Witches Burn

“I think I see what you’re going for, but you’re a bit too shabby to be chic, darlin’.” Her mouth was covered in icy pink glimmer, her Southern drawl just noticeable enough to be adorable. If you didn’t know how much evil lurked beneath. Sarah Jane and her gaggle of sorority sisters turned on their heels and sashayed towards the union. Sure, a lot of them would be date raped and enter into soulless marriages, but at the end of the day, most of them were going to graduate with a diamond on the left hand guaranteeing financial security. Their certainty that this was the case lifted their chins with the posture of a superior being.

Meanwhile, Melody was stuck with her thrift store finds, pretending she preferred a more quirky look when the reality was that she couldn’t afford nice, new clothes. Her fists involuntarily clenched at her sides, nails digging small crescents into the palms of her hands until she felt wetness in addition to pain – the unfairness of it all, “it all” being her “life,” had drawn blood.

She wandered to the library – unlike Sarah Jane and her minions, she was likely going to have to forge her own way in the cold, unfair world, which meant that she should probably keep up her grades. Scholarships tended to care whether or not a student was passing her classes.

Melody stared at the same paragraph in the Malleus Maleficarum for about 20 minutes before she gave up. Why had she wanted to take a class on the Middle Ages, anyway? The people were ridiculous, the primary sources were dry when not poorly written, and what did a primarily uneducated populace who decided to make women their scapegoats for everything that went wrong in their shitty, short lives have to do with her future career? Was she going to bring it up in a job interview to show she was well-rounded? Was she going to draw parallels to the world around her that were pointless, anyway, because Americans will steadfastly ignore all proof that history is repeating itself?

She decided that she was too tired for studying to do much good, anyway, and began walking home. As she trudged in her thin sneakers, soaked through from the wet piles of dead leaves littering all sidewalks, she heard a false laugh, and the clomp of thick, designer leather boots coming towards her. She closed her eyes tight, hoping that would make her invisible – but, of course, it didn’t.

“Why hello, Mel-oh-dee,” Sarah Jane’s voice crooned. “Didn’t your momma ever tell you not to squinch your eyes like that? It’s gonna give you wrinkles. And we all know you can’t afford the Botox.”

With a sigh, she opened her eyes, and resumed walking.

If there was such a thing as karma, the wind would have picked up, blowing Sarah Jane’s skirt up towards her shoulders and revealing a pair of laughably large granny panties. Or she would have slipped on the wet leaves, falling on her face like an actress in an old comedy movie. But Melody was very aware that karma does not exist. So of course it was her own feet that betrayed her, slipping on a cracked sidewalk hidden by the plethora of fall foliage. Her hands and chin were scraped by the unforgiving asphalt, and she would find that the unfortuitous action had cracked her laptop screen.

Sarah Jane and her cronies cackled, and Melody understood how a group of people could be mad enough at certain women to use any excuse possible, according to the widely accepted belief system of the day, to burn the bitches to death. But even if Sarah and gang were witches, it would be as pale imitations of the devious women thought to have naked orgies with the devil beneath the moonlight. Just some candle-burning, and “blessed be” Wiccan bullshit. Nothing criminal enough that their daddies, real, sugar, or otherwise, couldn’t get them out of.

Still. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if she and her bitches were taken down a peg. Or twelve.

The annual Hallowe’en bash was full of drama, as usual. Sarah Jane caught her boyfriend Ethan in flagrante delicto with sorority sister Mary Sue, which should have been almost boring at this point, but still resulted in tears and racoon-eyes, because Sarah Jane had unwisely foregone her waterproof mascara. Tiffany was discovered passed out in the bathroom, and unceremoniously dumped off at the hospital because no one wanted a ticket for drunk driving. One of Ethan’s frat brothers tried to show-off for a comely partygoer, and accidentally set the living room curtains on fire; the comely partygoer made the situation worse by pouring alcohol on the curtains to try to put the fire out. And one of the attendees snuck into the coat closet and relieved everyone of the cash in their coat pockets, wallets, and purses, as well as several sorority sisters of their credit cards.

The next time that Melody encountered Sarah Jane, her toes were warm and snug in the pair of Sorel boots she had recently acquired. Her neck was covered with a warm Burberry scarf, which peeped out of her dark blue pea coat. Sarah Jane, complaining to her “friends” about yet another instance of cheating by her boyfriend which one of them would likely soon partake in as well, did not see her through her bitterness and watery, irritated eyes. She walked right past, not even purposefully “accidentally” bumping into Melody, who was pleased to not be seen. Melody continued to the library, where she purchased a large flavored latte that probably contained all the calories she would need that day, before heading up to her spot on the fifth floor. The fifth floor contained the Regency period books, both those published during that time as well as more recent historical analyses. Even the most steadfast Jane Austen fan had a difficult time caring about these books, and save for the occasional odd student bravely trying to perform research that he or she would soon give up on, Melody generally had the floor to herself.

Melody walked to the fourth study carrel off the entrance and to the left, pulling the door closed, and laying her books on the shelves thoughtfully provided just above the desk. She removed her laptop, and logged in on the unblemished screen of the MacBook pro Sarah Jane’s father had unwittingly purchased.

Life was not fair, and karma isn’t real, although the ridiculous fire incident on Halloween night came close to making her think otherwise. She had witnessed the false and drunken bravado from the fringes, dressed as a slutty beetle (the only costume at the 11th hour with a full-face mask) as she snuck into the coat room and obtained her own justice. Her rich peers were almost asking to be robbed, having a ridiculous amount of cash in an unsupervised room, so she didn’t feel very guilty about removing their readily-available, liquid resources. Nor did she feel very guilty about sneaking through the quilted beige handbag with Sarah Jane’s name stitched across the front. In fact, she was not even sure if Sarah Jane had realized her Visa had been removed; Melody was still using the card to purchase food and drink because it had yet to be canceled.

As Melody took a sip of her creamy, sweet drink, she thought to herself that the witches on campus may still be alive, but she had burnt them, whether they realized it or not, where it hurt the most.

Written in response to one of M’s October Writing Prompts.