The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks

by Amanda Helms

The house wakes from its somnolence as the witch trudges up the path made of tarts. Through its rock-candy windows, the house scans her figure for any signs of hurt. The witch’s errands in the city make her nervous. And the house, being made of her magic and therefore of the witch, worries along with her that the wrong person might recognize her, or simply think they do. “They say Creoles all look alike,” she’s said, bitter.

It astounds the house, that the witch could be mistaken for any other but herself. That someone could fail to identify her tightly coiling black hair, her agate eyes, her russet skin as the witch’s, and the witch’s alone.

Her hair remains neatly tucked under her wrap. In a basket, balanced against her hip, she carries a basket full of linen bags. Flour and sugar. Though her steps are weary, she’s not limping. A successful outing, then.

Pleased she’s safe, the house opens its front door and rolls out a rug of pie pastry.

“Thank you, House,” the witch says, and walks in, letting the house close its door behind her.

Despite the muggy heat that makes the house’s pecan praline shingles stick together, the witch doesn’t roll up her sleeves till she’s set her basket on the single molasses-cake table. With a groan, she lifts her skirt to perch on a stool made of brioche. She pulls off her boots, wriggles her toes in their stockings, and frowns.

The house flares its brazier in question.

“Ran into someone I knew once, while I was in the city. Got a decision to make, now.” She grimaces. “I keep thinking we oughta leave New Orleans.” She doesn’t go into why, but from the witch’s dreams, the house already knows. She presses a hand flat to the brioche wall. “Hide for now, yes?”

It does. It’s made of sugar and magic, after all; and like sugar in a glass of water, it appears to dissolve into nothing, but it’s still there, just too fine to see.

When the house wakes next, the witch is on its roof, prizing off a pecan praline shingle. Once it’s loose, rum jelly oozes, filling in the naked spot. Though another praline will grow back by morning, the house rattles its tartelette shutters and puffs a clot of meringue from the chimney.

“Hush, now. I’ve decided.” The witch gives it a pat and plucks a few more pralines. “We’re gonna have some company.”

Displeased, the house blows out more meringue.

“Never you mind.”

The witch scurries down the brioche siding, then strides toward the swamp, where towering cypress trees grow, where sometimes the witch has to hiss the secret words to send away an alligator or cottonmouth. The only words she whispers now are those directing the river where to take the pralines and what they should say when they arrive.

The house watches anxiously as the witch returns. It knows she can take care of herself — she wouldn’t have been able to create it if she couldn’t — but she also created it to keep her safe.

And now, she’s inviting strangers to come.

It could rattle its praline shingles and let some fall on her head, but considering what she’s just taken, the house thinks that’d rather miss the point.

As she goes inside, the witch pulls calas from the doorframe. Petulant, the house tries to hold it fast, but more rum jelly strings out as it comes free.

Alternating nibbles and hums, the witch stokes the fire for the oven. “Gonna need something special for our guests. Molasses cake, maybe?”

Beignets fall from the ceiling.

“Stop, House,” the witch says, sharp. “I know you’d like to keep me all to yourself, but I’m needed.” Yet her lips pucker, like she’s tasted spoiled jelly.

It’s a bad night for the witch.

The house usually rests when the witch is away and when she sleeps. But now, it resists the pull of her slumber to keep vigil on her fitful dreams. The witch kicks off her blankets and cries out. The house struggles not to let the witch’s sleeping magic work its will. It fails. Sugarcane stalks erupt from the nougat floors.

In the morning, the witch wakes grim-faced, unshed tears pooling in her eyes. She hacks and yanks the stalks with such violence the rum jelly takes hours to stop flowing.

The guests arrive by raft three nights later, a shuttered lantern lighting their way. The witch stands in the doorway as they come: one man as old as the witch, wearing a straw hat, his skin a couple shades darker than hers, and a young woman carrying a sleeping child. To judge from the tendrils slipping free of her wrap, the woman has dark brown hair in curls looser than the witch’s. Her skin is of a similar tone to the witch’s, as is her child’s.

Eyeing the calas and the nougat and the brioche with trepidation, the woman heads into the house with her child. Intending to corner the strangers, the house expands its brioche walls as if they were dough left to overrise.

Subtle-like, the witch kicks the doorframe. Mind your manners. “If you’re hungry, help yourself. House doesn’t bite.”

For the first time, it wishes it had teeth.

The woman nibbles handfuls of nougat and brioche. Her eyes widen, and with a smile she jostles her child. Yawning and rubbing her eyes, the girl eats some solemnly.

Though the girl scoops up rum jelly to suck off her fingers, the house keeps its attention mainly upon the witch and the older man, who, curiously, opens his arms for an embrace.

More curiously, the witch accepts.

“Very kind of you to do this,” the man says. “It’s just a night, then I’ll take ’em to the next station, and they’ll switch conductors.” A pause. “Will I find you again?”

The witch pauses longer. “Still deciding. A body gets used to being safe.”

The man — conductor — keeps his expression shuttered. “Well, we ’preciate whatever help you give, even if this’s the last.”

The witch remains silent. The house can’t help itself; it sighs out a satisfactory meringue.

A cough. “But — meaning no disrespect, Agnes — why’s your house like this?” The conductor gestures to the nougat, the beignets, some petit fours arrayed on a tray. In irritation, the house lets its nougat around the conductor’s feet melt. Grimacing, he lifts his feet to a less-sticky spot. “You made it. Couldn’t it be . . . different?”

Affronted, the house allows a stale beignet to fall on the conductor’s head. They’re a little harder than the fresh ones.

The man lets out a quiet oof while the witch purses her lips. She does not apologize for the beignet. “True, House could be anything I got a mind to cook or bake. Then maybe the sugarcanes . . .” She exhales, cheeks puffing out like popovers. “It might go easier on me, if I’d made House of something else. Cornbread and gator fritters, maybe.”

Her back straightens, and though the conductor is more than a foot taller than the witch, he slouches back. “But then I think, No. They took my home and my family from me. Everything. But this food, I made it mine, like House is mine. Stayed mine even when they made me go cut cane instead of cooking.” She lifts her chin as remembered fury, and fear, shadow her dark eyes into black. “They don’t get to take it, too.”

She relaxes, and the power that’d been crackling under the surface, set to grow like air bubbles in yeasted dough, relaxes with her. “’Sides, ain’t no pralines like mine this side of the Mississippi, or on the other either. You gonna tell me different?”

With a flash of white teeth, the conductor tips his hat. “Tastiest message I ever got. So, no, ma’am. I sure ain’t.”

Yet for all her bravado, the witch’s conversation with the conductor must’ve shaken her. For it’s another sugarcane night.

The witch thrashes alone on her nougat bed while the stalks rise around her, forming a cage. The house thrashes with her, best it can. Nougat goes runny and beignets fall from the ceiling in a shower the house hopes will knock down the stalks. It’s forced to stop for fear of burying the witch.

The conductor scrambles up from the corner near the stove, where he’d been sleeping. “Agnes!” Trampling beignets underfoot, he shoves through the sugarcane, and does what the house could never do: he wakes the witch.

She’s weeping, and where her tears hit the nougat, they pearl into caramel. The man waves at the young woman and child, peering down from the loft where they slept. “I got this.”

He helps the witch out of the sugarcane cage, and together they remove the stalks. “I still dream about it too, sometimes,” he says when they’ve finished. “Habitation Haydel.”

The witch says nothing, but she squeezes his hand.

Soon as nightfall comes again, the conductor and his passengers are on their way. The witch watches the swamp long after the light of their shuttered lantern fades from view.

The house considers.

It shimmies from its tartelette shutters, to its brioche siding, and finally to its roof.

The witch catches the praline in midair. “You know, I was thinking the same thing.”

The broadness of her smile makes the house’s fire blaze.

“Little company might be nice.”

To Pluck a Twisted String

by Anne Leonard

This is a truth: it is the hardest thing in the world to see your child suffer.

And this is another: anyone can learn magic, but in the hands of an artist it can destroy.

When my boy was sixteen, he went to the Glass City to study painting with a master. He took nothing but his clothes, his paints and brushes and pencils, and his guitar. We had bought the guitar for him years ago, because his fingers needed something to do when he was not painting. Music helps me see my art, he said. He submitted to my hug, kissed me on the cheek, shook his father’s hand, and left.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the odor of paint and linseed oil faded from the house.

A year later he was back, skinny, unhappy, and murderously angry, silent about what had gone wrong. Failure, but it could have been failure in love, in painting, in his master. He put away his pencils, returned to helping my husband in the mill, and spent his evenings strumming moodily on the guitar. He had painted it blue. When I asked him why, he said, I like blue. His voice was adult with bitterness.

Bit by bit he rejoined us, offering to help with dinner, collecting the chicken eggs, sitting and talking. Some of the tightness in me began to unwind. He was healing. I stood beside him one afternoon, looking down at the millstream, watching the frothing water settle and still. He said he would like to sketch it, and I thought, I have my son back.

And then . . .

And then . . .

The sorcerers from the Glass City came. They took my son away, their spells of restraint sparking silver around him. They would not tell us what he was accused of.

Before they left with him, they brought out his guitar and smashed it methodically to pieces. The strings jangled and snapped. Blue-painted wood lay scattered over the ground.

When they were gone, my husband stomped and thumped things. I gathered up the pieces of the guitar.

With care, over many nights, using my son’s discarded brushes, I glued the fragments and splinters back together as best I could. When I was done, the guitar had its form, but the once-smooth sides were ragged with holes and seams. The curves were warped, the neck bent. I reattached the strings, though they were curled and twisted.

The guitar would never make music again, but the sorcerers had not smashed it out of spite. It threatened them, and I meant to find out why.

The sky was overcast on the day I arrived at the Glass City. Glass was everywhere, in arches and bridges and roof tiles. Some clear, some colored, some opaque with glorious pigments. Sorcery made it nearly weightless and unbreakable. Under the grey clouds everything was muted, catching the drab shades of the cobbles and the granite foundations of the buildings. Even so, in its curves and swoops and columns that held a thousand reflections, it was beautiful. I understood why artists clustered here.

At the prison, they told me I could not see him. They still would not tell me what he had done, or how long he was to be held. The prison was a harsh, strong, windowless building, square and blocky, made of a stone that seemed to swallow light. It menaced me, and among the bright clarity of glass I had no place to hide.

My son’s master turned me away without answer or reason. So did his friends. The woman who ran the boardinghouse where he had lived pretended not to remember him. They were afraid.

I went deeper into the city, following even the scantest of clues. As I did, I saw that the glass was dangerous. The columns were sharp-edged translucent spirals that could cut hands, and the lace-like eaves were blotched here and there with the old blood of birds. In stores I saw pair after pair of leather gloves, open-backed and decorated, palms padded.

My son knew the stone and timber of the mill, the powdered texture of flour, the deep brown-green shade of the millstream under overhanging trees. Had the city been too bright, too sharp, for him? In this city, beauty wounded.

With persistence, a sufficient number of questions, and some luck, I found a man who had been my son’s friend. He was wary and alert and would not let me into his studio. We talked on a balcony. A thick overhang of vines with magenta flowers screened us from the blaze of sun on glass.

“Why did they arrest my son?” I asked.

The man was quiet for a long time. He said at last, “His paintings were too good. He painted reflections and mirrors and simulacra. Looking at his work, you never knew what was real, not even yourself. It made the city itself seem a reflection. The master dismissed him, and no one else would take him on.”

“But that is not a crime.”

He glanced at the vines. I understood abruptly that they were a shield against watching eyes.

“People said he used magic, that his paintings were spells. He didn’t; he would have considered that cheating even if it had been possible. But after he was dismissed, he did learn sorcery somehow, which is illegal. He used his guitar to break the unbreakable glass. I watched him strum a chord and shatter a column. No one else could do it. I told him to go home, for his own safety. I’m sorry he was found.”

I shivered. It seemed impossible, my boy doing magic. Why had he not come home when he was first dismissed? Was he too ashamed? Afraid of what his father and I would have said to him?

When he was small, his father and I marveled every day that we had made a person. Unique and alive and utterly himself. But as people grow, they become less transparent. They fill with shadows and mystery. Sixteen is young enough to make bad choices and old enough to hide them.

“What happened to his paintings?”

“A few sold. He cut the others to shreds. Wait a moment.” He went inside and came back out, holding a small, framed canvas.

A woman by an open window, a songbird on her open palm. Her skin had the gleam of glass, and the bird had the sheen of metal. The longer I stared, the more unsettling and disturbing it became. My own face was dimly reflected in the bird’s wing, but I could not tell if he had painted it there or if it was an actual reflection.

He must have felt so lost, to paint a thing like this. Uncertain and troubled and afraid.

I had only one more question: “Why did he paint his guitar blue?”

“He said blue was the color of glass with all the light drained out. I know, it makes no sense.”

Glass with all the light drained out. Dead, empty, brittle. Did he break the glass because the alternative was to break himself?

I returned to the prison and from outside it, thought my love at my son as hard as I could. I tried to imagine what color the black stone would be with all the captured light drained out.

Then I went home. My husband and I both wept a little, aching and helpless.

That evening I studied the guitar. The blue paint was like the night. I plucked a twisted string. The discordant note hung in the air. In the kitchen, something cracked.

This too is a truth: love is a kind of art.

Stone was brown and green and grey, the color of the shaded millstream, of mud and leaves, of bark. I would paint the guitar, then play and practice until I found the chords that crumbled stone.

Host Commentary

And welcome back. That was The House, The Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks by Amanda Helms, and if you liked that, her work was part of another double feature on Episode 566, with the hilarious and brutally incisive “Starr Striker Should Remain Capitol City’s Resident Superhero, by Keisha Cole, 10th Grade Student,” and has appeared fairly frequently on Cast of Wonders, with Episodes 226: Wished, 241: Mr. Quacky in Space, 335: Skinned, 354: Wordslinger, Wordwreaker; and on a Cast of Wonders Father’s Day double feature in episode 419, with the heart-wrenching The Last PoMatic. And of course you can keep up with her body of work at amandahelms.com.

Amanda had this to say about The House, The Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks:

This story originated from a … flash-fiction writing prompt, plus my personal inclination to write a story about a witch (I like to mash prompts and ideas together). The prompt was to hit Wikipedia’s “random article” link I think up to five times. I happened upon a Wikipedia article for “Sugar Creek.” The name alone made me think of Hansel and Gretel and the witch’s candy house. I knew I didn’t want to do a straight retelling, so I began playing around with what other types of candy houses there might be, and who might be considered a witch and why. I also see the story as an expression of my biracial background–some of my ancestors were brought to my country against their will, and in their enslavement were subjugated into accepting traditions outside of their own. Others were likely the enslavers and subjugators of culture. I’m often left feeling that the stories I grew up with, which were vastly western and European, are ones I know only because generations of my Black ancestors absorbed them to the detriment and exclusion of their own stories and histories. But to paraphrase my witch, “These stories, I made them mine.”

Thank you, Amanda, for the story and the thoughts.

…And welcome back. That was To Pluck a Twisted String, by Anne Leonard, and while this is her first publication by Escape Artists, it is far from her first publication, so if you enjoyed that, you can find more on AnneLeonardBooks.com.

Anne had this to say about To Pluck a Twisted String:

This story was inspired by photos of a blue guitar hanging in a store window and flowering vines. Somehow my brain just put those together and this was what came out.

Thank you, Anne, for the story and the thoughts.

At the heart of each of this week’s settings is a tyrannical power structure that holds people captive, that restrains them, forces them into one box or out of another.

The witch’s trauma from it runs deep, prompting her to realize that her own precarious freedom is not worth much when others still suffer as she did. Her tale very tastefully relies on the readers’ at at least superficial knowledge of the history of enslavement in the Americas, but the establishment of the setting manages to be at once constant and powerfully understated.

The young painter was only exercising his skills when the people around him, fearing for their own hides, ostracize him, creating in him the very threat that they and their overlords feared, and when the sorcerers act against him to maintain their monopoly on magic, create that threat twofold in the heart and hands of the boy’s mother.

To be sure, are these threats?

Both these tales remind that there are a lot more ways to act out against an unfair power structure than to fly a fighter for the rebel alliance. Creative acts—the forging of words, images, music, clothing, and yes, even culinary delights can be acts of subversion. And both tales also feature acts of love and compassion that highlight the beauty of connection between people while simultaneously gnawing at the base of fascism. These acts can communicate to others that abuse by the powerful is not to be tolerated, and, just as importantly, can communicate that same message to ourselves. Right now, I know I need to hear it.

Before we conclude this week, we have some exciting and important news to share about the future of Escape Artists. The headline is that October 1st, we’ll be introducing brief, tasteful advertisements at the beginning and end of each of our episodes, with an ad-free feed available on our Patreon. This was not something we had previously considered feasible, but our recent audience survey showed 69% of respondents considered ads a “necessary evil,” while 30% didn’t mind them at all, especially when there was an ad-free option available, showing your overwhelming support for funding episodes into the future.

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