Short Story: “The Thought of Vinegar”
The child went home each night to a house in the cold hills. There were unseasonable storms and winds in the late evenings, storms and winds on which a witch might fly through an upright window to speak to the little girl in benign but frightening tones. The girl’s uncertainty is an uncertainty that a witch might like to solve, in her necromantic way and for her own fey or devilish purposes. The girl might, then, worry a loose strand of yarn at one of the cuffs of her sweater as she speaks to the witch, telling the witch that in her dreams she has other and better unnatural or supernatural friends.
“My mom says I won’t be seven for much longer,” the girl says. “I just have to wait for a little bit.”
“And how long has it been ‘not much longer’ for, for your mother?” asks the witch. “You’re not tired of being seven until she sees fit otherwise? You don’t wish to start the passage of time yourself, for yourself?”
The questions feel like being poked by pencils, the way the boy who teases her does at school. “It should be any day now,” she insists, “that I’ll turn eight.”
“Who will turn you?” the witch demands. “Who can turn you eight? Who is it who could allow or disallow the passage of time?”
The girl fidgets some more with the dark brown strand of sweater-cuff. “It just happens,” she says, “I think, I guess.” The small piece of off-black chocolate in the witch’s beckoning hand frustrates both of them and looks frustrated itself. For the child it always feels apprehensive to think that her apprehension might vanish. The invitation here is honest and because of this the inviter, the witch, is, for her own part, humiliated and offended, in the power of this child as she might be in the power of that which laughs in the cold marcescent trees.
After an interval the girl says “The lorries will help me get there. To my birthday, I mean.”
Imperiously, the witch declares “How silly! A lorry is a truck, isn’t it?”
“My lorries aren’t. They’re elephants, on dirtbikes. They bike up the stairs and ask me about my day.” The girl smiles at the witch. She is no longer fiddling with her sweater. “They’ll help me with this.”
“Feh,” says the witch—then, realizing to her horror that she really is being sincere with this little girl, “It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?”
Tomorrow the girl will go and take a math test at school, a test for which she will, in fact, have studied. It will be her eighth birthday. She will try to imagine what the witch’s chocolate would have tasted like, but for some reason it will be the taste of vinegar that comes into her mouth instead.