Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online

said, Will I tell you my own story?
    It is a tale of hair.



VI
The Tale of the Hair
    Y OU SEE ME NOW reduced to a skull; I have shed all the trappings of flesh, skin and mane. You’ll look much like this when
you’re dead too. How slight our differences become, between lives. In my last life I was not a horse, but a woman like you. Or rather, a woman quite unlike you. Where you hunger for
attention, I sickened of it. You want to be queen over the wide world; I hid away from it.
    When I was a girl I used to live in a tower. It was a misshapen tree of stone, hidden in a forest; it was mine. The woman who built it was not my mother. Sometimes she would say that she had
found me growing in a clump of wild garlic; other times, that she had won me in a bet; other times, that she had bought me for a handful of radishes. Once she claimed that she had saved me, without
saying from what.
    I remember nothing of my early childhood except the odd glimpse of rust on a gate, butter in a churn. I knew what a town was, and a plough, and a baby, though I couldn’t remember ever
having laid eyes on these things. The woman said there must have been a time when my eyes were not clouded, but from the day I fell into her hands I was blind as a mole. Before there was ever a
tower, we lived in a stone hut in the woods, near an old mine.
    The only thing I had from the time before, the only thing I owned that the woman had not given me, was a comb made out of an antler. I liked to sit beside the window of our cottage so the air
brightened a little in front of my face. With the comb I used to form my long hair into a sheet, then into coils as slick as the stream that wound through the woods.
    The woman was my store of knowledge, my cache of wisdom. Which was odd, since she had so little to say, and what she spoke was never above a whisper, for fear of disturbing the birds and the
beasts. She taught me you only have the right to kill a creature when you know its names and ways. She walked out in all weathers, and never shrank from the cold. Sometimes she spoke of her
childhood in a country so frozen that people could walk on water. When she murmured of such things under her breath, it was as if I could see them.
    As the years pulled me towards womanhood my body swelled, my spirits whirled. My hair began to grow faster; one day I could sit on its sharp ends, and another day again, I could cover my knees
with it. I felt its weight pulling at the back of my head; it lolled like curtains over my cheeks.
    I was never warm enough; too little of the day ever reached down through the trees to our cottage. Once when the woman came back with a bowl of milk from a sheep that had strayed into the woods,
I said, I wish I could live up there in the light, in a high tower.
    What do you want light for if not to see by? she asked.
    All I could answer was: I like the feel of it on my face.
    As ever, the woman did what I asked, without asking anything in return, but it was the first time she had not understood me.
    With her weathered hands she brought stones from the old mine and took mud and leaves and built a little tower behind our hut where the thorn-bushes grew. When I shook my head out of the first
window she had made, my hair spilled down. The woman laughed as she walked by; I felt the pull of her hand like a fish through the rapids of my hair. Higher, I crowed.
    So she fetched more stones from the old mine and built another room on top of that, and then another, till the round wall hoisted itself up almost as high as the trees. At last the woman climbed
down the steps; I heard her wipe the crust of mud from her hands on a tree. She complained that the tower was all askew, but when I stood at the base and stretched my arms around its jagged girth,
I knew it was just what I needed.
    We went back to our old life, except that as I shelled nuts and chopped roots in the highest room of the tower the light was white against my face. The woman came and