Member-only story
Some Witches Choose to Burn
And they laugh when the flames try to tame them.
Bella’s mother named her after a poisonous plant, and her life seemed to go downhill from there.
“Belladonna is a beautiful name,” her mother told her. “You should be proud to have it. Names are power.”
Back then, all Bella knew was that her mother had subjected her to a life of teasing and, when her schoolmates grew into more vicious versions of themselves, bullying outright.
It was a good thing Bella did everything she could to make the other girls believe she was a witch.
She used ballpoint pens to cover her hands in pentagrams and runes.
She carried around dusty old tomes written in other languages — easily disguised as spell books from an archaic era.
One time, she even pretended to have a fit in class as if she were possessed by a demon.
The girls left her alone after that incident.
It was a good thing they didn’t know what an actual demonic possession entailed. But mimicking a scene from The Exorcist proved to be enough to get the worst of the girls to forget her — or try to forget her — very quickly.
The boys were a different matter.
