Caffeine and Magix

caffeinewitchcraft:

Summary: Sylvia has two problems. One is a ghost in her house. The other is her husband. (Tw: domestic abuse, violence)

Morgan is not a malevolent spirit.

Her visitors treat her like one. They crawl through her rotting house with cameras clasped in sweaty hands, hissing about evil and violence. They bring out objects of prayer to ward her off. Some of them try to trick her into speaking. Into acting. They spend hours recording the whispering of the wind through the cracks in the attic or the creaking of her home sinking into a century old foundation.

Morgan watches them from the slanted chandelier in the foyer and never says a word.

Truthfully, she doesn’t hate them. They’re alive and addicted to the strange cocktail of hormones the body produces when afraid. She can’t hate what is created by nature. 

Perhaps that’s why she isn’t a malevolent spirit. She knows addiction and to be alive is to be an addict. Food, water, passion, lust, greed, love, fear. A complex array of cocktails all pumped directly into your receptive brain. The bad ghosts are jealous of it. Greedy for it. And Morgan simply…isn’t.

She has her routines. She stays well out of the way of the people who come to explore her abandoned and withering house. When those who need the shelter of her walls find themselves there late at night, she makes sure that the wind doesn’t blow the doors open, that they choose the rooms with the best windows, that the pests that have started to nest in the roofline don’t wander down.

On days she has no one, she stares out the window of the master bedroom - what used to be her bedroom - into the garden. Her neighbor’s houses shrink and expand, fall apart, get torn down, and then reemerge like new, brightly colored with gleaming windows, but her garden stays the same. The weeds bloom into late spring, pops of white false morning glory all along her wrought iron fence, and wither into long, thin stalks in the winter. The squirrels she once chastised for eating her tomatoes lay down to rest and their descendents descend on the new vegetable patches in the neighborhood.

Then, one day, a man in a white van pulls up. He cracks open the back door and pulls out a long orange banner. This he strings along her fence with precision, pinning it so that it lays flat. He examines his work, nods, pulls out his phone to snap a picture, and then he’s on his way.

When Morgan goes to investigate, she finds the words UNDER DEVELOPMENT emblazoned on the banner.

Thoughtfully, she returns to her window.

—————-.

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