Write On Prompt: Sydney Goes Home

 

Note: The Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021 meeting of the Write-On Rock Falls Writing Group, we had prompt night. We were tasked with writing something that included at least one of the objects in the picture above. We wrote for about 45 minutes. Below is what I wrote. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments section!

Sydney Goes Home 

“When will it happen?” Sydney asked, picking a scab on her arm. The girl was nothing but bones and skin and scabs. The scab picking a vice for her like games of chance or mugs of brew for others.

“Patience.” Madra whispered, continuing to darn. The yarn was pink like the flesh of a baby pig and the needles were sharpened like a pair of steak knives. Madra’s sagging features were all shadows in the candle’s light. As she worked, the yarn was becoming some sort of figure, a doll.

This was the season of harvest or had been when crops were still grown. An orange moon with its cracked face slumbered behind wisps of purple clouds. Away from the light, things – for they were neither human nor beast - creeped and crawled, hungering for blood and anxious for the little bit of light glowing from the candle to extinguish. In the dark, they could converge on the two women and feast.

Madra pricked her finger with the needle, but her skin was like leather and barely a drop of blood escaped. She rubbed it on the doll. Madra’s eyes were green and still as young as the day she was born, which could have been yesterday or a thousand years as far as anyone else knew. Sydney certainly didn’t know, how could she? She’d known the woman maybe a week, it was hard to tell here. Days passed sometimes in minutes and nights felt like years. The girl couldn’t take another night here.

“This better not be a trick, you promised,” Sydney said. Trying to find another scab with her fingertips. Her mother had hated her habit, like she hated Sydney’s green hair stylized short and pointed like a porcupine. Her mother hated Sydney’s torn jeans, black boots and pierced nose. Her mother didn’t know about the tattoos – the orange serpent on her right shoulder blade or the bloody dagger on her left hip. Her mother tried warning her away from things like witchcraft and the occult. Scolded her for the séance her and Liza performed when they were thirteen and the voodoo doll she made of her freshman biology teacher. God, if she’d only listened. God, if she could only see her mother now.

“You won’t.” Madra said.

“I won’t what?” Sydney said.

“See your mother,” Madra said. “I can send you back to where you came from but not to the when.”

“How did you know?”

“What do you take me for?” Madra said. “Some village midwife dispensing spoonfuls of honey for upset stomachs and roots to cure body aces? I am Madra of the Green. I could spin this damned earth upside down if I so chose. Reading your silly thoughts is hardly a skill.”

“Sorry.” Sydney slouched, looking very much like the girl her mother knew all-to-well. The sullen, moody one who pouted instead of taking responsibility. She was sorry for not listening to her mother, if she had, she wouldn’t have landed in this hell. This world where the hairs on your arms never went down because something meaning harm was always close by. You couldn’t see them, but you could feel them, lurking just out of sight.

“How does that candle work?”

“There’s a wick and wax, you dullard,” Madra said.

“Yes, but even when the wind hollers, it barely flickers.”

“Does it now,” Madra answered. “You’re not completely useless. That candle is sitting in a dragon’s tooth. Dragon’s never let their fire go out.”

“Really?”

“Stop saying that, when I say something, it becomes real.”

With that, Madra held out the object she was darning, it was a disfigured doll with six arms or maybe they were legs. Then the witch blew into its backside.

“Hold it.” Madra said. Sydney let it drop into her waiting hand, expecting it to feel like yarn. But it didn’t, the yarn was taut and warm and pulsating. Sydney thought at first it was just her own blood, coursing through her veins so fast, but it wasn’t. The doll had a pulse and a warm, faint breath brushed against Sydney’s palm.

“What in the hell?”

“You brought yourself here with magic you didn’t understand,” Madra said. “It’s best you leave here with magic you couldn’t never even dream of. Take out that key and hold it.”

With her other hand, Sydney took out the key. It was to a Honda Civic that she could only barely remember being brown or maybe red with balled-out tires and a cracked rearview mirror. Her father had left for work one morning when she was seven in the Civic and never returned. The police gave her mother the key back, as if she wanted a momento from that time her husband’s car was t-boned by an 18-wheeler. Sydney’s mother hadn’t wanted it, but Sydney had carried it everywhere, always in her front pocket.

Madra produced a scrawny orange pumpkin spotted green. Cracking it open, she slapped the guts into the dirt and then spat three times. Next came a wand, which Sydney soon realized was a pen, or had been in some long-ago time. The witch stirred the pumpkin’s guts with her spit, chanting some incantation in a language no mortal had ever known. It was guttural, lacking vowels or any discernible form.

“Place the Gralla,” Madra said, pointing to the breathing, slimy doll in Sydney’s hand and indicating to put it on the pumpkin’s guts, which were beginning to smolder.

Madra handed Sydney the darning needle.

“Stab it.”

“I can’t.”

“It has to be you.”

“I”

The witch slapped her, and Sydney responded by plunging the needle into the doll. It cried, wailing like a baby left too long without food or changing. It cried out like hope was something that could be ripped from one’s soul like a piece of candy from a child’s hand. Sydney pulled her hand back, leaving the needle inside the doll, tears streaming down her face. When she looked up, the witch was gone, except from her eyes. They glowed a moment in the ether through the space between them which was now considerable then they were gone.

Sydney looked around, she was in an alley between two brick buildings and before her was a mouse, skewered by a rusty nail. She heard traffic and smelled grilled meats. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she was closer to home.