Witch Tongue
The witch tells Sarah about fruit. How apples stewed with cinnamon create heat. “Heat like temperature? Or anger?” Sarah asks. The witch winks at her. Apples are 100 calories each and cinnamon negligible, Sarah thinks. How three raisins soaked in water can douse a fire in the belly. Sarah blushes with pleasure; how delicious to be trusted with the secrets of witchery. Sarah accepts the glass of wine (105 calories), and they talk of other fruit. The witch’s eyes are green, and she crosses and uncrosses her legs. She shows Sarah a spell of sugar (50 per tablespoon) and salt (0).
Sarah invites the witch to dinner. They open a bottle of wine, Sarah makes zucchini pasta (300 calories per serving), and they discuss demon familiars. The witch doesn’t have one. Sarah washes the dishes and the witch dries them. “I watch girls,” Sarah says. “Videos of them. Not like that, just TikToks,” she clarifies. Her words stick together and she can’t pull them apart. “The girls wake up with the sun and do yoga. The girls wear matching workout sets - pink and ivory. The girls wear white shoes and bounce on the tips of their toes when they walk. The girls drink from glass bottles with golden lids. The girls massage jade into their glowing faces. The girls’ faces are peach, bronze, and caramel. The girls’ legs are smooth. The girls have blue couches and orange couches. The girls cover their beds with pink bedspreads and ivory sheets. The girls' houses have flowers in bowls and vases. The girls make salads in wooden bowls. The girls drink green smoothies.”
The witch touches Sarah’s hand, dipping her own hand into the washing water. Sarah cry-laughs, the pressure inside her releases a little, and she can feel warm wetness between her legs. The witch licks her lips, smearing wine all over her chin.
The next morning, Sarah finds a box on her doorstep. Inside, a glass bottle with a golden lid waits for her. There’s a note, “If you’ve ever read a fairytale, you know magic has its price.” Sarah drinks the witch’s brew. As it slips down her throat, the air tightens around Sarah. It feels like being swaddled. Or wound in a shroud. The spell quickens. When the magic clings to her so tightly it could be Spanx, a crawling begins in her throat. The world loosens around her body and Sarah gasps for breath. Her throat itches. Clearing it doesn’t help.
Sarah washes and dries the glass bottle, does the laundry, and vacuums the kitchen floor. Then she’s ready to watch. The girls are willows, slender and tall. The girls are swans, graceful and delicate. The girls are ballerinas, air and light. A few hours into watching her girls, Sarah feels the hunger. It builds in her belly, and as she keeps watching it claws into her thorax, cramps into her ribcage. It is the pain of the void, and demands to be filled. Sarah runs her fingers over the swell of her hips, the bulge of her belly, she flops her upper arms and jiggles her thighs. She squeezes, her nails dig red crescents into the skin. The hunger does not relent, it pushes and thumps against the inside of her stomach. Her throat hurts. She opens her mouth, intending to clear her throat, but a green tentacle shoots out. Sarah knows she should be horrified, she should scream. She tries to retract the tentacle, with the same motion she uses to pull her tongue back after the doctor’s examined her throat. It works. Sarah pokes her tentacle out and tastes the thing closest to her: the phone screen.
A star blazes in her mouth.
Sarah devours their smiles, carving the joy out of their faces. She gorges herself on their glossy skin. She licks and then rips into their bronzed legs, with white running shoes still on their feet. She slurps up their caramel waists. The thing in her throat squirms in joy. It spawns itself, cells dividing, growing, burgeoning. Soon Sarah has three tentacle tongues, then four. As Sarah eats, she grows. Her belly swells, pouring out of her clothes, shredding them. Her arms burgeon, growing into young tree trunks. Her thighs are marble columns, she could straddle the world. She drips fecundity: water and womb blood flow down her legs. She smells of the wet earth, of iron and sweet rot.
When the witch finds her, Sarah has grown so large her head skims the ceiling. The witch lets herself into Sarah’s apartments and laughs. Her green eyes darken. The witch’s desire sends a shiver through Sarah. The witch walks to Sarah the tentacled, Sarah the rotting, Sarah the infinite. Sarah’s tongues wrap around the witch and the witch shudders in delight. The witch’s skin tastes sour and salty, and sweet, as Sarah imagines the red fruit of the sun might taste. The girls cannot compare. They were bits of cardboard to the succulent juice of the witch. What she thought was a star had been a bubble of cheap champagne. The witch sparkles on Sarah’s tongues, tart, cold, sweet, sharp. Sarah devours the witch, licking her down, skin then fat, muscle and sinew, and finally bone. And still the witch’s eyes gleam with mirth. Still she loosens herself to Sarah’s tongues, relaxes her head backward into their coils.
And Sarah learns, when she has wholly chewed and licked and swallowed the witch, that witches cannot be eaten.
Rukma Sen is a writer and fable-gatherer based in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in The Writer’s Ruckus reading series and is upcoming in Hunger Mountain Review. Her work explores bodies, technology, motherhood and monsters. When not reading or writing, she markets technology, cooks, and hikes with her family.