Explanation might be necessary after my last post.

Celia worries.

(I call her Celia. Not her actual name. She did go through a Celia phase, before she settled on the name she uses now. No one remembers her original name, except me. I'm not allowed to speak it. If you know me, that might be a giveaway. You don't, though. Don't worry. No one knows me.)

She would be furious if she found this.

I can't say what happened to Celia, but I will say that there once was a little girl who loved the woods, and then she didn't.

Down by the creek bed, I found another circle, five feet across, in a flat hollow spot. Couldn't miss it. The snow is melting. The ground underneath is thick with mud. Whoever left the footprints pressed the snow down, staining it. 

Celia thinks I shouldn't go for these walks. She wants me to attend fitness classes at the Seniors Centre. I need to be out, in the fresh air, not splashing around in some pool, while a cute young thing urges me not to hurt myself.

Celia doesn't like me going down there. I think she's jealous of the woods. 

Celia took me to the doctor today. I don't understand why I needed to go. I really am fine. I walk every day. At least, I do when I'm not stuck in some waiting room.

I suspect Celia might be a hypochondriac.

The doctor asked me to draw a clock, of all things. I asked her if she needed to go back to kindergarten, if she couldn't remember what a clock looked like. No one else thought that was funny.

By the time we finished lunch, it was 2pm.

"I suppose you'll miss your walk today," Celia said. The nerve!  

Bit of a battle, getting out for my walk today. Celia showed up, right before I was ready to go. She knows I always go late morning. That's been my routine since she was a little girl. I used to carry her in a sling, until she was grown enough to keep up with me.

Today she argued, shouting about how risky it is, as if I would ever get lost in the woods! She used to love going there. When she was a baby, she would shriek and point at the bushes. That's right, I would tell her. Fairies!

A strange discovery in the woods today: footprints in the snow, tracing a circle about three feet in diameter. Not left by a child: the boots were large, the treads as thick as the ones on mine.

The snow still falls, and is deep, despite the fact that it is, technically, spring.

The footprints overlapped, tracing the same circle over and over, in a clear patch to the side of the trail. I admit I stood and stared at it for a long time.

Who would do that? Who would step in a circle like that?

I might never know. 

A to Z Theme Reveal

Hello! I'm Elizabeth, and I write fiction. There's a (mostly up to date) list of stuff I've written here, if you're interested.

I've done A to Z to varying levels of success in past years, but this year I decided I would actually, you know, use this space to bring my fiction to the foreground. So I've written a story, a complete arc that I'll tell throughout the month. For each day of the challenge, I'm going to release a new, very short, chapter. It's all first person, from the point of view of someone using this space to communicate to her online audience.

In other words, a different voice, with a different set of experiences, will be taking over this blog for the month of April. My plan is to answer all comments in that voice for the month, so...in a way this is hello? And goodbye. I hope you enjoy it! I can't wait to visit yours and see what you're doing.

Robert Eggers' The Witch

This isn't a review site, so I'm not going to, uh, review The Witch. I do want to talk about it from a craft perspective, however, because it was absolutely fricking stunning, and deserves all the support, and a bunch of awards. All the awards. 

I could talk about a great deal that I absolutely loved about this film. I think, as a (former) Renaissance scholar, I'm fairly obligated to like it? From the dialogue, which emulates Jacobean English in a very authentic sounding way, to the old school Renaissance witchery, it was so far up my street, it opened my front door, offered me a cup of warm goat's milk, and is now my roommate. I could say a lot about its incredible aesthetic and the familiarity of the woods where it was filmed and the way those woods are now super super creepy to me. Yay! I would also praise its lack of jump scares and the way the fears it evoked were so essential to the experience of being human, it barely required its supernatural elements.

But I want to talk about its characters, or rather, about how it drew those characters. 

It would be easy, in a film that featured a Puritan family cast out of its New England settlement (for being too Puritan? Not Puritan enough? the answer is unclear, and does not matter to the story), to fall back on lazy stereotypes. It would be easy, super easy, especially in the context of a film about women and their power (or lack thereof), to make the father a thundering, Bible-thumping patriarchal monster, and the son a little monster in training. It would be easy to make the teenage girl petulant and hungry for something different, and the mother a powerless wreck. 

The Witch never, never allows itself to be lazy. 

It never forgets that before whatever else they are, its characters are human beings with close, loving bonds to each other. It never forgets that above all else, these are people in trouble, caught in a terrible situation that might have, at one point, been of their own making, but has gone far, far beyond that, into something completely obscene.

Instead of a thundering, Bible-thumping monster dad, we have a man who is trying to hold his family together, trying and failing, disastrously so, to make their farm work. He's as scared as anyone else about what's happening, and it shows. The older son is as caring and earnest as any of the other characters, even as he's clearly conflicted about the white lies that circulate all around him, and his budding sexual interest in his older sister. The teenage daughter--and our point of view character--struggles for autonomy even as she plans to fight to stay with her family, and, eventually, struggles to be believed. Everyone in this film has multiple motivations running simultaneously, and, with each new development, as the trouble deepens, each one of them ticks over into a new mode of being, more desperate and frightened than they were before. 

Never--and if you know horror movies, you know how hard this is to pull off--never do they lose their humanity. Even when it might be better for them if they could. This film hurts as much as it frightens. That's saying something. 

I can't say enough about how wonderful The Witch is. As a study in finely drawn characters (the finest), it's worth having a look.