06/26/2025
Have you ever felt like your shadow knew secrets your heart had forgotten?
Once, in the folds of a fog-wrapped wood,
where the wind whispered things it shouldn’t have known,
there lived a witch with a cat made of soot and silver,
a creature born beneath a blood moon
and cradled in the roots of an old forgetting.
They did not speak in words, she and the cat.
They spoke in glances, in the prickle at the back of the neck,
in the silence before a storm.
He walked where she wouldn’t.
He remembered when she tried to forget.
The villagers called her cursed.
Said she brewed storms in her teacup
and stitched hexes into the hems of her skirts.
But truly, she brewed remembering.
She gathered broken things... old bones, wild herbs,
fragments of dreams snagged on brambles...
and with her cat beside her,
she wove them into something whole again.
Still, she was lonely.
Not for company... but for kinship.
For someone who knew the language of stillness,
the sacred weight of silence.
Someone who understood
why her eyes never blinked at the dark.
One dusk, beneath a crooked moon,
the cat vanished into the woods.
She waited. A day. A week. A season.
Grief ripened in her like blackberries...
bitter, thick, alive.
She searched, of course.
Lit candles. Drew circles. Sang the wind’s own lullabies.
Nothing.
But one night, as she sat before her hearth
with nothing but the crackle of memory for company,
the shadows danced differently.
Not darker. Not deeper...
But familiar.
And when she turned...
there he was, eyes full of stars and smoke.
He had grown. Changed.
Carried something back with him...
an echo, a knowing, a bit of her own soul
that she had unknowingly sent with him
to bury, or heal, or both.
She smiled. “I didn’t know I’d given you that.”
The cat blinked slowly, a yes wrapped in fur.
And from that night on, the witch remembered herself better.
And the cat, loyal as moonlight on still water,
watched over her dreams...
not to keep the nightmares out,
but to lead her gently through them.
Because some shadows aren’t curses.
Some shadows are guides.
And some witches aren’t lost...
They're just waiting for
the right ghost to come home.
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A tale by Zenaida Nina, known as Baba the Storytelling Witch.
Copyright© 2025. All rights reserved.
