1.
It was late one spring afternoon when they arrived.
From a squat black car that reminded Charlie of a Mary Poppins bag came three figures, and looking down at the driveway from the attic window, he turned to his sister and said, "But none of them looks like a crone."
For weeks, their parents had been talking about this visit. "Friends of your father's, from college," their mother had told them when they asked her for clarity.
"Does that mean they aren't also your friends?" Zoe asked.
"Mm, does it, Laney?" their father teased and their mother swatted at him with an oven mitt. They understood well enough what that meant.
Neither of the children wanted to ask the real question, though. They knew about magic -- this was after the discovery in the attic, that day when Charlie had seen Zoe put the glass skull back together -- but the idea of witches enchanted and confused and, to be honest, frightened them. Witches were things in storybooks, found on the backs of brooms or behind terrible cauldrons. They didn't understand how a witch could be something worth letting into their home, let alone three of them.
But these three also didn't exactly look like any kind of witches they'd ever heard of.
They looked, obvious aesthetic differences aside, more or less like their parents. Which, understandably, raised some questions.
2.
Charlie stepped carefully over the creaky step, the one three steps from the top, and peered down the hallway. The third floor was the floor for guests and the three witches had been given rooms up here. Zoe was distracting their parents so he could do some reconnaissance.
The door to the room he liked to think of as his grandmere's room was still closed. Or perhaps newly closed? He'd come back to it.
Four other rooms up here, and he could hear someone inside the Sun Room (so-named for its yellow wallpaper, which he had always found unnerving). He pushed his little body like a spy, or so he thought, bending quietly to peer inside the open door.
He saw the male witch there, eyes closed, grooving to a song in his earbuds. The male witch had such smooth skin, he thought, never before having thought about such things and feeling a little confused as to why he did now.
He waited until the male witch's back was turned to dart past the threshold of the door.
Down the hall, the third door on the right began to open and he panicked. He hadn't thought to look at the bathroom! Stupid, stupid, stupid; he should've checked!
Quickly he darted to the side and through the half-open door of the Library Room (confusing as there was a plain-old library downstairs, but nobody'd asked his opinion) before he could even check if anyone was in there.
"Well hello," said another of the witches.
They stared at each other, a distinct lack of comprehension between them, like two civilizations making first contact. Charlie felt his chest constrict -- was it a spell? The witch was smiling haphazardly, one corner of their mouth much higher than the other.
He mustered whatever speed he had left and ran, nearly colliding with the third witch in the hallway. "Late for the opera," he heard her say to the second witch, and they both cackled (because that's how witches laughed, so if they were laughing, it must be a cackle) and the sound rang down the staircase after him.
3.
Dinner was to be an affair.
The smells began to percolate through the house late, later than they would've started eating on a normal night. Zoe and Charlie had been told that they would eat with the grownups tonight, an honor their parents assumed would be taken as a gift. And to be fair, Zoe was curious: how did witches eat? Would they have strange or different food? Would she have to eat what they ate -- and, way back there in her mind, she wondered if she might like it?
Her mother wore more rings today than she normally did, and they clacked against her wine glass as she gently kept the beat of the song on the stereo in the other room. "Mom," Zoe tried again. "It seems like witches get bad press."
"That's one way to put it."
"So why do people want to be witches?"
A cutting glance over the rim of that wine glass. Her mother was always so perceptive, so keenly aware of what Zoe meant even when she herself was unsure. "Things aren't always so cut and dried, heart. And if you--"
A timer went off and her mother swung away from the counter, tracing an arc across the kitchen. "Why don't you go tell everyone that dinner is ready, hmm?"
She slouched into the living room, where her father and the male witch were looking through vinyl records. "Dinnertime," she nearly whispered, but they heard her well enough.
The male witch said, "I'll go help Laney. I think the others are upstairs."
"And where'd Charlie get to, I wonder?" added her dad.
"Probably hiding," she said boldly, with an insouciance she picked up from the novels she was reading or perhaps some TV series about a precocious near-teen. It made her father laugh, which had been the point, and she glowed under the light of the smile.
When they'd all assembled at the big table -- their father had added leaves just so everyone would fit -- the siblings shot glances at one another, their own secret language to counteract the seemingly-secret language being spoken by the grown-ups. Zoe in particular couldn't stop thinking that their words were like spells, like magic she could wield if only she understood it better.
And when Charlie, unable to keep it together, asked the witches which of them was the matron and which was the crone and everyone burst into laughter, she was left feeling more confused than ever.
4.
"Psst, wake up, wake up!"
"Humhwunh?"
"Shh, be quiet and come with me."
"But where? Why? It's the middle of the night!"
"No it isn't, you went to bed like an hour ago."
"Okay but mom and dad said we--"
"They won't know, now come on."
Zoe dragged her little brother from his bedroom and down the hall, ignoring his continued groggy protestations.
She pushed through the door of their parents' room like it wasn't a major violation, a threshold crossing that Charlie couldn't yet conceive and that Zoe had only just discovered wasn't so powerful as all that. Her grip on his wrist kept him by her side and they crossed quickly past the big brass bed and towards the big round window that looked out on the yard.
"Stay quiet but I don't think they can see us," she told him, and then climbed up on the hope chest for a better view. With no better option, Charlie followed.
Out in the yard, around a roaring open fire, they saw their parents and the witches with glasses of something thick, dark, poured from labelless bottles. Someone said something that caused someone, one of the witches, to shriek and slap their leg violently.
They saw their father do some strange mincing dance, leaping around the roaring flame and singing -- singing? their father could sing?! -- in a surprisingly smooth baritone. They could not make out the words, and the song fell apart in moments.
One of the witches picked up something -- a branch? a wand? -- and made a stirring motion and began to make a screeching sound, one that the rest of the figures around the fire, even their parents, began to mimic in an ungodly chorus.
"It must be some kind of witch curse," Charlie murmured. "Should we go out and save them?"
"No, you dummy. If we go outside, we'll get caught in the spell too." But she wasn't so sure -- not about the spell part, anyway. She understood, in some fundamental way, that she was not yet meant to be a part of what happened out there but that perhaps she would, someday...
But the question felt too large, too difficult to fully understand in this moment -- she was only ten after all. “But I don’t think it is a spell,” she added softly.
Charlie frowned at her, deciding in that moment that this must all be a dream and that he was in fact sleepwalking or something else cool that he could tell his friends at school on Monday. “I’m going back to bed now, dream-Zoe. You can come tuck me in if you’d like.”
Zoe looked at him, watched him yawn, watched his brain already twisting away from this and decided that she'd put him back to bed and then... then, she had some reading to do.
5.
The next morning, as often happened on weekends, the kids descended to roam the house half-feral until the grown-ups awoke.
They were surprised, crossing the kitchen, to discover that they were not in fact the first ones up. Charlie flinched and even Zoe couldn't contain a gasp when the back door slid open -- not the kitchen door through which their father left for work every day and that they were not to use without his permission, but the door out onto the deck. One of the witches came inside, sweat dripping from their headband. "Oh, morning, urchins," they said. "Anybody else awake yet?"
Zoe shook her head.
"Word. Do you know where the coffee is?"
She felt Charlie squeezing her hand, trying to pull her away. She shook off her brother's grip and stepped forward, into the kitchen, where she confidently showed off the coffee and the various devices they had to brew it.
"Your brother's scared of me," the witch said softly.
"No, he's just scared of witches," Zoe replied.
A quirked eyebrow at this. "And am I not a witch?"
Zoe had been thinking about this, had been considering it until she fell asleep the night before and all morning since the sun had woken her up. "Witches are supposed to come in threes, I thought."
The witch laughed, joined by another of their coven who'd just come down the stairs. "Oh, right, Charlie's question about the matron and the crone." This newcomer, the male witch, smiled like a cat stretching in the sun. "As we established, I'm obviously the maiden..."
"Lol," said the first witch, without shame. "What I was going to say, urchins, is that covens can be any size you'd like. Ours is four, for example."
Zoe frowned, pointedly doing the math. "But there are only three of you."
"Your dad, sweetheart. He's the fourth."
"Is my dad a witch?" asked Charlie, voice trembling, unable to hide now for the fear that shook him. He looked up at Zoe. “It wasn’t a dream, last night?”
The two witches looked at each other, out of their respective depths. "We probably should--"
"Yeah, I don't--"
"--get someone else to--"
"--know that we should be--"
A heavy tread down the stairs, one that Zoe and Charlie knew intimately. Their father came around the corner in a patched cardigan, a t-shirt, sweatpants. "Oh good, you found the coffee."
The witches looked at Grant, who looked at his children, who looked at him, who looked back at the witches.
"Dad, are you a witch?" Charlie asked in a rush.
"Well sure," he replied, a second too hasty. Only then did he realize, did he see the look of fear and confusion on his son's face. He knelt down, trying to keep his heart steady as his son quailed before him. "You know there's nothing wrong with witches, buddy, don't you?"
"I... I..." and Charlie began to cry, because, no, he didn't know. But these visitors to his home had seemed so nice, even despite what he'd seen the night before, the things he couldn't understand yet.
And Zoe felt a few tears forming on her face as well, for even though she wanted to believe that she too could be a witch and that that could be something powerful to want to be, she was at that precarious age where the wrong word or moment could slam any number of doors that ought to stay joyfully open.
One of the witches, bright and wholesome like an elementary school teacher, took a chance: "Witching is just living your own power, babe."
The other witch rolled their eyes. "I mean, it’s a little bit more than that. A little less cheesy, too."
The third witch, having just come downstairs, said, "Oh no did you crones scare the children?" and everyone laughed a little bit and even Charlie, still mostly confused, cracked a smile.
"I was reading last night," Zoe said, "while you guys were... doing whatever it was you were doing out there around the fire--"
A look passed quickly around the adults, including an 'oops' face from Grant.
"--and I found this book about witches being part of a community, being helpful and connected to nature and... that's what I want to be. So does that mean I can be a witch?"
"And me too!" shouted Charlie through a snot bubble, which made everyone laugh a bit more.
"Sure does," said Grant, to general agreement.
The morning began to spin on again, this crisis averted. The siblings clambered onto stools and watched the coven of four laughing and joking and moving with almost choreographed grace around the kitchen. They could see, now, that these witches had some kind of power just like their parents -- just like they themselves did.
And when their mother came downstairs, they were eager to tell her that they now understood, that they could now too be witches.
And she smiled at them and said, "Well of course. Just no wine yet.”
