The Hag’s Scream: A Wintertide Dream Remedy While the Kettle Boils
from ‘Ways of the Witch Storyteller’ by Danielle Dulsky
The season of pitiful suns had dawned, and I begged for a hopeful sign from an unnamed god. I prayed for some spectral song to grace my ears with heathen tidings before the eerie gloaming swallowed the sky whole and retched back the indigo-and-pinprick-star night. These were hallowed hours. Early winter wants our longing like damp bones want rest, and I put the tea kettle on and curled my aching limbs into the nest of my grandmother’s rocking chair to give rhythm to my wait, to grant my impatience the gift of slow-creaking nostalgia.
I knew better, but my stubborn nature demanded some ancient, cosmic remedy for my modern, mundane anguish. I wept. I wondered if the beat of my lonesome heart had fallen into my chair’s pulsing groan-and-squeak cadence. My inner poet mused about the true color of tenderness while my more embattled bits gnashed their teeth and sharpened a blade for every grudge I still kept. I spent an eternity here, rocking and sniveling and snarling, and I bemoaned all that had forsaken me, a winter witch left to her own devices on an ordinary afternoon.
Soon, the hour had me weary. The ghosts got thick, and my house went cold. I lit my oil lamp as a lament for a sign ungiven, for an oracle unseen. The grey of the clouds dimmed to amber milk, and the lone crow outside my window spat a juniper berry in my direction. My anxious heart slowed. My hands fell into a soft shape, and my heavy head lolled. Just before sleep took me, just before the darkest depths of my subconscious swaddled me in the warmest blanket, my rocking chair went still.
Between a dream and a waking vision, I was. My body bared to a storm of snow, I drifted toward a cottage of stone that I knew to be the mythic house of the mountain creature. Wolves howled and wind screamed, and I, a blue-skinned sculpture of ice and grief, floated above the unmarked crystalline earth. Ages passed while I journeyed this way toward the pine-and-clove scent of smoke, a frost-fleshed ornament of a fallen angel-hag, and I arrived at the door just in time, just before my eyes shattered into splintered shards.
The door whined open, and I was hit with a wall of warmth and spice. She was there, hunched over her brew and stirring with a diligence I have never known. Unbothered by my intrusion, the snow crone rattled with a low and knowing sound, a soft guttural grunt that belongs only in the vocabulary of an elder who has befriended her wounds, a gravelly purr that says I see you but best stay put.
My body and my hesitation thawed. Curiosity got the better of me, and I came so close to that wild one I could see the color of her brew.
I’d been too bold.
So sharply her chin lifted, and I leapt backward. That hag’s mouth opened so widely, as if her thin-fleshed jaw unhinged, and she let out a wail that changed me. Her eyes rolled back to white, and, I swear, her slight bird-like head swelled and she became more dragon than grandmother. The house quaked. I pressed my hands to my ears, but that beast’s screech was shaking the skin from my bones.
I dissolved into a puddle of bubbled blood and hair, my fat heart thumping at the center of the horror. I felt nothing and everything. I was nameless. I understood the wild ache, the primordial sound of birth. I might have lamented my arrogance, but I was beyond regret. I was a shapeless song. I was the rawest magick. I was the godless and the god, the dreamer and the dream.
I woke to the tea kettle screaming and the crow building a nest of treasures in my tree. He, a befeathered witness to my awakening, and I, a winter witch stunned toward initiation by a potent yuletide nap.