“Garnish your wages with parsley,” was what the witch first told him, Little Karl, who was only four years old. She’d just moved across the street from his family.  She was smart enough to know that it was a good idea for a witch to semi-retire here in this seaside town, where taxes were cheaper and the noise was less deafening and she could focus on a few select specimens to do her bidding. You could say she put all her eggs in one basket when she chose little Karl as her subject.

 She spoke jibberish as he far he was concerned. At his age, he knew nothing of “garnish” or “wages” and certainly didn’t plan on taking her advice to heart. Already, within a few hours of the Mayflower van leaving her belongings, the kids in the neighborhood had started calling her Tarantula. Her hair was spiky and frayed and dark as night. Her limbs were long and thin, burntly brown and glossed, as if by slime left by slugs. When he was a little older, when people started pointing to him too, and finding as many faults as they did with the witch, when they said he he smelled and walked funny and poked through his clothes like something broken and jagged, when they described his face like a tree that would never see spring, he began to notice her more. And she him. She stood up for him.  She called him a prince. At first Karl found it hard to take her compliments, that he was handsome and strong and smart.  She had no fucking basis for these opinions!  He’d already lost two front teeth in a fight. His father left home not last week, with a note saying he was going to another beach where “air was fresher” –a cheap crack at his body odor.  And if Karl believed in his own ugliness, he was an even more avid follower of those who were repulsed by the witch. The rumors ran rampant about her own bodily conditions. Parasites invading her ears. Her mind seething with maggots.  Her breath producing that sewer smell on foggy days.  Yet outwardly he was always polite to her, smiling at her as she spoke of his goodness, but really not making eye contact, in order to avoid curses, instead staring off  in a direction beyond her, feeling it was better to stare at something indeteminate like the rusty nails sticking out of her screen door than than screw his face up at the wild sayings of a witch.

    When Karl was forty-eight she murdered her own husband with a spell.

    How did he know?

    He was the husband.