Edwina
felt the blood rush to her face. They felt sorry for her! Words
and symbols swam together on the cards. She steadied herself by
holding onto the table.
“Let’s give her power.” Lou said. “Let’s
make spell, hokay?”
“Okay,” Annalee said. “I’ll whistle.”
“I’ll use the satanic ritual for power,” Doramay
added.
Edwina sank down onto a chair, dropping the cards all over the
table. Fifteen years of study, of copying every curse and spell,
and she couldn’t come up with some little witchery on her
own. They thought she needed help. Well, she’ d see about
that!
Flies buzzed in her head as she fumbled around with the cards.
Words blurred and lifted from one card to another, until Edwina
finally came to the spell for making things disappear. She stared
at the words. “ I wish I could make Disney World disappear,”
she whispered. “Then they’d see I’m a witch.”
From the other room came whistling, and Doramay’s voice
repeated strange phrases. Was Lou beating a drum? The hollow sounds
shivered Edwina’ s bones, and the words on the card leapt
up at her. She mouthed them quietly, while the flies buzzed louder,
the whistling grew sweeter, and from within herself, Edwina felt
a dance of black shadows along the pathway to the magic in her
soul.
*
* *
The
silence awakened her. She was face down across the table, her
glasses crooked, the cards scattered to the floor. When she went
into the other room, everyone was gone. The only sign that anyone
had been there was a blue feather on the mantelpiece, and the
recliner had widened to accommodate a bigger person than Edwina.
She heard the news later on the television. The reports about
Disney World vanishing into thin air attributed its disappearance
to the sudden opening of the largest sinkhole in Florida’
s history. It went down without a trace, but all the tourists
and employees were saved. They followed a strange, barefoot creature
who led them away with her whistling, just before the Magic Kingdom
went under.
Edwina never saw the three witches again. She pushed her glasses
up on her nose, tore up all her recipes for magic, and began studying
card tricks.
**************
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