Strega
by Pamela McCarthy
I didn’t know about the ways until my fourteenth birthday last summer, the day Nonna asked me why I was crying. Her face set sharp as a knife’s edge as I told her about Alex and his friends. After a silence swollen like a storm cloud she said, “I’m going to teach you how to do some things, my girl.”
I had told Papa before that. “I knew you resented him but I had no idea it was this much,” he said. Then he talked about getting me help because obviously, I needed it if I was going to tell such lies.
Papa and Julie don’t like Nonna. Papa calls her an old witch and Julie says she’s touched in the head. Papa married Julie when I was six. It had been ten months since my mother died. “You get a new mom and you get a brother,” Papa had said, as if it was a great treat.
I like Nonna. When Alex and his friends came home bored and had ideas about how they’d make sport of me, I could run to her house. It smells of herbs, baked bread, and spiced vinegar.
I made charms to protect myself, which was all fine and good, but then Alex and his friends got arrested for something they did to a girl we went to school with. Nothing came of it—the prosecutor decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. Meanwhile, the girl’s locker had the word SLUT scrawled on it, people messaged her and posted about her online, her voice inbox was full of jeers, and sometimes people threw trash in her front yard.
I asked Nonna about what she told me. “You said the liquor, the hair, and the prized object would do the trick,” I said. “Is there any way to reverse it?”
Nonna considered for a minute, cracking each bony knuckle. “Yes,” she said, “there is. You can take those same things and reverse the chant, and it will all go back to before.”
“The same things? Can it be different liquor or does it have to be the same liquor in the same bottle?”
Nonna confirmed: The same liquor in the same bottle, the same hair, the same prized object.
At home, I brought the jar and the bottle of Strega into the bathroom. I left his hair and XBox console on top of my bureau. Alex was running around on his tiny legs, antennae wiggling, his shiny black back spinning around and around at the bottom of the jar.
I made sure he was watching when I poured every drop down the drain, and smashed the bottle on the floor.
Pamela McCarthy's work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Lighthouse Weekly, and Drunk Monkeys. When she isn't writing, you will find her reading, buying seeds for her garden, or creating more garden space because she bought so many seeds. You can reach her at pmccarthy2007@gmail.com.