By Pamela Love

Someone shrieked. Everyone’s heads, including mine, swung toward the east side of the village. A riderless broom raced westward, skimming almost close enough overhead to part my hair. Something red dripped from its straws.

Some folks in the market square yelped with panic. Others raced for cover. A few flung themselves over their wares.

Me? This was witch business, and I was the only one in sight. It was time to act—to mend what harm the broom had done if I could.

Grabbing a basket loaded with healing herbs and bandages I’d brought to sell, I mounted my own broom and headed toward the cries. My breathing came fast and tight. I hope I can save the victim. I’d never heard of a broom gone bad before, and my guts twisted as I feared what this rogue broom might have done—and might do next.

In front of a rowhouse, I spotted a woman with red streaks on her face and kirtle. She was shaking both fists. “Bad broom! Shame!”

I landed. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Sore enough.” She stomped a foot. “Though, it’s my purse that’s harmed, not my body. That greedy-guts witchstick rapped on my door. When I opened it, it flew past me into my kitchen and dove straws-first into a kettle of scarlet berry jelly. A whole batch, ruined! There’s not enough time to make another before tomorrow. It’s my best seller, too. Since when do brooms eat more than the crumbs they sweep up? Wait till I tell Witch Enid on it!”

“That… was Witch Enid’s broom?” My voice cracked.

“Yes. It had those two eyes she painted on it, as green as her own—Hey! Where are you going? Tell her she owes me—” But her voice faded away as I raced toward my best friend’s cottage.

***

Tears rolled down my face when I found Enid collapsed on her doorstep, beneath the sunset she’d painted the week before. Looks like death came naturally yesterday. Though I knew it was hopeless—a broom never leaves the witch it is bound to while she lives—nevertheless I spoke a charm which would have made her body stir if her soul remained within it. She stayed still.

We witches bury our dead as soon as we find them. Her shed should have a shovel.  And there was the rogue broom, painting on the shed’s door. Its straws had drawn crimson petals in broad strokes with the still-sticky red jelly.

Sorrowful as I was, I couldn’t help smiling. “You want to paint pictures like your witch did, eh? She painted yellow stars on my broom. I believe Enid loved art more than magic. Would have warmed her heart to know she’d passed that on.”

I tilted my head, thinking. “You’re certainly not a rogue broom, but you are wild. How did that happen? A witch must release you before you can depart this place. Any member of our coven would have told me about Enid. Was it some other witch passing through? Perhaps, yet she must have seen Enid, and no decent witch would have freed you before knowing your witch was buried first.”

I stepped forward. “Let me lay my hands upon you to learn who it was.” Instead, the broom kept adding petal after petal as if I hadn’t spoken. Perhaps it wants to finish the painting—that jelly is drying up and will be useless soon. 

So, with regret, I spoke words I’d learned as an apprentice. Enid and I had argued with our teachers about this spell, which would force a wild broom to obey. Wasn’t that cruel? Wasn’t it breaking a promise of freedom after many years of service?

“There may be a life-threatening emergency where we need a broom’s help,” we were told. I never dreamed there might be a mystery.

“Come here,” I ordered once I’d finished the spell. The broom did not obey. I reached out for it, and it rose past arm’s length, not fleeing but defying an order while my spell commanded obedience. Impossible. I knew I hadn’t misspoken. A supposedly wild broom who will not obey that spell… This was a greater puzzle.

I squinted at the eyes on the broom’s side, eyes I remembered as being far lighter, like the ferns now growing beside Enid’s front door. “It’s my favorite shade,” she told me once.

But studying the eyes now, they had become the rich green of the leaves between which it was hovering. The same green Enid’s eyes had been.

I took a deep breath. “Enid? Are you still riding that broom?”

A moment’s hesitation, and then the broom bobbed up and down.

“Can’t stop making art, can you?” I wiped away tears of grief and gladness. “Even as a ghost. Let me put your body to rest, Enid. After that, I have a better idea for your painting, one that will let your broom go free.”

***

I was counting my earnings a few evenings later in the village’s market square. It did my heart good to see the light green-eyed broom fluttering about the market square with two other wild ones, sweeping up sourdough crumbs folks toss them as feed.

Just across from me a woman was packing up. The sign by her stand said JANE’S JAMS AND JELLIES in vivid red and purple lettering and pictures of her wares for those who couldn’t read. That, plus a bag of coins I’d handed her two days before, had soothed her temper so that it was now as sweet as her product.

And Enid? She now creates more art than ever on not one but a dozen mounts—her brushes, which our coven enchanted so that she could ride and paint at the same time—her talent making even a sign for preserves a thing of beauty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pamela Love was born in New Jersey and worked as a teacher and in marketing before becoming a writer. Her work has appeared in Havok, Page & Spine, and Luna Station Quarterly. She is the 2020 winner of the Magazine Merit Fiction Award for her story “The Fog Test,” which appeared in Cricket. She and her family live in Maryland.

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