Note after note trickled out of Kady’s lips, drenching the hazy air with that old lullaby parents used sometimes to sing their children in the scrawny town of Branleigh. Humming was as good a cope as any when stuck in a humid attic with nothing but stacks of senile records to keep you company. At least it could tear her mind away from rolling hills and overly lit malls and all the other places she could’ve been if she weren’t so desperate for quick cash.
What even that old song could not do though was distract her from the musical festival, creeping closer every day. All of her friends had already gotten their tickets to bathe in the crescent morning light with the saccharine sound of laughter and music to dance to. Meanwhile, she’d spent days on her knees before her father whose face remained scrunched and red.
“Thirty bucks for that?” he’d spat when she’d first slid into the conversation over dinner. “What did I buy ya a phone for— ain’t there music up on the Spot-eefy?”
“This is live music. It’s different,” she’d tried to appeal her case, but to no avail.
Kady and her father were on different plains, each looking at the world and seeing an array of colors that somehow never overlapped. She’d never understand his moaning about the good ol’ days and how things should be and he’d never understand the prison of watching every friend you had run off together while you watched your golden years slip through your fingers, lost to the endless march of tradition.
Of course, she was no stranger to that feeling of the world constantly spinning just a little faster than she could keep up with, but the festival only happened once a year in Branleigh. Once a year when her friends all flocked together without her. This year, she was eighteen and next she would be off to college.
Either she went this time or she resigned to letting go of her childhood dream of running around chainless with all the other giggly girls.
That was how she ended up sweating in the attic, promised 200 hundred bucks by her sweet old Grandma if she could sort this mess in a single Saturday.
Mounds of boxes and file cabinets overflowing with ragged, old files lined the slim walls that seemed to cave in around Kady. Sickly dust caked onto nearly every surface there was, making it nearly impossible to move even the slightest without it puffing up into a cloud that burned her lungs.
There was no WiFi up there— cellular service either— which she found herself surprisingly grateful for. At least the tempting distractions had already been taken care of. Now, there was nothing left but her humming and the urge to itch the dust clinging to her skin between her and the dumpster fire.
The droning song danced into its second verse as Kady leaned forward and curled her fingers around a sickly orange folder sprawled loose in a pile ahead of her. In her head, lyrics she knew by heart played along, telling the cliche story of some loner girl who’d been so isolated that when she fell into a well and went missing, nobody even knew her to look for her.
What a moral.
Her carefully trimmed nails slid beneath the crinkled flap of the folder, peaking it open. The faint flicker of the bare bulb above her illuminated the page just barely enough to make it readable, as it had done for nearly every other piece of garbage she’d stumbled across.
She’d seen a lot so far— from forty-year-old tax reports, her aunt-three-times-removed’s birth certificate, to love letters sent back during the Napoleonic war, she’d been tempted to throw away most of it. Still, her family had stayed in this stupid town for the past bajillion years for a reason. Her father would probably throw another one of his fits and forbid her from going to the festival altogether if she tossed anything.
Her eyes skimmed the first page in the grimey folder, scanning for some quick sign that could tell her what this waste of time was. Those sorts of flags were hardly difficult to find and, naturally, this one was no exception. It took all of the first two lines for her to realize what she had in her hand:
“Name: Ida Myers
Crime: Witchcraft”
“A court record,” she murmured to herself before double-taking. A court record with the word “witchcraft” on it.
What was this? She’d never heard of any witch trial in Branleigh— and she’d heard of a lot of the town’s history from her starry-eyed, blabbery father— yet, this was real, paper documentation of one. The documented proceedings of a case that’d never happened.
The juvenile beat of her lullaby fell flat as she scanned the paper, feeling each word scratched on the page prickling her eyes. At first, she was just looking for some piece of salvation that would prove the file fake— something so wrong in it that she could have an easy excuse to count the whole thing as uncredible— but it didn’t take long for her to realize that there was nothing of the sort to find.
The lines were regal, marked with perfect grammar and old-style vocabulary that sent little shivers down her spine. Little footnotes and jottings in the margins cited old laws she’d distantly heard of back in history class, accompanied by the sentence which was something called a ducking stool, apparently.
Kady hardly knew what that was, but one scribble in the margin next to it gave her a clue.
“Miss Ida was deemed innocent through trial at Carver Well,” the fancy, loopy handwriting read. “Cause of death; rapid influx of water to the lungs. The water’s failure to repel her counts the Myer family blameless to all witchcraft accusations.”
It was striking for a moment how much nausea Kady felt wash over her, strengthened by the urge to condemn whoever wrote— no, did— this to an ancient girl whom she’d never even heard of. Still, when she imagined a woman with well water flooding her lungs, she imagined someone with her face.
A girl, both innocent and dead, drowned in the name of some baseless accusation.
It crossed her mind for a brief moment to ask herself why she’d never learned about such a thing before then, but before she could, that age-old song pounded in her head once more. A woman, isolated and clumsy, who’d fallen into a wall.
Or perhaps, pushed was a more appropriate word for the story.
The flaky paper crumpled in Kady’s white knuckles. All thoughts of the festival and quick cash wrenched out of her mind, leaving a hollow silence behind them that echoed through the claustrophobic room.
If she were any less imaginative, she might’ve just thrown the paper and moved on, but her brain was already working. It worked up movies only she could see of women held under with ravaged bodies and ruined dignity. Killed, then rebranded.
Rebranded into the song Kady grew up singing along to.
Author’s Note:
I wrote this piece as commentary on the frequent inaccuracy and lies we’re told about the history and tradition we’re meant to revere.
Ginger Hester | 15 | South Carolina, USA | @gingerlywriting on Substack, @gingerly.writer on TikTok, @lostinafieldofflowers on YouTube
