La Sorcière

There were stars in the sky and in the lake and great, jagged chunks of the whole mess had been hacked out leaving nothing but blackness. Those were the mountains, and we could feel there shapes from here. From where we were lying in the grass by the edge of the water beneath the tree whose shadow had been gradually swallowed by the night.

We were barely seventeen and it was neat, it was fun, it was different to be in the park at four in the morning, just the two of us and a whole mob of the kind of boys we found interesting. Emma had a talent for summoning them – these kinds of boys – "stoner boys", "dirt-bag boys", "poetic artistic intelligent and brooding boys". She had discovered this superpower at the start of the summer, when there were plenty of them hanging around for the music festivals anyways; the two of us would go and sit by the lake and she would take out her guitar, and they would come flocking, with their long hair and their tobacco and their inflated opinions on subjects they knew next to nothing about.

Mostly they were interested in her, but that was okay. Sometimes they were interested in me, and that was okay, too.

Tonight I was quiet. I wasn't drunk enough to be confident, but I was being pleasantly shy and happily silent.

"So where are you from?" One of them asked me, "You're not Swiss." He was lovely to look at, with dark eyes and dark hair, so I didn't mind that he probably hadn't washed all week.

"I don’t know," I said, and I rolled onto my back so that I could see the stars through the leaves above me, as well as his slight double chin, "Nowhere. I'm not from here. I guess my parents are from America, but I'm not. I'm not from Brazil either, or from Lithuania or from Pakistan."

"Well, where, then?" Another asked. They were listening now.

"Not Portugal."

"Hey, fuck you, I'm from Portugal. What the fuck is wrong with Portugal?"

"Nothing's wrong with Portugal, I'm just not from there."

"We're nowhere man from nowhere land," Emma's voice chimed in from above me. The boy next to her, this evening's chosen one with the bright green eyes and the chipped front tooth had an arm placed carefully, nervously around her shoulders. She was further gone than me, sitting cross-legged, tearing up handfuls of grass and throwing them into a growing heap in front of her.

"Stop that," the curly one grabbed her hands.

"Why?" She laughed, "I'm not hurting anything. I'm just cutting the grass. It's not hurting it. It's like hair. The hair of the earth."

A pause, followed by a burst of laughter that I thought far exceeded the comment. But they were high as kites, stoned as could be and they thought it was brilliant and clever and hilarious. Just giving the earth a trim? A close shave? Maybe wax its legs?

I stopped listening. It, all of it, everything, all seemed so trivial and empty, from the sky to the spaces between the mountains to the spaces between the people. It didn't even matter, really, that I couldn't answer a question as simple as where are you from.

What was bothering me was the girl, leaning against the other side of the tree we were under, muttering to herself. She'd been hanging around us all night, slurring her words, eyes brimming as though she were going to burst into tears at any moment; she would come and grab one of them from behind, be shoved away, and would wander off across the park, talking to the air, stumbling into trees, before spinning around and stumbling back to us. They called her the witch, la sorcière. She was maybe in her early twenties, short and squat with glistening dark skin that was stretched over a face that looked too large for it to contain. They knew her only from her constant presence in this park at this time of day, they said, and they treated her like a stray dog. She was a stray dog, very nearly. Any time she did anything they all turned to us and said "See? See why we call her the witch?" Emma nodded and smiled politely and said that yes, yes she did see, and I said I did too but I didn't.

If she were a witch, most likely she would not be hanging around a park at four in the morning hoping to get a joint or a sip of beer off of a group of strangers. She certainly wouldn't be crouched pissing in the gutter to a chorus of howls and whoops and vomiting noises. If she were a witch she could make herself disappear or maybe give herself some sort of meaning. I thought that I should have been kind to her. I should have asked her her name. I nearly did, but her popping, blood-shot eyes rolled over me and she grabbed my shoulder so suddenly that I found myself recoiling in disgust while one of them pulled her off of me and kept saying "See why she's a witch? Do you see?" And I said yes, yes I do see, and I hated myself a little bit for it because I didn't see at all.