Nightmare Fuel 2018, day the sixth

Today is an experiment in process rather than style; this was written over the course of 35 minutes and 42 seconds on an exercise bike at the gym on my phone. 

I'm not sure if that made it make less sense or more; it is a different experience, and a change in the level of focus.

Too Few for a Coven

Three is too few for a coven.

You all  knew that.

Oh, three would have been fine were they mother and maiden and crone, but Jane wasn't quite a maiden anymore, Becky not much closer. They took pains to avoid motherhood, and even their mothers weren't crones. Not by far.

Still, Mary and you and Becky were all that they had, here in the bedroom community where Becky and Mary's dad slept after a day's work and Jane's mother did what single suburban mothers did.

She survived.

You are too few for a coven,  but they needed to be something. The three amigos and three musketeers are all men and boys, and they'd had enough of men and boys.

Especially Jane.

So a coven you'd be. The White Pines Conclave, named for the coniferous wood and not the abandoned 1950s mental hospital alongside it. The people of White Pines had an unspoken deal with the restless dead of many decades ago - each side would pretend the other didn't exist.

It went well.

The world works by unspoken bargains of this sort. You don't talk about the creepy ruins. Don't ask your neighbor how he can afford a new BMW all of a sudden. Don't ask the woman across the street why she's wearing so much make-up in a Sunday morning.

You don't ask what happened at homecoming.

You know, but you don't ask.

Instead you take your two best friends and call yourself a coven even though you aren't. You gather twigs and feathers and pretty rocks with magic powerz, even though your family is lapsed Catholics except your grandmother who still kept trying to get you to say the rosary, until the day she died.

You still keep her beads in your purse because she'd have wanted it, though they mean nothing to you.

You all know the irony of Mary being named for the Virgin, but you make that joke. You did once, and knew it was a mistake. Now you think it sometimes when meet her eyes as you say the name, in your secret space where the hospital washroom was, by the ancient stone washbasin.

Sometimes in this space you finger your grandmother's beads, think of the other Mary, who was a whore.

Beloved by Jesus.

You think all these things as you three sit in the stone space, once the home of those suffering hysteria were once sequestered.

Maybe someday you'll sacrifice a goat or a squirrel or a young virgin boy, summon a demon to this place, raze the sleepy little town to the ground, like they deserve.

Maybe someday.

For now, you're too few for a coven, but you'll be one anyway.