***
I got a new cloak
of scales in shades of brown.
I got a new bag
made of a fuzzy bat demon’s wing,
safe to mix a myriad of potions in
above a myriad of flames.
I even got
a glowy crown
from
Dr. Mizto,
one of our first shapeshifting teachers,
and I thanked them
but didn’t really think
I’d wear it that often.
I donated
the old cloak
to the sewers’ rooms
and the bag
to the original owner,
Crinkz, who taught purple potions,
and Crinkz was glad to have
their seventy-second pair of shed wings back
to use to teach more students.
Then I hobbled around the halls,
checking on the classrooms
where I studied for seven decades,
still owned by the same teachers as always,
given that immortals like change even less than mortals do,
except
accidents happen
so one of the practice gyms
for summoning rings
was walled off
by vines
that apparently
no one had cleaned up in long enough that half the vines had died,
and some of the sleeping quarters
had gone missing
behind a shimmery veil.
But Jojoe the janitor
was still eternally doing rounds
and the library was still falling apart
and professors still often wandered the shelves,
tapping talons to spines to make them shiver,
and the life force classes
still tended a wild garden for practicing
and the artifacts room
still had the password lock on it
we’d cracked our eighth year here
and the cafeteria
still smelled like rotten things
but the un-rotting spell we made up in our second school year
was still scrawled on the underside of the seventh table,
written in the Latin alphabet that only mostly encapsulates the hissing-spit sounds required
to work the spell,
but for old time’s sake
I spoke it
at some molding fruit left on the floor;
it turned rosy and pink
and I ate it
and it tasted
like the rot-odor infusing my nostrils of course,
but also slightly sweet and crisp
under all the fumes.
Then I visited my rooms
and yours
and the one we shared for a couple years
but they were each occupied
by new students,
probably had been occupied
by handfuls of students
since we came through,
but I wondered
if the two of us lived on like some sort of legends;
“These are the rooms of Clarissa, a human witch who went missing after twenty-five years here.
I hear she was starting to learn magic, but a spell went wrong.”
“These ones? These are the rooms of the human witch who graduated, Witch Kook–have you ever heard what her pre-witch name was? Isabel.”
“Did you know both humans came here at the same time?”
“I hear, Witch Kook had to sacrifice the other human in order to power her magic.”
“Do you think the dead one haunts her rooms still?”
That one, I don’t know the answer to. Do you
haunt your rooms?
If you do, I could’ve delivered a bunch of these letters to you
when I went there.
But I didn’t.
Because I need your memory to keep haunting me,
beyond when I’m just a witch
revisiting her school
to remind her
of simpler times–
staying up
for days at a time
to finish projects.
Surviving
shapeshifting
disasters,
memorizing tongues
two at a time–
simpler times,
when I didn’t have time
to wonder
what the heck I was doing,
who the blazes I was becoming,
beyond being determined
to finish
what we started.
Looking back, I’m not sure
how I survived.
But I did,
I guess.
I could survive more than I thought,
I guess.
I could actually probably survive most anything,
I bet.
Jordyn Saelor 