend me a hand, won’t you?”
Elena’s legs wobble underneath her as she stands. She tells herself she is sore from sitting, ignoring that her hands are shaking as well.
Scooping up an armful of pink, she follows the witch across the room to her bed. Little pink bundles trail behind them, all knitted from one single strand of yarn passed from Elena’s lonely fingers to the clever hands of the witch.
With a precision not unlike that of her knitting, the witch gingerly lays the cream cloak on the bed and arranges the knitted bundles along its length, twisting tubes tightly in the middle and funnelling pink matter down the sleeves. By the time she places the grooved ovals into the hood and pauses to assess her work, Elena is paralyzed by the instinctive comprehension of what is lying in her bed, its insides on display. Then the witch pulls out her needles. She drags them along the knitted carcass and the cream yarn crawls towards the tips of the needles, sealing away the mounds of pink. The needles meet in the middle and leave behind a soft belly button. The witch steps away from the knitted man and beckons Elena towards him.
“No,” Elena whispers.
“Kiss him,” the witch commands.
Elena sits by his side and shudders when his body shifts under her weight ever so slightly. He has no face. Only the hollows of two eyes, the soft peak of a nose, and the plump suggestion of a mouth. It isn’t until Elena is hovering over the knitted man’s head that she realizes she has never imagined kissing someone for the first time. She has only ever imagined being kissed; by a man who tucked her hair behind her ears and held her cheeks in his hands; by a man who looked into her eyes and saw that she wanted to be kissed; who kissed her because he thought she was beautiful.
As her lips meet the dry, lifeless mouth of the knitted man, she mourns the loss of a dream she didn’t know she had.
Her heart skips a beat when the yarn melts away and she feels the warmth of dewy lips kissing her back. She recoils, and the man with smooth cream skin opens his vacant eyes, but then he smiles at her the kind of warm, unassuming smile she’d always dreamt of.
Elena tries to back away and bumps into the witch hovering behind her with the basket. “I hope you will find that he is everything you asked for,” the witch says.
Elena searches the witch’s eyes for some kind of answer, but all she finds is the proud satisfaction of a mother.
“But he’s not real,” Elena whispers.
“Neither are you, but you feel real, don’t you? Now give him his clothes.”
Elena hands the clothes to the stranger on her bed, powerless to do anything else.
“Thank you,” he says, rising from the bed. Then, as if he’s done it a hundred times before, the stranger reaches out and tucks a hair behind her ear. Elena gasps, feeling sick to her stomach and blushing despite herself.
“This is your husband. You remember him.”
The ache in her stomach mutates into a loud hum. She gasps again, this time with terrible joy, as she remembers everything she can’t believe she forgot. The day they met, all those years ago. The day he kissed her, and all the days lost to kisses since then. The day they were married. The day they put their fights behind them and chose peace over passion. The days where no one spoke until noon. The days he kneaded her shoulders the way she kneads dough.
All their days, all their nights, are compressed into a quiet contentment in her soul as she watches him pull on his socks.
“I believe Charlie is a fine name, don’t you think?” the witch says. The witch always names her children.
“Charlie,” Elena says. She welcomes her husband’s arm around her waist as they walk the witch to the door.
“Good luck with this one. I think you chose well this time around. Now, forget I was here.”
Elena and Charlie close the door on the cool night air and get ready for bed. Before they fall asleep, he presses himself into her backside and moves the hair from her neck to kiss her there. She smiles and says nothing, he does too. They move together in a familiar rhythm. It doesn’t last long, but Elena falls asleep feeling beautiful.
. . .
On her way out of Elena’s home, the witch spots a man across the street spouting drunken pleas into his front door while his wife—her youngest child until tonight—refuses to let him in. She considers plunging her needles into his navel and bringing home the yarn, but her hands are worn out for tonight.
As the witch shuffles back to her cottage just outside the village, she conducts a silent symphony for all of her children, embedding them with fond memories of their old neighbour, Charlie.
Jaclyn Legge is a Masters student in Carleton’s English Department with a personal and scholarly interest in the pleasures we seek and desires we fulfill through reading and writing love stories and erotica.
