Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? – Macbeth, Act ll, Scene 2
I land in bed, now an older version of my younger self. On the wall is the animated shadow of a screaming witch, a witch to be rid of and sail away Aleppo-bound. Sounds easy enough, especially for one who began with a gopher with a tale. Who can help? A rat without a tail? The witch on the wall morphs into the witch on the bicycle and then back to the witch on the broom.
“Who killed my sister?”
“I don’t know anything about your sister.”
“Stay out of this, Glenda, or I’ll fix you as well!”
“Glenda? Who’s Glenda?” As she flies faster and faster around the walls, they begin to vibrate.
“Just try to stay out of my way. Just try.”
“It’s not my fault!” I start to feel under the covers, looking for help from any quarter and find that there is something warm and fuzzy underneath. Could it be my magic Davy Crockett hat? I stuff it on my head.
“I’ll get you, my pretty – and your little dog, too!”
“It’s not a dog, it’s a hat. And it protects me against the powers of evil!”
“When I get those ruby slippers, my power will be the greatest in Oz!”
“Oz? We’re not in Oz, we’re in Hell! Who cares about your power here! Why don’t you go back!”
“What a nice little dog!” she says, looking at my hat. “And you, my dear. What an unexpected pleasure! It’s so kind of you to visit me in my loneliness.”
“It’s not a dog, you bloody bitch!” I take off the hat. It’s definitely some kind of animal, but for sure not a dog. Shouldn’t it be a raccoon? No it’s not that, the tail is too big, and the teeth. Oh, crap. How could this be? It’s bloody Chester. He begins to flit back and forth, one minute grinning an evil angry grin, the next smiling forgivingly. Back – angry, wrathful. Forth – benevolent, forgiving.
“Who’s your Daddy!” he shouts in my ear.
I turn away from this apparition to my more immediate problem.
How do you kill a witch? Water worked for Dorothy, right? I fling the bedside water glass at the apparition but the twofold apparition of witch on bicycle and witch of the north changes with a whip-like shudder from Wicked to Weird, and before the water can strike, she is no longer a singular wicked witch but has multiplied mirror fragment-like to three. They mock, “I’m melting, I’m melting.”
The water rebounds off the circling trio now cackling, “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble” and back to me, and suddenly there is a flood filling the now cauldron-like bed with water burst though as from a dam heating rapidly on the bedrock of Hell.
“When you durst do it, then you were a man!” shout the Sisters as one.
The weird sisters race around the walls, one on her shadow broom, one a horsehead broom, and one, my bus girl, bouncing on a broom upended. Terrified, I cover my head with the sheets. What durst I do to become a man? I scratch my head, forgetting the hat, which then squirms, and a gentle voice whispers in my ear, “I’ll give thee a wind, ” winning me to a conspiracy born. I hold him up before my eyes. “I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do!” he shouts - strange circumstance from which alliance forms.
Not a rat without a tail, exactly, but perhaps there was room for Chester in this morphing Macbeth Hell. Had I not entered rump-fed? Furthermore was there not a scabby rodent in front of me looking as rump-fed as could be? How indeed do you dismiss a Macbeth witch? What better course than with a rump-fed ronyon?
He turns to me, repeating, “I’ll give thee a wind that will rid thee of the foul witch. But first you have to right a great wrong…
And restore to me my dominion
Broken by nature’s social union
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion
And fellow mortal.”
“And restore to thee thy true dominion?” I wondered, while Chester continued,
Do you not realize what Hell you have sent me t’ward?
Without my school where many happy hours flewed,
Fondled by kiddies as a cat to be mewed
Only to be banished to this distant land,
Hard on the heels of your unreasonable ban?
Could it be my voice that replied?
Oh, tiny timorous forlorn beast,
Oh why the panic in your breast?
You need not dart away in haste
To some corn-rick
I’d never run and chase thee,
With murdering stick.
And Chester,
Oh, hard and oh so brutal master,
An ending to this tale you could make come faster.
Retell a tale about poor Chester
In which a hero soon becomes he
And not a rodental social pariah.
“Curse it! Curse it! Somebody always helps that girl!” Our conversation is interrupted by the too-long silent witches. In desperation, witch alterations whip, their black capes snap, polaroid apparitions exposed–Wizard witch/Macbeth witch, white and black and back then back and back again they twitch and from the plains of Hell The Weird Sisters scream:
Hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about,
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine,
And thrice again, to make up nine,
Peace! The charm’s wound up.–
And back again as Wizard witch briefly, flying around the room. Shadows of the ever-present soldier monkeys now join them through the widening cracks, “Fly, my pretties! Fly, fly! How about a little fire, Scarecrow?”
“Shut up!” my rump-fed ronyon and I both yell. And spurred along by the ever hotter water in the cauldron/bed to prove I was not, in fact, the brainless one, I come face-to-face with Chester,
And so now at last it’s became clear as first
I see a way out of this painful verse
And so a promise to wee beastie I make:
All right my beady-eyed friend and rat’s mop top
You shall return as our beloved school mascot!
“SURRENDER DOROTHY!” yells the witch as she and her monkey minions fly around the room.
Mollified, my newly found buck-toothed ally calmly views the sea of insane witches and mad monkeys chasing each other around the walls, nods to me and turning to the nightmare witches just transformed back to Oz says again, “I’ll g’ie thee a wind.”
And my rump-fed ronyon cries, “Aroint thee, witch!” and as he does, he raises his eyes to heaven and then casts out his paw. On the tip of a claw, he catches a drop of the flooding water. The witch attempts one more transformation, but as Chester flicks his claw, sending the drop towards her, she commits a fatal pause and is caught in mid-transition between wicked and weird.
“Ohhh - you cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! Melting! Oh - what a world, what a world!” She begins to melt like a nesting doll, from Weird Sister to Meathook Man to Maze Nazi and then to witches: Wall Witch, Wicked Witch of the North, Weird Sister Weird Sister Weird Sister and finally down to a tiny shoulder-sized Mr. Voelot who as he melts falls into the pot, and cries as he makes a pretty plopping sound, “Who would have thought a good little boy like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness!?” And with these magic words they are gone, to Aleppo or some other distant land.
A new shape takes their place, flying now backwards around the room, faster and faster, a coloured shadow with a red cape trailing until time itself begins to reverse and back I go through the circles of Hell hand in paw with now beloved Chester, back by the meat hook man as he swipes ineffectually at me, back through the tales of Christmas past, back by the not so virtuous Snow White as she shakes her spheres goodbye, the dwarves singing, “If ever a witch a witch there was, ” then by the hideous baton-waving choir master, tap, tap, tap, down past the minions of now cheering Chester polyps, back towards the light of the rapidly approaching door through which I blast and, then, disambiguating, to the first circle, the home of the virtuous pagans and the unbaptized babies.