For November’s writing, we looked into our personal ancestry and tried to incorporate a creature from our own family line. Quin decided to research her Polish history and found inspiration from a creature known as Poludnica. They are demonic spirits of young women that died around their weddings. In ancient retellings, they’re also known for protecting the earth and plants.
The Noon Witch
by Quinlan Hurlburt
In the winter, my father lost his job and with the last of our savings, he bought a farm out in the country. I was 12 at the time and although I didn’t want to leave my friends and I had no choice in the matter, I knew my parents were trying to do what was best for us. My dad called it a fresh start but when we got to the land, nothing was fresh. The winter air left the farm barren and weathered inside and out. Dirt mounds rose and fell with cracks and dead roots that suffocated the ground below. The land spread before us as far as the eye could see. I saw the look my parents gave one another as the sinking feeling settled in, knowing that this is all we have. And this, as it stood, was nothing.
My dad rallied up some energy and gave my mom a smile, “Once harvest comes, there’ll be crops as far as you can see. We’ll feed the whole town and then some!”
My mom nodded hopefully and gave him a kiss, hoping it would reassure him in some unspoken way.
We walked up the front steps and into the farmhouse. A layer of dust covered the old appliances, indicating that no one had lived here in many, many years. A quiet, steady, dripping noise reverberated through the empty house. My dad went to investigate the sound while my mother grabbed the broom and swept the dust out onto the porch. I wanted to help so I grabbed a rag and turned on the faucet. The water sputtered at first, and then poured out thick and brown. I turned it off quickly and then turned it on again. The same rusty water sprayed out, becoming clearer and clearer the longer it ran.
“Looks like we’ve got a little leak in the roof upstairs, anybody seen a bucket?” he chuckled, trying to make light of the situation.
My mother grabbed a pot from outside and brought it to my father, handing it to him without saying a word. My mother was often quiet. I wondered if she had always been that way or if she felt the same as I did, that my dad talked enough for all of us. Because of this, my mother didn’t communicate in words, she used her eyes and her body and a few words when necessary. Some days I could believe she read minds, some days I believed I could read hers.
Today, like most days, she read mine. After cleaning the house and unloading our belongings. I sat on the porch while my father fixed logs into the fireplace. My mother came out onto the porch and sat next to me, grabbing my frozen hands.
“How are you feeling, May?” she asked me.
I pondered my thoughts for a moment. I had been thinking about the summer. I thought about the heat pounding on my head and the air hot and sticky. I was trying to imagine what it would smell like, feel like, here. I thought about my friends and I wondered if they missed me. I was sure that Jen and Katherine would be best friends without me. My eyes welled for a moment, and my feelings swelled at the top of my throat. I felt sad, and scared, and lonely.
“I’m okay,” was all I managed to say without my voice cracking.
My mother held my hands tighter and in that way she did, she leaned my head into her chest and wrapped me in her arms.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered.
I nodded into her chest and she hugged me tighter.
“Me too,” she said. Although I wasn’t sure if she’d really said it out loud or if I’d read her mind. I supposed it didn’t matter either way.
My father spent the next six months fixing up the house and preparing the fields. My mother and I cooked, cleaned, and took care of the livestock. We had two cows, 12 chickens, 4 goats, and a couple barn cats that came and went as they pleased. I preferred to spend my time with the cows, brushing them, feeding them, and talking to them about my life.
Today I talked to them about my dad. Something had changed within him and I wasn’t sure what it was. I knew that we were short on money, we had been for a while now. For weeks he worked in the fields from sunup to sundown, but nothing changed and the fields were still a mess. He woke before all of us and came in after we had gone to bed. We knew he was out there but we didn’t know where he was or what he did all day.
In his absence, my mother worked all day and night to keep everything together. She began to lose weight and gain muscles on her small frame. My body began to mirror hers. I took over some house chores and kept up my end of the deal by taking care of the livestock. My father got up early, showered, and went outside. His skin was burnt and tough from the hours spent outside. He said very little, which was unsettling to say the least.
One night, my mother waited up and tended to the fireplace while he was outside. I asked if she’d like me to wait with her but she told me to go on to bed, that we’ll talk in the morning. I didn’t know what she meant by that so I laid in my bed with the door creaked open so I could hear what was happening downstairs. My eyelids struggled to stay open when I heard my father humming and coming towards the house. I heard him stomp up the front steps and stumble through the door. I pictured my mother as she was sitting. Her face was tired and gaunt. We had foregone eating in the middle of the day to save time and food. I imagined my father’s face, assuming it was red and puffy from the sun, or alcohol, whatever he had been doing.
“What are you doing up?” He slurred.
“I wanted to make sure you came in for bed.” she said softly.
“Is that it?” he grumbled.
“Where have you been?” she asked weakly,
A loud groan followed and he stumbled forward, rattling the house.
“What do you think I’m doing?” a twinge of guilt hung on his words. “I’m getting the fields ready,” he said.
“I understand but I don’t understand how nothing’s changed, we’re not going to be ready for harvest.” her words held more weight now, she was serious, pleading.
As the gravity of the situation fell over the room, something within him snapped and my father revealed a side of himself that I had never seen, a madness.
“And why should I be here doing all the work? So you brats can sit pretty and eat all day? Well that won’t do for me” His voice boomed and lingered. I’m sure my mother sat confused and hurt as to what the beer, or whatever it was, had done to him.
“I’m just saying that there’s a lot to be done and we could use an extra pair of hands around here,” my mother replied calmly and gracefully.
“So that’s what I am, huh? A pair of hands? You want ‘em so bad, take ‘em, “ I heard him grab something and throw it on the ground. My mother screamed and I couldn’t help but run to the bottom of the stairs.
There was my dad. Blood pooled out from his left hand, and seeped into the floor. A kitchen knife laid on the floor, next to the pieces of finger he had chopped off. My mother screamed and ran to him, pulling off a piece of her clothing to wrap his hand. As she pleaded to go to the hospital, my father began laughing uncontrollably. He looked different than I remembered, his face was sunken in and suddenly I couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten either.
She lifted him off the ground and carried him to the truck. She had become so strong, when just a few months ago, he would’ve been impossible to carry. I watched as she hauled his body into the passenger seat and hopped into the driver’s side with her eyes wide and panicked. I collected his bloody fingers in a cloth and ran to the car. My mother looked at me with eyes that I had never seen before, they looked an awful lot like my own, terrified. She grabbed the cloth from me and placed it in her lap before starting the car and speeding away from the farm.
The next morning, the house creaked and moaned but no one was home. Neither my father nor mother returned all day. The crops were growing and there was so much to be done in preparation for the harvest. In their absence, I did my best to take care of everything.
In the early morning darkness, I fed the animals their food. They ate quickly, as if they didn’t eat the same thing every day. After feeding them, I went to fill their water. The water was already a little warm and soon the buckets were full and heavy. After finishing with the animals, I started in the field to try and beat the sun.
Later that day, while I was tending to the field, I found my father lying under the farthest tree from the farm. His skin was covered in red welts from the heat of the sun. His left hand was wrapped in guaze, brown from dried blood, or dirt, or both. I wondered how long he had been there and if this is where he had been spending his time. I leaned down to wake him gently. He smiled without opening his eyes and said “Where have you been? I missed you.” I looked at him confused as the sun beat down. A flurry of dust floated up and swirled around the tree, covering my father and sending me stumbling back.
As the dust settled, I could see a woman in the field. She was dressed in all white, like a bride. Her golden hair flowed in perfect waves down her back. In her hand, she carried a scythe that was blinding if the sun hit it just right. She was beautiful and for a few moments, I stood and watched her. Wemade eye contact and she disappeared again, into a cloud of dust. I rubbed my eyes and looked around to see where she had gone, if she had been there at all.
“Come on, it’s too hot out here,” I said grabbing my dad’s arm.
He yanked it away and began humming a strange tune that sounded oddly familiar, ancient.
I decided to leave him there and get something light to shield him from the sun. I searched the house and found nothing, so I went to the barn. When I entered the barn, a smell hit me that I didn’t recognize from this morning. The smell was a little familiar and putrid, My first thought was that a rodent must have died. I could see everything in the barn clearly now. I searched around the barn for the source of the smell, gagging when I reached the food barrel. I lifted the lid open and immediately vomited onto the ground below.
Inside the barrel were chunks of flesh and meat mixed into the food. In any other circumstance, the contents would be impossible to distinguish. But I could tell somehow that this was her, this was my mother. I didn’t know when or how it happened, but I knew now that they didn’t go to the hospital last night, and she wasn’t coming back.
I switched between sobbing and vomiting as I scrubbed the floor over and over again, long after the sun had set. My hands were rubbed raw with splinter as I laid my head against the cool floor. For a moment, I had no thoughts. Nothing came to mind. I sat there and existed in a space that didn’t exist. A space where my mother was alive, and my dad was happy, and I wasn’t lonely. But that space lasted only a moment before it didn’t, couldn’t, anymore. I closed my eyes again and willed death to find me. I pleaded with every force in the universe to take my body, turn me into feed or dust.
Even as the remains of my mother rotted in the barrel, I felt as though I could hear her. “I love you,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I cried.
I couldn’t tell how much time had passed before I mustered what strength I had left in me and pushed against the floor. My body turned upright and my head was light as I reached around for stability. My hand grabbed a post in the wall and I leaned into it. “Wake up,” I told myself. Stop thinking, I begged my brain.
With new clarity or disassociation, I made my way out of the barn and into the house. The emptiness of the house was heavier now. The space left open to be filled by my parents was closed and it was just me in that quiet house. I checked the house to make sure my dad wasn’t in it before locking all the doors and falling asleep in my closet, hidden from the world.
The next morning, I slept in. The closet shielded any sunlight from entering and I convinced myself that I could survive there, at least for a while. Before I could fall back asleep. I heard that same song my dad had been humming, only this time, it was a woman’s voice. I creaked the closet door open and peaked around. The sound was still distant, it was coming from outside.
I crawled on my hands and knees to a window that faced the whole field. In the distance, among the tall crops. I saw my father, standing now. He was spinning and dancing to the song. It made my stomach wretch to see him, see him dancing at that. As he danced, a cloud of dust began to rise over him and then there, like she had never left, was the woman again. She skipped around him with her scythe overhead as he spun faster and faster, trying to keep up.
Then she slowed, the dust settled and I could see them more clearly. She leaned in and whispered something in his ear. He looked at her confused and then gave a sly smile. Any other day, I would’ve been able to guess what he was doing or thinking, but now I had no clue.
He laughed loudly and looked at the woman, giving a shrug and leaning in to begin the dance again. In the moment he leaned in and down, the woman raised her scythe in the air and struck him across the neck, letting his head roll onto the ground before his body followed. I screamed involuntarily causing the woman to stand up straight and gesture with her hands for me to come to her.
As if I had been possessed, I came to my feet and began walking out of the house, into the field, and towards her. I stopped a few feet away and the spell broke as I saw pools of blood and two pieces of my father on the ground ahead of me. My feet faltered as I fell to the grow in a dizzying mist.
When I opened my eyes, the woman stood above me, heat radiated off of her and I shielded my face to look up at her.
“Would you like to dance?” she asked, her hand outstretched.
With no thoughts in my head and nothing to lose, I reached for her. She pulled me up and immediately began to hum and dance and sing. I’ll dance until I die, I decided, Why not? She danced around me, and I danced along. My feet were clumsy at first, as I stumbled around her white gown. As the sound enveloped me, I began to dance in time. Soon, I was humming along to the same song, like I’d known it all along. My feet fell in time with hers and I followed her every movement, twisting my body around and through the dust that rose and settled with the rhythm.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asked into the dust.
I’ve been tired since I got here, I thought.
I stomped the ground below me believing that if I danced long enough, hard enough, the ground would crack open and swallow me whole. I would be free. I began to laugh and then sob while my body released every feeling I had bottled up, everything I never said, never go the chance to. I screamed and pounded my chest, regressing to a sort of primal dance that didn’t match the elegant movements of the woman.
As I danced, the space where my skin ended and the air began became one. I kept moving as though I was being carried by the wind, as if I was the wind. Then as the sunlight began to come down, the woman whispered, “You win.” The moment my ears processed the words, a cloud of dirt and dust pulled me towards the woman, wrapping my body in hers. For a second, I felt as though I was nothing and then everything all at once. The dust fell and I stood there, dressed in white, scythe in hand, alone.
My body felt as though it was still moving, still dancing. I closed my eyes and listened. In the same way my mother spoke to my father and the way I spoke to my mother, the woman spoke to me, without words. This land is yours now to protect, for Mother Earth must be honored. She will bring you prosperous land and riches but those who neglect her must be tested and punished.
Like my father, I thought, Like my mother.
My skin was glowing and hot. I tried to think of what to do but that same song was playing in my head, refusing to be ignored. So, I danced. I danced until the ground rose and Mother Earth met me in that field. Her arms wrapped around me and I didn’t feel lonely anymore. We rose above the ground as she held me, wrapping me in white, taking me away, setting me free.
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