I Once Was a Witch

For Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

The broad-shouldered kombucha brewer holds a brain in a jar. His raincoat is boring. There is no one else in the coatroom. Beyond the coatroom, the potluck is raging.  I hear a crack-crack-crack, the gluten-free table buckling under the weight of… what? I use my senses and clairvoyance. I listen.  I look through the wall.

“Beet wine. Lentil waffle batter. Cast iron of severed fiddle heads. Chicken feet. Groats.” I murmur this to the broad-shouldered kombucha-brewer.

Can he hear the magic in my voice? I have no vocal cords.  My larynx is strung with the lashes of my third eye.

The broad-shouldered kombucha-brewer sweats copiously, or his boring raincoat blew open as he biked into the wind, brain jar sideways in the saddle bag, monsoon slapping his T-shirt, on which someone has stenciled the Antikythera mechanism, white on navy blue. The future is analog. The zeitgeist is an algorithm. The sentient periscopic dildo fucks between planes.

The broad-shouldered kombucha brewer speaks: “I teach standardized test prep for Kaplan.” His beard oil is over-fragrant. He is young. He is balding with adorable precocity.

“I sort of think in aphorisms. No! Analogies,” says the broad-shouldered kombucha brewer. “That’s it.  X is to Y.”

To what or to whom is he comparing me? I corner the bed and move closer. I use my weird gaze. My right eye is perfect math, and my left eye is perfect verbal. I hold a hum in the lashes of my larynx. My teeth shine with cosmic light.

To whom? I think, and then I know. I see her, the girl he called Scary Sitter, the girl who came after dark, who tiptoed into his room and sat on his bed, black curtains of hair, lips numbed with clove, unmoving as she whispered.

I’ll let you feel something secret.

And she took his hand and brought it through a curtain of hair and around to the back of her head and rubbed it up and down the soft bristle of her undercut.

Furry bunny, fluffy bunny, sleepy bunny, secret bunny.

Little boy in the dark—a witch’s familiar is the back of her skull. A witch’s nape is a bunny, a cat, a ferret, a sow, a frog, a weasel, a wolf, a goat. Mine is two star-nosed moles, red as Mars, Shaula and Lesath, the Stinger of Scorpius.

For every boy who grows up to brew kombucha there is a Scary Sitter, a clove-smoking story hour sadist boy torturer bedside nightmare. Was her name Brenda? Was her name Crystal?

Beyond the coat room, the potluck calms.

The broad-shouldered kombucha brewer wants to get past me, to cross the threshold of the door after which, potluck, after which, people, after which, no witch.

No witch, he is thinking. No witch.

But I am taking the jar, unscrewing the lid, pressing my finger through the fluid. I stroke.

Every broad-shouldered kombucha brewer is a spiritual virgin. He adjusts his body like a fig leaf to cover the loins of his soul.

I roll him into a clove, into a dolma.

I ask, “Is that your mother’s brain in the jar?”

He can’t answer.

I feed him to the brain of his mother.

We lick our numb lips.

It’s a potluck.

No leaves hungry.

No one leaves.