The Witch

A Dispatch

As that familiar arid stench of burning flesh filled the air(a thief had been lynched recently; tyre-pyre), the motley congregation ofshop-attendants and busy bodies gathered round the concrete pylons. Thus, they gathered, they milled about an old woman, with flesh wounds on herlonghaired head and spindly arms. and who, surrounded by smouldering black feathers, was just coming to after having been knocked out...The woman in question, they said, had been on her way back homefrom a night of vigorous witching, flying in vulture form, when she failed to see the high-tension cable in time and as such had been caught foully.There was a brilliant spark, they said, and a loud crack which disoriented herand which attracted the first members of the crowd. They screamed fire,fire! in pre-emptive panic before they saw the figure on the ground, lying surprised. She, they surmised, had spun headfirst groundward and had been saved from splitting a quasi-avian skull on the street (the shock had quickened her transition back into human form) by a discarded tyre which had broken her fall. She promptly bounced off to lay now beside the gutter, which,thankfully for her, ran low and reeked but mildly. She had tried in vain to flap her wings and regain flight; but found them metamorphosed into leathery arms,thin and brittle like burnt twigs, one of which—the right—was broken. Her transformation was just freshly completed when the crowd dared draw near enough to identify her; none could claim that they had seen her shift shape to woman from vulture hen but such happenings were increasingly common in that locality, and besides someone needed to be blamed for the fuel scarcity and vagabond president (and other fly-by-nighters) and delinquency and typhoid and so on and so the people were quick to conclude from what they had seen and heard, and from the burnt feathers, that what they feared—that they were not ten feet away from where a vicious witch lay, the cause,surely of their miseries—was indeed the case. The jury, though, remains out; of course, I—and I am sure you will too—have my doubts.