Seashore Essays

I once had a housemate who believed she was a witch. She revealed her identity to me soon after we met, so firmly and seriously that I dared not contradict her. She was in touch with spirits, some of whom were her mentors, and she knew all about the other spirits who wandered around the city. She saw one of them in our house, in the middle of the night, when she was woken up by a girl pulling her duvet: not an evil ghost, the witch reassured me, but made a bit mischievous by her long love suffering.

The spirits needed to be thanked, or appeased: occasionally, when they did the witch a favour, and regularly, every night of full moon. To show her gratefulness, the witch used to buy a beautiful bunch of roses from the most expensive flower shop in our neighbourhood, and put them in a vase. But at nightfall, when they were still fresh, she cut their heads off, one by one, and boiled them in her cauldron, with other herbs. Then she poured the scented water all over her body in the bathtub. One for each night of full moon, all the beautiful roses would thus be sacrificed – their stems left looking out blind over the edge of the vase.

The day the witch had to leave the house forever, she again bought a bunch of roses, as beautiful as ever from the expensive shop. I asked her whether she would sacrifice them there and then, to protect her journey. Not this time, she said: they were a gift for us. They remained in the vase for many days after she left, they were the longest-living roses I had ever seen, and they were still alive more than a month later when she came back to visit. This magic took the witch by surprise: glancing at the roses, her eyes lit up with wonder – forgetting it was herself, who had enchanted them.