The tea-drinking man was breathing hard now. He looked at her like a crazy man, eyes wet. “What if they’d been left on their own?”
And then he went silent and watched.
The swamp witch took a breath, felt it hitch in her chest. Then she let it out again, in a low cough.
“You’re infectious,” she said.
“What?” said Linda from behind him.
“Infectious. The dream sickness,” she said. “You look at the past and start to think maybe that could be better than now. You can’t move, it’s so bad — can’t even think.”
The tea-drinking man shrugged. “I been around, madame.”
“Around,” said swamp witch. “Surely not around here. This place is mine. There’s no sickness, no dreaming sadness. These folks are happy as they are. So I’ll say it: you’re quarantined from this town.” She glanced back at Linda, who looked back at her miserably, awash in inconsolable regret.
“That’s how it is.”
Swamp witch glared once more at the tea-drinking man. The tea-drinking man smiled sadly.
“I am—”
“—sorry,” finished swamp witch. “I know.”
And then swamp witch raised up her arms, cast a wink up to her dragonfly, and set a hex upon the tea-drinking man. “Begone,” she said.
He stood up. Set his saucer and cup down. Looked a little sadder, if that were possible.
“I was just leaving.”
And with that, he stepped out the door, through the yard, over the road and into the mist of the swampland.
“Stay away from my hutch, mind you,” swamp witch hollered after his diminishing shade. “I mean it!” And she thought she saw him shrug a bit before the wisps of mist engulfed him and took him, poor dream-sick man that he was, away from the town that swamp witch loved so.
Swamp witch left shortly after that, and she didn’t feel bad about it neither. If she’d been a better person, maybe she’d have sat with the girl until she’d calmed down. Maybe cast another little hex to help her through it. But swamp witch couldn’t help thinking that one of the things poor old Linda was regretting was her own complicity in the bunch that’d driven swamp witch from her home those years ago and into the mud of the Okehole Wetlands for good.
Let her stew a bit, an unkind part of swamp witch thought as she left the girl alone in her kitchen.
And even if swamp witch wasn’t feeling mean, she felt she had an excuse: after having spent a moment with the tea-drinking man, swamp witch couldn’t be sure what regret was real and what was just symptomatic. So she called down dragonfly to her shoulder and headed off to town. That’s what Saturday was for, after all. It was very bad, worse than she’d thought. This tea-drinking man hadn’t, as swamp witch first assumed, just started his visit to town setting in Linda’s Poppa’s easy chair. That was probably his last stop on the way through, spreading his dreaming sickness all over the town. Wandering here or there, giving a little sneeze or a cough as he passed by a fellow fixing his garage door or another loading groceries into his truck, or worst of all, a woman by herself, smoking a cigarette and staring at a cloud overhead wondering where the years had gone. He would leave behind him a wake of furrowed brows and teary eyes and fresh fault lines in healed-up hearts.
And those were the ones he’d passed. The others — the ones he spent a moment with, said hello to or spoke of this or that—
— there would only be one word for those:
Inconsolable.
Swamp witch was set to figuring now that the tea-drinking man wasn’t just a carrier of the bug, like she’d first thought. He was guilty as sin. He was a caster.
And swamp witch was starting to think that he might not be alone. He might not, he might not…
She closed her eyes and took a breath.
When she opened her eyes, swamp witch headed across the downtown with more care. Her dragonfly hid in the curl of her hair and she kept underneath awnings and away from street lamps, and as she did, dragonfly asked her questions with the buzz of its wings.
—What does tomorrow bring? he asked.
Swamp witch opened her mouth to speak it: sorrow.
But she did not. She simply stopped.
—And the day after? wondered dragonfly.
—Who knows? whispered swamp witch. But she did know, and she stopped, in the crook of two sidewalk cracks. All she could see was her boy, whose name would be Horace, lying with the gossamer yellow of new beard on his face and his eyes glazed and silvered in the sheen of death. Her girl Ellen, old and bent, rattling in a hospital bed. These were not tomorrow — nor the day after either. But they were bad days ahead — days she’d rather not have happen.
—Dream sickness gotcha, said dragonfly. Only you regret what comes, not what’s been.
—You are wise, said swamp witch, her voice shaking. She tried to think of a hex to drive it off, but the ones she knew were all for others.
—Think backwards then, dragonfly suggested. Think of the time you were born.
Swamp witch tried but it was like trying to turn a boat in a fast-moving river. Always she was bent back to forward.
“Need help?”
Swamp witch looked up. There, standing in the middle of the road, his hands behind his back, was the yellow-jacketed tea-drinking man. He had a half-way grin on him that salesmen got when they wondered if maybe you were going to buy that car today all on your own, or maybe needed a little help. He unfolded his hands and started strolling up the way to see her.
“You were banished,” said swamp witch. “I said begone!”
“I went,” said the tea-drinking man. “Oh yes. I begoned all right. Right through the swamp. Steered clear of your home there too. Like you demanded.”
“Then why —?”
“Why’m I here?” He stepped up onto the curb. He shook his head. “Let me ask you a question.”
Swamp witch tried to move — to do something about this. She didn’t want him to ask her a question particularly: didn’t think it would go anywhere good.
“Just hypothetical,” he said.
Shut up, thought swamp witch, but her lips wouldn’t move, plastered shut as they were by contemporaneous regret.
“Oh what,” he said, “if the town were left on its own?”
“You asked me that earlier.”
“Well think about it then. What if you’d just left it. Left it to have a name and a place in the world. Left the folks to see the consequences of their activities. Vulnerable you say and maybe so. But better that than this amber bauble of a home you’ve crafted, hidden away from the world of witches and kept for yourself. Selfish, wicked swamp witch.”
“What—”
The tea-drinking man leaned close. He breathed a fog of lament her way.
“I didn’t care for it,” he said. “Tossin’ me out like that.”
Swamp witch swallowed hard. “I don’t,” she said, “feel bad about any of that.”
He smiled. “No?”
Swamp witch stood. “No.” She stepped over the crack. Away from the tea-drinking man. “No regrets.”
As she walked away, she heard him snicker, a sound like the shuffling of a dirty old poker deck.
“None,” she said.
Swamp witch lied, though. To hide it, she meandered across the parking lot of the five and dime, tears streaming down from her eyes, feeling like her middle’d been removed with the awful regret of it all but hiding it in the hunch of her shoulders.
It was low cowardice. For what business had it been of hers, to take the town and curl it in the protection of her arms like she was its Goddamned mother and not its shunned daughter?
She took a few more steps, over to the little berm at the parking lot’s edge. Then she walked no more — falling into the sweet grass and sucking its green, fresh smell.