The School for Witches (with a nod to D.T.)

THE SCHOOL FOR WITCHES (part one)

THE SCHOOL FOR WITCHES
(with a nod to D.T.)

It was held, improbably but how else in this 21st century, in a room at the top of an old building at the community college. A proposition, a discreet suggestion that an institution in their position could not be seen to be privileging one religion over another, a tacit nondiscussion of academic credentials, above all an additional source of revenue in these even for the state-employed desperate times from an unloved room in an underutilized building in an empty time slot; and in fullness of time it appeared in the semester brochure as Wicca Somenumberorother. A course? Of course, a course, high Mingdom for a course, and no one can curse at a course, you horse. A measure of Progress (questionmark not allowed): instant social accreditation where a previous age would have reached for the Maleus Maleficarum.

The instigator of the project and teacher thereof was a heavyset woman in her mid-forties, strawberry blonde with shoulderlength curls and smooth plump fingers that might perhaps have been considered sexy in a twentyyearold. She spent her days behind a sign reading Psychic Reader and Advisor. Now she looked out over her class in the witching hour of the evening, an unlikely combination of NWO Lumpenproletarierin couch potato and a surprisingly effective attempt by Don Juan Matus to impersonate a female.

Her face wrinkled in distaste, for there, sitting in the back row in her assembly, specifically held to twelve to make with her the thirteen of the coven, were two males. She had protested, she had fumed, she had even muttered an incantation or two when backs were turned, but the nonprivileging arguments that had gotten her the room in the first place had made refusal impossible.

The two saw it, but interpreted it as a mystic-warrior challenge. They stroked their Hot Topic corporate-image-of-halloween-evil clothing. Bring it on, dude! They were one part biker-graphics demonology, one part heavy metal wizard wannabe, one part almost normal youthful lust to score some occult pussy.

In this last they were bound to be disappointed. The female portion of the class was roughly evenly divided between Sapphics, earnest naïves from the Isles of the Ugly, and pc suppressed-anger bots, colder than Nancy Pelosi's tit, Chiang Ching with liquid nitrogen coursing her veins. There was of course some overlap.

We are not here to deal with books, but Practicum, said Beetlegrub, and twelve heads came up, twentyfour eyes focused, onehundredtwenty fingers ceased their idle movements.

****

But how, a voice from fifty years ago might ask, did such a melange of superstition and prerationality enter the halls of Academe, or even community-college Academe Lite? By a gradual and organic process, to be sure, your Narrator would reply, but not one analogizable to photosynthetic plants. Think mushroom. For a mushroom needs little to grow but a reasonably dry surface and moist rottenness beneath.

Once, long ago, when Doesnotcurandera had a name which named her innerly instead of being mere shorthand for a Number on external documents, when her younggirlness still took her external appetites and burned them up within a thin body, there was a priest. Fingers where they should not be and a rod which was more worshipful to him than the dead wood around his neck, and yet there had been no dark annihilating transcendence and afterwards no strong conqueror's joy in having possessed, but only craven injunctions to keep silence, as if a young striver in the forbidden and grasper for the status of womanhood would ever willingly reveal such to anyone. But it had come out anyway, somehow, and the priest had gotten in a great deal of trouble and been sent away. Unfair, she knew, for she was the one who had wanted and initiated and done such as to make refusal impossible, but he was guilty of cowardice and of poor performance, for even at twelve she knew that there must be far more: so she stayed silent as she had been bid, with full adult realization of the irony.