The Village Witch

4 August, 2025

I normally do not waste ink or paper by dating these pages. But it seemed important to make note of it now.

With that date, I commence my scribbling in the last of the beloved notebooks. Whilst my fellow squatters were looting stores for food and clothing, money and other transitory items, I found my petty larceny peculiarly focused on other things. Once the Sickness was gone, when the newspapers no longer came, and the Internet no longer whispered across the magical phone lines, when the governments themselves seemed to be mere figments of our disease-muddled memories, that's when things got really out of hand. In my dazed state, I stumbled to the library, pulling book after book into my satchel, including these twenty notebooks.

I must have been daft. Survival was what I should have I thought about. While the others killed over stale bread from the battered remains of the local discount grocer, I hoarded books on desert survival, native plants and herbs.

And my notebooks.

What was I thinking? I ask you, the invisible person at the other end of this page. What was I thinking? Food. Water. Shelter. Protection, from sun and beast and Muggle. These are the things a desperate woman seeks in times of chaos, not pages and pages of emptiness upon which she will eventually pour her feeble and forgotten thoughts to an unknown reader.

Perhaps I knew, even then, amidst the fear and confusion and horrible longing for home and kin, how lonely this place would become for a woman such as me. The drain of magic from my body had been painful, traumatic, a soul-wrenching experience. I reacted in the only way I could. By falling on what I knew. Study. Books. Experience. Food goes away. Knowledge lasts. And now, my library is such that I can cure almost any poison from the desert. I can spin as my grandmothers did in the thousand years before the thousand years our history knows. I can grow and prepare food, by hand, without the slightest magic outside that of mind and body.

Several hungry years passed, dear reader, after that first initial shock. For much of it, I was too tired and weak to care. As you may know, the first volumes deal with the history of magic as I know it, the tools and spells and potions remembered to the best of my ability. It felt crucial to me that these things be retained.

But now, as life grows slightly easier, I find I'm reflecting more on what was, as opposed to what shall be. The children seem to grow younger as I grow older. My memories of home grow dimmer.

I can't even remember what we fought about. Even as I write that, I wonder to which fight I am referring. The fight which started the wars? Or the fight between Hooch and me, the last moments spent with my dearest one before flight to America?

It aches in me still, but the ache has grown familiar and almost comfortable in its familiarity. I can still feel her near. See her face as she zooms up to the sky. Is it the girl I knew, spiraling madly upwards towards that golden snitch? Or is it the woman she became, guiding and teaching and inspiring generations of students to do the same?

My heart stops when I think of our last day together. She didn't want me to spend the last of my vacation in America with Billie. I accused her of being jealous of Billie. Stupid, really. I was torn. I loved them both, each in their own way. Billie, my dearest boy, and Hooch, the love of my life.

I lost them both when the Sickness came. The pain of Billie's death was quick and fierce. But the pain of not knowing what became of Deanna Hooch is a growing tumor in my soul. It consumed me, driving me to find and seek and rage in those first months. I wanted to get home, and I was by the gods going to return home. I shudder with shame at how little of that rage was inspired by concern over my sisters and their guppies. I cringe when I recall now that my students, for the most part, barely registered in my concern.

I had to see her. I needed to see her.

But how could I? Without magic, I was confined to Muggle transportation. Which car would I use? Where would I procure gasoline? What plane or boat still existed which could cross the sea which separated America from Europe?

A week after Billie's death, I set out on foot. I took the highway from Yuma east, withering in the sun, walking by night, sleeping by day. I stayed away from the hoards of refugees, many having fled San Diego and Los Angeles, hoping to find safety in the midlands of the continent.

It was there I realized the truth of what happened, the stories that had been gathered from the burning cities and poisoned streets. I saw the ragged faces of women and children, and knew the worst had happened.

There were no cars. The oil fields were burning or abandoned under the icy Arctic seas. No planes flew. No trains, no passenger boats traveled. I was trapped.

But worse than that, worse than the fear and guns and hunger, was the knowledge I felt, I knew, that magic was somehow gone from the world. Not just from me. That comforting flow, that buzz of energy I had felt since earliest youth, was missing. The world was colder, emptier.

I came to La Puente and I stayed in La Puente. I slipped in amongst the chaos, offering what I could of healing and teaching. Mostly, I kept to myself. I ravaged the local library before the books could be used as tinder against the cold desert nights. I scanned the demolished grocers, taking what food was left, and stumbling upon this stash of notebooks.

I've written in them ever since.

I don't know why I continue. Why do I feel the need to document this part of my life? There are so many other things more important, enough knowledge to fill hundreds of notebooks, and a journal of my thoughts and fears seems wasteful. But here I am, opening the cover of the last volume, pouring out my fears and disjointed memories to the invisible cosmos.

And what happens when the last page is stained with my precious ink? What happens to my chaotic mind when it can no longer be bled and purged on this dusty paper?

I do not know.

But I have survived this long--next week is my 104th birthday. I will find a way. And if there is any magic in these old bones, in these dried up cells and tissues, then as long as I survive, the memory of magic shall endure.