Wild things grow like mad in my town. Ivy winds its way round every porch, spreading its leaves out, thirsty, soaking up the sun with greedy feelers. Blackberry bushes choke out the shrubs that grow in the middle of hayfields, growing berries as big as baby Maybelle’s fist. My mama says it’s unnatural. Then again, so are the witches.

They spring out from the edge of the woods, pockets full of roots, berry juice purpling their fingernails. You can never be sure of how many there are- folks mostly keep to themselves round here. We have one post office down by Colvin Run, and a general store near the middle of things, but most times people are too busy minding their own business to worry much about a few women getting up to mischief in the woods. Still, my grandmama always says witches are like mayflies: one is too many.

I only seen one once, down at the Chelmsford church. Some folks say that’s where they came from. Round here, names have power. We don’t say the Lord’s name in vain, and we don’t name things that shouldn’t be named. I guess the people who came down here from them northern states didn’t know that, though. They went right ahead and named that church after that town and brought all the town’s ghosts with it. Just goes to show what happens when you let a northerner into your land. We had enough of that to last a lifetime.

My grandmama doesn’t much like the witches, but I don’t think they’re too bad. We’ve never had a bad crop year, unlike Springvale a few miles over. I hear them at night sometimes, calling water down from the sky on during the August droughts, singing away the storms that threaten the new seedlings in the spring. I don’t think they’re much harm. But they are wild, and you never know how the wild things are gonna grow in our town.