Read Online Witch Baby by Francesca Lia Block - Free Book Online

the firelight and their eyes look dead, as if they have watched too much television .
    One of the women stands and turns to the doorway where Witch Baby hides. She is a tall woman with a tower of white-blonde hair and a chiffon scarf wound around her long neck .
    “We have a visitor, Jaynes,” the woman says .
    Witch Baby feels herself being drawn into the firelit room. She stares into the woman’s tilted purple eyes, a purple that is only found in jacaranda tree blossoms and certain silks, knowing that she has come to the right place .
    “Are you Vixanne?”
    “Who are you?” The woman’s voice is carved—cold and hard. The necklace at her throat looks as if it is made of rock candy .
    “Witch Baby Wigg, your daughter.”
    All the people in the room begin to laugh. Their voices flicker, as separate from their bodies as the shadows thrown on the walls by the flames .
    “So this is Max’s little girl. I wonder if she’s as quick to come and go as her father was. Did Max and that woman tell you all about how he left me, Witch Baby?” Vixanne asks. Then she turns to the people. “Do you think my daughter resembles me, Jaynes?” She reaches upand removes her blonde wig, letting her black hair cascade down, framing her fine-boned porcelain face .
    “Let’s see how my baby witch looks as a Jayne blonde,” she says, putting the wig on Witch Baby. “You need a wig with that hair, Witch Baby!”
    The people laugh again .
    “Now you can be a part of the Jayne Club.” Vixanne leads Witch Baby over to the screen. Jayne Mansfield flickers there, giggles, her chest heaving .
    “Sit here and have some candy,” says someone in a deep voice, delicately patting the seat of a chair with two manicured fingers. Witch Baby can’t tell if the thick, pale person in the wig and evening gown is a man or a woman .
    Witch Baby sits up all night, gnawing on rock candy and divinity fudge, drinking Cokes, which aren’t allowed at the cottage, and watching Jayne Mansfield films. After a while she feels sick and bloated from all the sugar. Lipstick-smeared mouths loom around her. Her eyes begin to close .
    “I’ll put you to bed now, Witch Baby Wigg,”Vixanne says, lifting Witch Baby up in her powdery arms .
    There is something about being held by this woman. Witch Baby feels she has fallen into an ocean. But it is not an ocean of salt and shadows and dark-jade dreams. Witch Baby’s senses are muffled by pale shell-colored, spun-sugar waves that press her eyelids shut, pour into her nostrils and ears, swell like syrup in her mouth. A sea of forgetting .
    Vixanne carries Witch Baby up a winding staircase to a bedroom and tucks her beneath a pink satin comforter on a heart-shaped bed. Then she sits beside her and they look at each other. They do not need to speak. Without words, Witch Baby tells her mother what she has seen or imagined—families dying of radiation, old people in rest homes listening for sirens, ragged men and women wandering barefoot through the city, becoming ghosts because no one wanted to see them, children holding out wish bracelets as they sit in the gutter, the dark-haired boy who disappeared. What do I do with it all? Witch Baby asks with her eyes. Vixanne answers without speaking .
    We are the same. Some people see more than others. It gets worse. I wanted to blind myself. You must just not look at it. You must forget. Forget everything .
    And Witch Baby falls into a suffocating sleep .
    In the morning, Witch Baby is too weak to get up. Vixanne comes in dressed in perfumed satin and carries Witch Baby’s limp body downstairs. The others, the “Jaynes,” are already gathered around the screen, eating candy and watching Jayne Mansfield waving from a convertible. Witch Baby sits propped up among them, wearing a long blonde wig. Her eyes are glazed like sugar cookies; her throat, no matter how many sodas she is given, is parched .
    Late that night she wakes in her bed. “How will I ever be able to tell her