Dulcie comes to her decision while shivering on her back stoop with a mug of undrinkable tea. The tea is the last straw. Everyone she knows speaks of tea as a powerful cure-all and even though she hadn't expected it to work, the bitter taste feels too much like a metaphor. And so she is done. She will become a witch.

Ever since the night she went home with a man who was always at the same parties, she had been feeling less than human, because that night he had decided she was. But it wasn't until she heard his name fall from her friend Cleo's lips that she decided less human should mean something, take a form.

She hadn't revealed what happened all at once, but as much as she could handle saying at a time, spitting out bits until the whole truth cracked from her mouth. Her friends had narrowed their eyes. Was she sure? Him? Really?

And then a few weeks later, Dulcie heard Cleo speak his name like it was a name and not full-on poison and their other friends responded like he was a person and not a criminal and she wondered if he'd been mean to her cat or had stolen twenty dollars from a wallet of hers, would it be the same. Maybe they would believe her if he was a stranger or if she was a stranger; maybe the very ness of Dulcie gave nuance to the word no.

For her, it's like, here's the math: when people who say believe women don't believe you, what are you? What's there?

*

She doesn't tell Cleo or their other friends that she is a witch. She doesn't need to hear another truth shrunk down into something more comfortable to swallow.

What she needs is a spell. She turns to Salem, to history, to internet message boards, to that one movie about teenage witches with spiky bobs and oil-slick lips that inspired her entire look in 1996 even though she was too young to actually see it. She turns to library books that smell like they know something, books she prefers to not crack after dark. She thinks: does this bode poorly for my powers. And also: fuck it.

*

Dulcie reads in the daylight. She drinks water and sometimes straight gin because that could be a potion, right? She brushes her hair once at night when it is wet and lets it curl wild as she sleeps. She collects a bundle of sticks just in case and some weeds from the patchy woods behind her house. After, a rash erupts across her wrist, and she cures it on her own with a poultice.

She contemplates getting a cat, wondering if she'd be less angry if there was someone to love her, but she realizes this is actually a terrible reason to enter into a relationship with a living being. Even when it's a cat. Even if cats are like a witch staple.

Some days she snaps a spiked leather choker around her neck and lets her lips shine dark like clotted blood. Other days, she is all velvet and lace, Stevie Nicks with a moldy library-bound tome of spells. She tests out the witches she has seen. She answers one out of every three text messages, maybe. She starts to think about what else she can leave to the human world.

*

And then Dulcie understands what a witch is: a woman who gives no fucks but hasn't given up.

An idea forms.

She invites Cleo and the rest over for dinner. No one can say no to dinner. They think she is fine, if a little quiet lately, so they say yes.

The spell is the making. It is fighting a mixture of flour and egg with a rolling pin until her arms have no fight left.

The spell is the pasta, cooked in the sweat-salt that soaks through her skin every night when she jolts awake from the nightmare.

The spell is the tomato sauce. It is opening her forearm and letting red meet red so that when they bring their forks to their mouths, they taste garlic and basil and wine and fear.

She sets the bowl at her dining-room table, can feel them watching her lips move as she heaps her creation and herself onto plates.

The spell is letting them eat their words.

The spell is believe me.

Amy Rossi has had stories in Barrelhouse, Synaesthesia Magazine, Hobart, matchbook and others. She's the Managing Editor at Split Lip.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Jasper Fields.

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