"My mother sent me a whore hat for Halloween," my friend Brigit said.  "You know, a sheer black witch hat with sequins and a fur trim."  Bridget got the harlot hat for the holiday.  I don’t need the hat.  Nope.  Not the harlot, the witch hat.  I know I’ve said this before, quite recently actually, but I feel like the witch.  I want to borrow her witch hat, so long as no one makes me carry a broom or talk about warts.  I have thoughts lately of wanting to cook people in a cauldron.  Ooooh.  The black cauldron.  I want to rent Halloween cartoons.  The music in Halloween the movie scares me more than the word "growth."  I’ve been scary lately, having mean angry thoughts because… I’m angry.  I want to scream and cry and hell, but I feel like I have to be well-behaved.  To play nice.  I don’t feel like it.  I’m upset and hurt and angry.  And I know why but I can’t say it.  I have to just live with it, swallowing poison medicinally.  This can’t be good for my health.  Soon my feet will shrivel up beneath a house. Or my heart will.

From Two Years Ago…
Witches always had a mean black cat that hissed and was too skinny. A cackle. A dark cloak and a straw broom. A pointed hat with a wide brim, a crooked hook nose, and of course a fat wart with long hairs growing out of it. That’s what witches were when I was small… creatures that with their green tinted skin appeared on All Hallow’s Eve, in movies, cartoons, and bedtime stories. Now, they appear to us in our everyday lives, waiting for the bus, sitting beside us in a movie theatre, even in the hospital waiting room. The woman at the bank, in a rush, sighing and squinting behind me on line, tapping her foot as I rummage through my handbag for a pen to sign the withdrawal slip. The mother at the diner, who ground out her cigarette on her teenage daughter’s plate and told her she has, “eaten enough, just look at your thighs spreading as you eat.” We all from time to time posses a bit of witch in us, but thankfully, when we were young we learned of good witches, too. The idea that when everything around us seemed cold and gray, and that when even our favorite blankets weren’t big enough to keep us safe, there was always someone, something, looking after us. It works both ways.