Fairly Late, She Finds Her Black Brick

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

1.

The baby’s father is dead and the turning leaves across New England are so beautiful, they must be fake. Gold and red, every direction Fiona turns. Maybe she is in love with this village. With its postcard-quaint storefronts, centuries old, and the town square a garden overstuffed with a rainbow of chrysanthemums. She parks to walk through it, hand on her belly. Starting to show. You could grow up here, she thinks. What kind of person would this place make you? Across the street children laugh happily.

She didn’t love the father, but still, it is a weird situation. She doesn’t want to go back to the city, ever. She’s thirty now. Old enough to get serious about life. There’s a lot of insurance money. But it is weird.

What if we make this town our home, she dares to think. Blackbrick, Vermont.

2.

“I have good intuition about you, Fiona. You’re not the usual leaf peeper.”

Erin Shay is a stout, florid country woman in her forties who introduces herself in the village pub, where Fiona has lingered after finishing lunch.

“Leaf peeper!” Fiona exclaims. “Is that what you call the city folk who breeze through in the fall?”

“Behind their backs, I’m afraid. Come over here, let’s talk.”

Erin introduces her to the bartender, Maryanne, a dark-eyed, horsey woman with naturally curly hair. Maryanne lines up three shot glasses, quick as a magic trick, and says, “Here comes the welcome wagon.” 

“Oh — I can’t. I’m — um. . .”

“I got you, babe,” Maryanne says. She flashes a bottle with a handwritten label. “Zero proof.” 

Erin leans in to make the moment conspiratorial. “When are you due?”

The hot blush that rushes to Fiona’s cheeks surprises her, and a laugh explodes from her in a sudden release of tension that she did not even know she had pent up. It makes her realize she has been thinking of her baby as a complication — but all at once, with these two strangers, that seems crazy. 

“May!”

“To new friends,” Erin says.

The liquid is thick and sweet, like blueberry syrup. Maryanne immediately sweeps the empty glasses and bottle from sight.

Fiona sits with them the rest of the afternoon, and feels herself unravel in a wonderful way. She tells them everything. She talks entirely too much.

“If you really like our town, Fiona—”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“Let’s get you a house here.”

“I’m staying at a B’n’B run by Marla. Do you know Marla?”

The two locals laugh. “This is not a big city. We know every lady you might name.”

“And the men worth knowing. I’ll call Billy. He shows our real estate.”

“Well. If it’s no trouble. . .”

“It is absolutely so simple.”

3.

“That’s the Witch’s Window,” Billy replies. “Over here—”

Fiona hates the window. 

It is an ordinary double-sash rectangular window, on the upper floor. However, it is installed at an angle. Under an eave of the house, where it would not fit upright, it is tilted toward its long side to match the angle of the eave. If it were square, that would make it a diamond, and fine. But rectangular, it looks simply — wrong. The decision of a lazy contractor to make an out-of-place part fit.

“What’s the next place on our list?” she says. 

He looks at the ground. “This’ll be the only house.”

Now, she wants to be polite. She has the impression Billy is Maryanne’s cousin, or Erin’s friend. 

“Why is it called the Witch’s Window?” she asks, hoping she sounds like she’s having fun with it. “Because you wonder which idiot thought it was a good idea?” 

Billy shrugs. He is a lumpy, defeated man, showing the house like it is a corpse at a wedding. “You see them every tenth house, this neck of the woods. It’s a Vermont thing. Now, over here. . .”

He really doesn’t show her any other houses. 

4.

In the two oldest rooms of the house, overstuffed chairs push up to a fireplace, and bookcases line the walls packed with paperback mysteries. But these rooms, built in 1750, have settled plenty askew. Her first night, sitting in one of the chairs, she starts to feels off-balance. Seasick. 

Her second week, she drops an earring, and she curses, expecting it to roll all the way across the floor — but it stops near her feet. So the room looks more crooked than it is. That is small comfort.

Pregnancy, she thinks, is making me way too sensitive.

The kitchen and the downstairs toilet were added in the 1880s. They are always frigid. She wears a jacket to cook, she goes upstairs to avoid the chilly seat.

The rest of the house was added in 1965. A garage, a den, four bedrooms upstairs. But while more comfortable, these rooms also feel cheaply built, with a linoleum bathroom, nails popping out of sheetrock, carpeting only as soft as a welcome mat. And of course the witch’s window. 

That’s in a room with an angled ceiling. She can’t stand up in half the room. To whose specs was it built? However it’s the only bedroom that gets good afternoon light, so she does sit on its daybed sometimes. With her back to the window.

5.

Jenny invites her to Thanksgiving dinner. Like everyone else, Jenny grew up in town, but she is the same age as Fiona and she tried living in Boston for two years, so they have hit it off, former city girls. Jenny’s house is frilly and toasty, heated by its oven, which runs nonstop. Billy is Jenny’s husband. It does not feel remotely like their house. It is Jenny’s.

Jenny’s sister comes over, and a neighbor named Hannah, and their husbands too. All the men are like Billy. Nonentities, murmuring in front of football in the den, missing all the fun in the kitchen. 

Out the kitchen window, Fiona watches Jenny’s daughter and Hannah’s girl run around the yard. Hannah’s son too, though he’s only four, he can’t keep up. Fiona feels giddy with a vision of her own child running around with friends.

At dinner, Hannah’s hubby insists on “saying grace,” which he says in a halting, choking manner while Fi catches the women exchanging low-key eyerolls. 

The food is startling, with rich, nuanced flavors coaxed from herbs Fiona can barely identify. The women laugh merrily throughout. The men veer from blank-faced to dour, occasionally pronouncing some opinion, out of step with the fun. Fiona wishes they were not present.

She won’t drink wine, as much as she’d like too, but the thoughtfulness of the women of Blackbrick astonishes her. Jenny produces a flask: “Maryanne dropped this off. No alcohol, strictly for you and the baby. Let’s sweeten you up, sweetie.”

This one tastes like caramel.

After dinner Erin drops by with her husband Larson (even the compelling Erin is married to a dope) bringing a homemade cinnamon loaf, and they stay for half a cup of coffee. 

Fiona makes a speech thanking everyone for inviting her. “Into your homes, and into your hearts.”

More women drop by. Erin explains it is a Blackbrick tradition, making the rounds to taste everyone’s cooking.

“What a way to celebrate. What a community.”

Erin says, “It is so simple, Fiona. This town is full of amazing cooks.” 

But she also gives Fiona a look that implies, yes, what we’ve got here is special, we know it. And you’re becoming a part of it.

6.

Erin keeps her busy as Christmas approaches. Helping to festoon the pub (Erin’s home away from home) with evergreen branches, going door to door with homemade cakes. Erin is a prolific baker.

Even so, taking lunch alone one day at a window table in the pub, Fiona feels blue. On the sidewalk men plod past, drones toting parcels on errands. The men here are such duds. If she ever wants to date again, is there one worth five minutes?

The season makes her miss her city friends too, even if they have kind of written her off since she “went rural.” She misses the energy of crowds, the city’s Christmas décor — although Blackbrick certainly goes all out. The town square alone—

She leaves her view of the men and the garden, she goes to the bar to ask Maryanne for a diet coke refill. With a nod at her window she says, “Nice view of the matriarchy today.”

Instead of laughing, Maryanne sustains eye contact in a manner that feels overtly purposeful. 

“You stick around, girl.”

Maryanne pours a swallow of one of her homebrew syrups alongside the diet coke. Like liquid marmalade.

Fiona sits back down to think about sticking around, about her new friends. She admires the remarkable evergreen effigy in the square. It is no Christmas tree, rather an assemblage of five pine trees lashed together and trimmed or sculpted into a striking figure of a man, erect on two legs, triangular torso sprouting arms. Face a broad mask woven from spruce, hair of jutting branches. The effigy is a town tradition. She watches Marla bring her children to lay flowers at its feet. The children are excited. She watches men shuffle past without a glance toward the figure, and she loses respect for every one of them, every man who neglects to behold the wonders his own home offers. 

7.

The baby makes her feel rich with creative energy — there has been no nausea, no surge of anxiety, at least not since New Year’s — and she used to want to be a songwriter. So she decides to record songs. For the baby. As Erin would say, it’s so simple. 

She gets into it, rekindling the old aspirations, researching the equipment that’s become available in the seven years since she touched a guitar. She orders what she needs. She picks a PreSonus AudioBox, small and large diaphragm condenser mics, decent cables — she always liked Mogami Silver. She finds a nice used acoustic guitar in a shop off the square called Second Thoughts, run by Rachel. The guitar is red. She turns one of the unused bedrooms upstairs into her recording studio.

Soon she remembers why she gave up songwriting. Still, after a month of struggle, she has created two songs that she can accept. She imagines her daughter — or son — listening to the recordings in five years. In ten. In fifty years. She feels all right.

Or she would, but there’s an echo in the recording. As if the bedroom were enormous. It’s faint, but definitely there in playback. 

Probably the cables. She orders Mogami Gold. 

This is important to get perfect. What if I die in childbirth, she thinks. My child will have only these recordings to know me. 

And like that, the era of no anxiety, of limitless creativity, is at an end. This is parenthood, isn’t it. Endless worry. Oh god, already she loves this baby so, so much. 

8.

Occasionally the house produces odors. Some as pleasant as an oven full of bread. Others more like a noseful of boiling swamp. Sour milk. Burning hair. 

One evening the aroma begins savory — she is able to identify it as wormwood only because in early November a woman named Gloria invited her for dinner, and Gloria explained she was boiling wormwood to make her house smell pleasant. But after an hour the air turns acrid in Fiona’s house, and she opens windows to get it out. Trees toss wildly in the wind, the tall grass of the field undulates violently, papers blow from a table — but the odor stays put. It even thickens to a bitter taste, as if all windows remain sealed. 

Maybe there’s no smell, she thinks, just hormones. 

Or I’m having a stroke. 

She gets in bed feeling uneasy. 

What if the baby resembles her ex? She doesn’t want to see his face. Ex isn’t the right word. He’s dead. 

She wishes she had gone to the pub tonight. Maryanne would pour her one of those sweet non-liqueurs. Candy for an adult and, better than that, she realizes, each sip comes with the ceremony of sharing, is a token of friendship. I have been welcomed here, I am home, and all these potions my friends provide will help me forget that bitter life I endured before I was welcomed.

9.

It is February when it occurs to Fiona to ask, “Why’s it called Blackbrick?” 

They’re in the pub. Erin looks at Maryanne before answering.

“There are various stories.”

Fiona gives her head a confide-in-me tilt. “What’s your favorite?”

Erin laughs, and looks around as if to make sure no is listening. 

“In Salem, when the witches were murdered in 1692, one of the accused escaped. Abigail Saunderfell.”

“Her neighbor swore before the judge,” Maryanne nods, “that his cows, after Abigail looked each one in the eye, stopped producing milk, and started to produce buckets of blood.”

“Lurid!” Fiona laughs.

Erin, more solemnly, says, “The neighbor theorized she got the power by having sex with a demon. He’d heard screams of passion from her house.”

“What did her husband say about that?”

Maryanne, no hint of humor to it, says, “He’d died two weeks before in a freak accident.”

“Abigail knew she was about to be arrested. She’d never left Salem before, but now it was that or die, and she fled more than a hundred miles through the woods. Searching for an infamous inn, at a crossroads. The innkeeper had passed through Salem once, and shown no religious feeling, and he was still spoken of there as a servant of the devil. She didn’t know where else to turn. But when she arrived, she found the inn had burnt to the ground. Only a blackened chimney stood at the crossroads, to signal she had indeed come to the right place, but — no sign of her potential friend.”

“Now, a pair of tiny sheds stood back at the edge of the clearing. So she had some luck.”

“Yes. She moved into one of the sheds. And reckoned that if the crossroads had once supported an inn, it could do so again. She started by renting out the second shed to travelers.”

Maryanne pours one of her syrups, slides the glass to Fiona. Erin continues.

“When spring came, Abigail directed her manliest customers to pay her in labor, and so, by winter, she was able to build a new, larger inn. And shortly, around that, the village sprung up.”

“And this led to the name Blackbrick…” Fiona prompts.

“Right! Sorry. When the new inn was complete, our Abigail took apart the old inn’s chimney, and welcomed each new settler to the village with the gift of a brick from it. A blackened brick. Good luck token to incorporate into whatever home they intended to build for themselves here.”

Fiona gasps. “What a story! How true is it?”

“True as the wind,” Erin says.

She has a dozen questions, she presses and cajoles. Does her house have a brick? Does the pub?

“Well, whenever an old house is knocked down, an eye is kept out for its brick, to use in the new house, but—”

They resist a while. But eventually, they do take her down a narrow stone staircase to the cellar of the pub.

There they show her a tiny room, not much bigger than a closet, with brick walls, in rows uneven, like fences running up and down hills, like red teeth in a mouth that needed braces, all the bricks mottled with age, some faded to orange, edges worn down, some stained crystalline white, the mortar patched messily many times and using diverse recipes, cracks showing, spiders webbing every corner. But the alcove is not filthy. It has been cleaned, over the years, and is not used for storage — housing only a single wooden crate, with a candle on it. Clearly the women respect the historical importance of the space. And they do because one brick, occupying approximately the central position in the back wall, at about chest level, or eye level if people were shorter back then, is scorched black.

“Amazing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Oh, look at the cross, Maryanne, it’s fallen, hasn’t it. Looks like the upper fastener has fallen out. Should we look for it? On the floor?”

“It’ll be too small in this light. We’ll get another.”

“We can’t forget.”

What the two women fuss over is a cross of bundled sticks, its intersection bound with an X of straw, which appears to have been fixed to the wall below the black brick by two nails, the upper of which has vanished, permitting the cross to swing down on its lower nail, and hang inverted.

“I have a flashlight on my phone,” Fiona volunteers— 

“No, no, let’s not get filthy. Back upstairs! We were having a nice visit.”

They maneuver her upstairs and she laughs, because she understands that no nail has fallen out. The blasphemy on the wall is a playful tribute to Abigail, all these generations later, a thumbed nose at her Puritan tormentors. And when Fiona laughs, Erin does too, and Maryanne briefly circles an arm around Fiona’s shoulder when they get back to the bar.

So now a truth is shared. Though unspoken.

10.

The Mogami Golds don’t eliminate the echo. She uninstalls and reinstalls software. She moves the equipment into the smallest bedroom, the one with the witch’s window. The echo gets worse. 

Songwriting is, she decides, maybe just a phase. A last hurrah. Simple as that. My baby is about to change me. My quaint village baby.

11.

By her eighth month, Fiona holds a clear vision of what fun these ladies have. Queens of a town woman-ruled from the start. A perfect family — and what a heritage of independence and warmth is theirs.

Obviously, they’re witches. In spirit, anyway. And, she thinks, I’m going to be a Blackbrick witch too.

She makes a move to get the unspoken — spoken.

“You know what I really can’t get used to, in my house?” she says. “That window everyone calls a witch’s window. I see them all over town, but. . .”

“It’s a quirk, isn’t it,” Erin says.

Maryanne hurries to finish helping other customers, clearly not wanting to miss this conversation.

Fiona says, “You know, I googled ‘witch’s window.’ But even Wikipedia is vague about them.”

Maryann says, “I love Wikipedia. I do some editing there, myself.”

“Oh good! You should improve this entry. It only says that superstition says, okay, that a flying witch — on a broom, I guess — can’t enter your house through a crooked window. Does that sound right?”

Maryanne’s expression betrays nothing. She says, “Even a house with a witch’s window has its other windows straight. How would one crooked window protect you?”

“What’s to stop a witch from using your front door?” Erin says. 

“Exactly!” Fiona rests both hands atop her massive belly. “Witches are highly intelligent. Don’t you think?”

“It’s only an old belief,” Erin says.

“Is it? Beliefs don’t confine themselves to one corner of one state. You’d see these windows in Massachusetts, if it was a belief. Ohio. On old buildings in Brooklyn. But something real, now, that you see only where it’s needed.”

“Fiona,” Erin says, “are you suggesting witches are real, here in Blackbrick?”

Fiona fights to hold Erin’s gaze.

“Call me insane, if I’m wrong.”

“You’re not insane.” 

“Imaginative, for sure,” Maryanne says. “A magic quality. Now, a toast to that magic.”

She pours a shot of her syrup for Fiona.

Fiona is happy. She knows they can’t say anything concrete until — Ha! Until her initiation ceremony.

12.

Fervently she hopes it’s a girl. A boy she would love, of course; but she wants a child to be outrageously proud of. A heroine, a goddess. A boy, second-class citizen, would dim her future here.

She actually has a nightmare of coming home from the hospital with a boy, and Erin and Maryanne going cold on her. It’s awful, and she wakes from it only when a name is spoken aloud, distinctly, by someone in her bedroom. 

She lies rigid. Heart thundering. The baby kicks inside her, as if in panic. 

But she sees no one in the room.

Abigail. That is the name she heard.

13.

“The ground is thawing,” Maryanne says on a visit to her house one evening. “It’s spring.”

Fiona sighs, “When you say stuff like that, I realize what a city girl I still am. Thawing?”

Abruptly, Maryanne kisses her. Lips, tongue, the works.

It seems fine. Lesbianism had never occurred to her. But it feels natural, after the initial time-freezing surprise of it. She likes when Maryanne places both hands on her enormous belly, so gently, so protectively, mid-kiss. 

After the kiss, however, Maryanne is casual, as if nothing has changed. So it was not lesbianism. Was it. Friendship, maybe? Love. It’s a small town and we’re all in it together, out here. Fiona doesn’t know thawing but after a winter in this empty house surrounded by fields and forest she has got a sense of what Blackbrick must have been. What Abigail’s inn must have meant to travelers. In the old part of Fiona’s house, even in the new part, it is easy to feel that heartless world, its hostility yet howling in the wind, rattling the eaves, still descending in the night, still rising with the moon, wolves and worse on the other side of mere walls. The world out here is not much changed since the day of that black chimney, she thinks, and it must have been terrifying to be a lone woman then, and to oppose it there must have been born a tradition of tenderness that abides even now.

I’m joining that tradition, she thinks. I’m through the winter. My own winter, and winter itself. It doesn’t feel cold anymore. It feels like anticipation. Spring is a thaw. That’s all that kiss means.

14.

When she calls first Dr. Amy and then Maryanne because she is in labor, it is 2 a.m., warm and humid. The hospital will be a twenty-minute drive. Waiting for Maryanne to show, she waddles through the house, turning off all the lights, focusing, singing, breathing.

At the door, Maryanne’s eyes are alight with anticipation. “Ready, Freddy?” 

“Thank you so much for doing this.”

“Don’t thank me. Turn left.”

“Left?”

Maryanne guides her not toward the car, but around the side of the house.

“Fiona. I am so happy. And so sad. It’s wonderful.”

Fiona follows Maryanne’s gaze up toward the eaves. In the witch’s window, the light is on. She knows she turned it off. 

Odder still, a crowd moves inside. Sounds of a merry gathering tinkle out into the night.

And next Fiona finds her hand gripped within Maryanne’s larger hand, and she falls, she tumbles — or so it feels. 

She is not falling. She is ascending, into the night. Like a vast round balloon. She lets out a soft, exhilarated cry as Maryanne lets go, and she keeps flying, toward the window.

Inside is a party. And inside — is not the smallest bedroom. It is the interior of a large, cluttered log cabin, nearly the size of the whole house. Packed with women. Lit by shimmering candles and the blaze of oil lamps. And everything within stands at a diagonal — or perfectly straight, truly, but on a floor angled to match the window.

Fiona drifts through the opening, belly barely fitting, laughing about it, trying to remember to breathe, and the chatter falls silent as all the women of the village turn to behold her with wet eyes and smiles. She drifts past the diagonal Jenny and Marla, happy. Everyone holds a silver chalice, and holds it up as if to toast her as she passes. The witch’s window is the only window in the tilted cabin. She drifts by Rachel. By Gloria. 

At last whatever force holds her aloft sets her down in front of Erin, to stand herself at the witch’s angle. And now, as all she can see is at this angle, so it becomes her new normal. So it becomes real. Real — this ancient house inside her house, knocked to this tilt. 

Erin stands beside a table of herbs and broths, in front of an enormous fireplace. Black bricks dot its stonework. Erin’s face is beet-red from the fire.

“Fiona, we are the daughters of Abigail.”

“Abigail!” shouts the coven.

Fiona, quaking, excited, says, “Sisters! I am home.”

Laughter ripples through the room.

“Our home,” Erin says. “Leaf peeper.”

The hands that seize Fiona and pin her to a table cannot be mistaken for friendly. In an instant her clothes are cut away. She is naked. The smiles all around her, she now sees, hold some dark gluttony in their teeth.

Erin wields a curved knife.

“Abigail!” she shouts. “We honor you!” 

Fiona, confused, thinks to say, “My baby might be a girl.”

A voice from the crowd replies, “Indeed she is!” Fiona knows that voice, but through the women holding her down, she can’t see Dr. Amy. “And sweeter for it.”

When the first slice crosses her massive belly, it is Maryanne who tilts a chalice against her flesh, an empty chalice, to catch the first flow of blood. The baby kicks. They all press in with their chalices. Fiona sees now the chalices are all empty. Ready for blood. The second slice, the sixth. These early cuts are relatively shallow but her bleeding is profuse. Maryanne sips it, glowing. Every chalice takes blood. Jenny and Rachel remind Fiona to breathe. It seems they want a natural birth.

“What is — why are you — my baby girl—”

Fiona is incoherent with pain and fear.

The coven in one voice tells Fiona, “Push!” 

“It’s so simple,” whispers Erin, as she adjusts the cauldron at the edge of the birthing table.

The cauldron is empty and ready.

The end

Comments & Writer’s Notes: If there’s no way in, tilt it