I am sitting at the top of the cloud, bare toes in the cold damp, watching the moon rise. Below me, small, huddled into coats, a woman and child. The child sees something—a flicker of my cloak? the dark against the stars?—and points, but the woman pulls him inside, unseeing, not looking. Still, she’ll put out the stockings, tell him to expect coal, ask him to believe. I wait a little while, then dodge the branches of the trees on my way into the village, knock my broomstick against a door to let myself in. They have a saying, I think, that I enter through the chimney, but why would I land myself into the banked fire? Have I no sense?
I’m filling a stocking with treats when I hear a sound—the child, not asleep, two fingers in his mouth, looking at me with big eyes.
“You should be in bed,” I say, but he looks at me blankly. “Go on,” I say, fluttering my hands at him. Why do I have no magic for avoiding children? Probably because it’s magic I don’t want. “Back to bed.”
He removes the fingers from his mouth. Oh no, a screamer, I think. Instead, he asks, with a lisp, his two front teeth missing. “Are you … the witch? The Befana?”
Oh, those two names. I’ll never escape them. At least my ugliness is expected, now, with an epithet like “witch,” but Befana? Some corruption of the day’s name, the Epiphany, and not my own name at all. But this is besides the point.
“Yes,” I answer, “la Befana. Now get back to bed before I take back your treats.”
A scared glimmer in his eyes and he scurries back up the stairs. The Feast of the Three Kings, but as always the motivation is not worship but greed. I sigh, finish my task, swipe at the floor with my broom—I don’t actually clean other people’s houses!—take a sip of the wine, go silently out the door. Even pagans need their saints.
Experimental City 