Member-only story
Throw the Bones and Let Them Rattle
Beware the tale of a witch.
I stole my brother’s bones from his grave on the night of a full moon.
Though I would have been called a devil woman for it, I didn’t care. My brother deserved more than a wooden casket buried on hallowed ground. It would have made him sick to realize his wife had gotten him a plot among clerics and politicians. My brother had been a wild man, braver than any stallion, and a headstone with his Christian name might have tethered his soul to this cemetery, doomed to wander restlessly for a hundred years or more.
You never knew with witch blood how the soul would tangle and knot and then unspool. Our mother had paid the tithes to the forest gods to spare us from the fate of lesser men and women. It didn’t matter that she had been married to a pious farmer whose land had stood in the shadow of the local church. She had played her part after she felt the baby — me — kick within her belly for the first time.
Her blood tithe had its repercussions, of course — mainly that her lifeline had been cut in half. We lost her barely past my twelfth summer. I could still remember standing in this cemetery, holding my brother’s hand as we watched the dirt shoveled pile by pile onto her own coffin.
