of witches

They always pull them out this time of year, the decorations showing haggish women in rags, warts on the nose & bad teeth. Pulled from shallow closets and deep memory, the witches come back.

But what we forget, is that everyone looked like that back then, back in those medieval hours that haunt our imagination. The lot of them didn’t brush their teeth or have proper soap. They knew nothing of the value of being clean. And here we are with our Ikea and CB2 lives and have the distance of time to push that historic memory into a ghoul. And this distances us from from the ghouls of our own time. Those places that fail to fall into shiny right angles and Helvetica, those places that ooze, bleed, stink a little bit and get sick, those aren’t here. They’re there, then, those people. The monster, it doesn’t live here anymore. Not unless it restrains itself and has proper manners.