When White Witches Weep

You would think all is light and magic in a white witch’s life. You would! Really! But you would be wrong.

Sometimes even white witches weep when living among humans, in a world where witchcraft and the belief in the magical world has almost vanished.

Witches have no other option than to live hiding in plain sight, tying to survive in a world where they are no longer welcome. It is quite true what they say, being forgotten is as bad as non existence and witches are almost gone, but for a handful who have managed to incorporate their magical self in their human self, and the only belief they need is their own faith in themselves.

As long as these witches believe in themselves, while adapting to the world changing around them, they will survive. They will lead magical lives in the shadows of the human paths they must follow in order to survive.

Faith, faith in themselves is all they need to have to be able to exist in a world convinced that they never existed.

And faith is what started to waiver in a middle aged, white witch living on the north side of Dublin.

In her human life the witch was a dental nurse, employed by a clinic based in the ground floor of a mock Tudor house, sporting brown stripes and fake lead windows.

Kath, the dental nurse white witch, was happy with the little world she had created for herself there. The work was nice and clean, had set hours allowing her to dedicate time to her true calling, magic.

Life was good going until one day Kath was faced with the greenest eyes she had ever seen. The eyes seemed to engulf her and to take away from her the ability to speak.

‘I have an appointment at twelve.’, the man with the green eyes said in a pleasant voice while looking at her intensely.

Kath pressed a key on her laptop and the schedule disappeared which caused her to become even more flustered. ‘This is ridiculous!’, she said to herself while trying to maintain a semblance of professionalism.

‘I am so sorry, the laptop seems to be acting up. Please take a seat and I will get back to you shortly.’, Kath had trouble breathing properly and felt the words were like chunky stones rolling from her mouth.

‘Ok, thank you.’

He went to sit on the chair right opposite her desk and was keeping a close eye on her.

The bit of space between them gave Kath the chance to catch her breath and her laptop restarted. She felt ridiculous, a woman of her age to react like that, even more, a witch who had seen quite a few bad things in her life. This goes to show that life can always surprise you.

Kath made sure she was away from the desk when the green eyed man left the office.

Ever since that first encounter Kath was haunted by the man, but also by the lack of understanding of why had she been so troubled by him. Then, one night, when she was tossing and turning, it all became clear to her. It was magic.

The man with the eyes, there was magic involved, but she did not know what its purpose was or who was wielding it.

The next day Kath checked the appointments schedule and found that he was due for a follow up visit in two days time.

‘Perfect! Enough time to prepare!’, Kath muttered to herself while formulating a plan in her mind. It was clear she needed a self-containment potion. She could not lose herself as she had before.

The potion was easy to procure from a potion making witch working in a pharmacy near by. The two of them knew each other for as long as they could remember, and they both had navigated the changes of the world as sisters, leaning on each other.

‘Be careful! You never know what might be going on!’, Kath took the potion promising not to take any unnecessary risks.

The day came and Kath, although well prepared, still had butterflies in her stomach at the thought of seeing the green eyed man again, and sure enough, she was still surprised when he walked through the door and came up to her desk.

‘Hello! How are you?’, his voice had a crystal ring to it.

Kath was trying not to look up, but despite the containment potion she did it, and when she did, once more she found herself inexplicably affected by his presence.

‘Hi! Ok. In five minutes. You can go in.’, she spoke like a robot and heat waves were crashing against her heart.

‘Thank you so much! You are so kind!’, and he went to sit.

All this was mind boggling to Kath, the self containment potions had always worked! Never before had she experienced such shyness and awkwardness. For sure he must be one very strong wizard to be able to cause that kind of reaction in a witch as old as her.

Although Kath looked to be in her late thirties, she had been alive for hundreds of years, and in all this time she had never experienced anything similar.

‘I must be getting too old …’, she thought to herself while cleaning an already spotless desk.

‘Hello!’

She looked up startled. It was him.

‘It is me Jonathan Murray …’, he laughed, ‘So silly of me of course you know who I am … I was wondering … aham … would you like to go grab a coffee?’

The waiting area was full but somehow Kath was caught in a cloud of extreme silence.

As she did not reply he felt the need to continue.

‘If you want … can, of course I understand if you cannot. You might be spoken for!’, and he gave an awkward laugh.

Surprising herself Kath answered:

‘Yeah, sure, why not! I am due my break now anyway!’

She grabbed her bag and they both walked out in the warm sun.

They walked for a bit in silence and then after getting their coffees from a near by coffee shop, they sat down at a small table close to the sidewalk.

‘I am sorry if I was too forward, it is just the strangest thing, ever since I met you all I can think about is you…’

Kath frowned slightly while listening to him.

‘No, no it is not like that I am not a psycho. It was just the weirdest thing, I have never experienced that … so I had to talk to you, to try and understand it …’

Kath listened to him recognizing her own reactions in his words but unwilling to share them.

‘So, what do you do?’, she preferred to shift the conversation to more neutral grounds.

‘Painter/decorator and struggling artist. I mean I paint, that is my thing, but I am not good enough to pay the bills, so I do the other kind of painting also. Walls I mean…’

His honesty and ease of being made Kath want to find out more about this unusual man that had made her feel so out of place in her own life. In her very settled, warm and cosy life.

They met again and with each occasion they learnt more about each other and got closer. Kath was still suspicious of the man that had so suddenly appeared in her life doing all the right things, being too good to be true. And, as it happened, Kath’s suspicions paid off.

One evening, weeks and weeks, after their first encounter, the painter invited the witch to his little studio to show her his work. As a lover of beauty and quite taken with him, Kath accepted with no second thoughts.

The studio was crammed with paintings facing the walls and smelt pleasantly like the chemicals he used, that she could sometimes smell on his clothes. The night outside was dark but the room was flooded by a powerful, white light, all the corners of the room were revealed under the exceeding brightness, making the backs of the paintings stand out even more.

Kath thought that maybe he needed that light to paint so did not comment on it, just waited for her eyes to adjust. He gave her a cup of tea and then disappeared among the paintings.

Kath thought that the tea tasted funny, like herbs her friend used to keep in well shut jars. A feeling of unease came over her and at that moment she felt something was wrong. She spilled the tea under the couch, careful not to be noticed in case somebody was watching, and then pretended to doze off.

Not even ten minutes later the Painter came back whistling a strange tune. He called her name a few times checking if she was awake. Kath pretended to be asleep.

He gave her a few more minutes while he pulled out a large canvas and seemed to prepare some paints. While he was doing this Kath’s spirit left her body to take a look at the paintings facing the walls, as it was clear what he was planning, was linked to his art.

Kath’s heart broke. All the paintings revealed women of all ages, of all types, set to pose in very strange ways, set up, obviously, by somebody else than them. The more she saw, the more Kath hurt, and then tears started running down her body’s face.

The painter saw the tears, and like a hunter he was drawn to the weakness of his prey. He got closer and caressed her seemingly sleeping face, touching her painful tears.

What the painter did not know is that a white witch’s tears alter all that they touch. They turn ugliness into beauty, they heal all wounds, they transform evil into good.

So, when the painter touched her tears, he fell down and was transformed, his personality erased, his actions non existent, his thoughts a blank.

Kath went back to herself and left before he could ever see her, making sure to erase all the paintings in his studio, now filled just with hundreds of empty canvases.

Kath went back to her life grateful that it was her whom he had met this time, as that was the end of his wickedness, in the white witches weeping.