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September 15, 2021

Naked At Last

K.C. Mead-Brewer

The witch has heard this song before. Another hot night, another lost love. She’s been heartbroken so many times, she’s made a full dress from the hair of her lovers. Some dead, sure, but mostly she got their hair after they fell asleep in her backseat, in her bed, on a picnic blanket, snip snip. The dress is a luscious weave of every color and texture, it whispers when she moves; in the moonlight, it shines like a saxophone. Brushing her hands over it, the witch remembers when it was alive, painting her lovers’ temples, framing their smiles, rubbing between her thighs as they mmm’d. She frets over the dress lock by lock, threading in poison ivy and fresh spiderweb as she murmurs the name of each lover. Teases and tragedies and fuckers and players, damsels and villains and darling disasters. Oh yes, the dress is something else. It makes the witch bite her lip. It gets her in the mood for outlawing. Flying off in her wild hair dress, the witch parts the tresses of your delicate sensibilities, cursing newborns and seducing priests, prying loose some youth group’s guitar to impale the heart of a wandering prince. This dress, this dress! She frees a farmer’s pigs and strikes down an apple tree. She chokes the sky with storms and turns every lake to glass. She plucks out the rose-blue eyes of a sweet groupie and tosses them down a well, lips parting to call after them—but the wishes stall in her throat. Silent, she watches the plump balls plop and sink into darkness. She strokes her dress; she sniffs her fingers. And she knows. For all the world’s magic, they are gone. They are never coming back. Thank goodness.