Noora and the Witch

Author's Note: This is meant to be sort of a follow-up to my earlier short story, entitled "The Troll Who Loved a Girl". It also involves Anna-Maria, of course, but this time her little sister is introduced, and goes on an adventure all on her own, during which she meets both a bog-witch and a talking magpie. Sounds kind of strange, right? Well, read it anyway, and, as always, enjoy! It's finally finished, thank goodness.

The witch’s bird wheeled high overhead, monochrome against a roiling gray sky, calling up the summer storm with rasping magpie screeches that tore jagged invisible rifts in the air, giving way to thunder and lightning.

Without warning, hail the size of marbles began to plummet down from swiftly-moving dark clouds, blown this way and that in an irregular pattern by a violent gust of wind that cruelly rattled the slender branches of birch trees and caused them to tangle roughly. But then a second wind, coming from the opposite direction, fought bravely against the other to shake the birches apart. And for a time, all was well.

It began to rain. Anna-Maria and Noora-Kristiina were caught in it where they’d been playing at the lake near their house, and they quietly suffered the harsh sting of the hail as it pummeled their heads and arms without mercy.

Anna-Maria took her little sister by the hand, and together they trudged home, completely appalled at how quickly the weather had changed: just that morning the day had been fine and clear with absolutely no sign of the oncoming gale.

“I thought there weren’t going to be any more storms this year,” Noora-Kristiina said sadly, gripping Anna-Maria’s hand even tighter. The five-year-old hated the hail, and stifled back tears.

“Ah, you never know, I guess,” Anna-Maria replied shortly. “It’s all right, Noora. We’re almost home.”

Above and behind them, the magpie saw that his work was nearly finished. He swooped low and perched on an old wooden fence, eyeing the hair of young humans with a black-eyed expression that was both wary and amused. He might have stayed on the fence a bit longer, but his witch was on the prowl, and he knew that he should probably be with her.

So the witch’s bird rose up and left. Anna-Maria and Noora-Kristiina hadn’t taken any notice of her at all. It was raining hard, but the house they lived in was finally in sight where the worn dirt back road ended, and in that moment they were too relieved to think of anything else.

*

The witch stood alone at the highest point of the bog she haunted and squinted into the bright, storm-scoured sky, which was like a dead man’s eye except for the menacing presence of several iron-gray streaks suspended slightly above the tree-lined horizon.

She expected to see the familiar dark shape of the magpie making his way back home through the clouds any minute now. And when the bird finally did appear, the witch could hardly keep back her annoyance.

“Harakka!” she hissed with a touch of anger, before the bird had even touched ground. “Where have you been? The storm we created was over some time ago, and yet you didn’t return. I suggest you explain yourself to me this instant.”

But the bird only cackled hoarsely and took his time in perching atop a stunted and scraggly marsh pine before adding to Inkeri’s newest argument. After a moment Harakka said in his usual crowing, cocky way, “Watching, watching, Inkeri. I was only watching the children.”


“Children?” the witch scoffed. “What children are there here, of all places? A bog is no place for heedless children, who could so easily stray off the marked paths and drown. The bog is only for stranger creatures like you and I, and for a few of those troublesome trolls, maybe—but no one else.”

“No, not so, Inkeri,” gently admonished the pied bird, ruffling his damp feathers. “The children haven’t strayed into the bog, but they’re not very far from it.” Harakka raised a single black wing and held it, fully outstretched, to point towards the forest.

The witch understood what the bird meant, then, and nodded mutely. A colony of people lived somewhere beyond that dark, serrated expanse of birches, linden, and pine; the girls were sisters, one dark and one fair. Harakka had never actually it, but Inkeri knew. She read many of the old bird’s thoughts. Indeed, their minds ran somewhat parallel to each other, meaning that once in a great while, it was possible for the witch to pick up on her friend’s thoughts and memories entirely. During such a rare time the witch was able to gain access to information that had been all but lost by the world around them. Harakka was very old, and had seen quite a lot happen in his day.

The witch made it her personal mission to be an acolyte of sorts, and learn every possible thing the old bird had to teach her before it became too late.

Neither magpie nor witch had ever known true friendship with anyone other than themselves. They were lonely, ghostly beings who reveled in nasty weather and the murky waters of their silent, green marsh, and that was all.

*

“Äiti,” Noora-Kristiina began the next day, when the rain had come to an abrupt end, leaving behind a vault of clear blue sky and a softly shining sun. “Can I go outside and play in the woods?”

“Yes, of course,” Noora’s mother said. “But why would you ever want to do that? Isn’t it too dark in the woods?”

“I like it better when it’s dark,” Noora-Kristiina answered with a small, uneven grin. “The sun hurts my eyes.”

“Then wear sunglasses.”

“I don’t much like those, either. They always hurt my nose.”

Hearing that, Noora’s mother laughed and brought the little girl into a tight hug. “All right, Noora. Just don’t go too far. We’d never want you to get lost in those woods. Stay on the path, and don’t try to jump off of any especially big rocks. You could hurt yourself, you know.”

“I know, Äiti,” Noora-Kristiina replied truthfully. “I won’t get lost, I promise. And I won’t get hurt, either, really.”

“Good girl,” Noora’s mother said, and she let the little girl go on her way. Besides, no actual harm could come to her in the forest, could it? The woods were as safe a place as any…

Out in the sweet-scented open air, Noora lept joyously off the porch and fell lightly on her knees. But she wasn’t at all hurt. She walked past the garden, where the rabbit hutch also was, and stopped for a while to take the quivering spotted rabbit out of his wire-faced wooden box to play with him. Noora would have liked to let the rabbit accompany her into the shady forest, but there was always the chance of the rabbit bolting away from her and being lost. So, with a bit of a sigh, Noora-Kristiina grinned at the rabbit and, stroked him one last time, and put him safely back into the hutch.

She glanced around the garden, wondering if Anna-Maria’s troll was standing anywhere nearby. Noora had never really been afraid of him, as her sister was, but on occasion he could sometimes appear out of nowhere and surprise anybody for the worse.

“Rölli, what are you doing?” Noora whispered in a friendly way, but no reply came that she could hear.

Noora left the familiarity of her backyard and began her lonesome trek into the forest, which she knew little of.

*

The witch had never cared to consort with humans. People weren’t good for very much. They cut down the birches, uprooted and disturbed things whenever it struck their fancy, and continuously failed to pay proper homage to the old creatures who had known this land in its earliest days.

More than once, Inkeri found herself longing to relinquish her young-womanish form for that of an orange-spotted toadstool, ahma, or bird, as Harakka himself had somehow done, more years ago than she cared to add.

But as Harakka had once mentioned to her, though a witch might grow powerful enough to shape-shift after a lifetime of extremely difficult practice, a witch could never decide on her own just what she would become after the change occurred.

Harakka had been a shaman for one hundred years before he was ever a magpie who could summon up storms and the like, and had long since came to the conclusion that he’d become a magpie, rather than a thousand other things he could have been, simply because his general personality had best matched that of a magpie during his life as a shaman.

Inkeri, however, didn’t believe herself to have much of a true personality. There was only that still kind of despair she sometimes felt about things, so she had absolutely no idea of what bird, plant, or beast she most resembled.

Right now it didn’t matter, anyway.

Inkeri’s eyes narrowed sharply as she saw the stumpy brown troll ambling up towards her, grinning mischievously from ear to pointed ear. Rölli’s long, gray-tufted tail drug the ground, only to pick up again in a low inverted arch.

“Huomenta, Witch,” Rölli greeted congenially. “What do you, if I may ask, on this dreary summer day?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Inkeri retorted sarcastically. She was, in fact, rebuilding the narrow pile of angular flat rocks that had fallen down on the edge of the marsh. All the safe paths through the marshy land were marked by such recognizable objects, so no one would ever stray off the paths and drown.

Inkeri peered slyly up from her work, meeting Rölli square in the eyes. “Was it you and Muratti who knocked this all down?” she said a bit rudely. Muratti was an old-woman troll with hair like wilting vines who sometimes liked to accompany Rölli on his gallivanting.

Rölli, however, simply shook his head at the young witch’s usual impudence, flashing that same old toothy sort of troll smile Inkeri had grown so used to over the years, and said in a very casual way, “I just came to warn you: there’s a little human in those woods right now, and she’s coming ever closer. If you see her, don’t try to scare her, and don’t let her get hurt.”

“What?” Inkeri grumbled, feeling quite ill at ease with the way her morning was already turning out. “Humans in the bog, again? Won’t they ever leave us alone?”

“Oh, learn to love them,” Rölli told her in a growling tone. “That little girl’s sister is my friend. If you remember, she was that one I told you about once, who had eyes the same color as harebells.”

“Yes, I remember you saying that,” Inkeri muttered absentmindedly, throwing herself wholeheartedly into the rocks.

She really wasn’t in a very good mood.

Inkeri wondered if the little human girl Rölli seemed to cherish so much was one of those same human children Harakka had chanced upon just the other day, during that bad thunderstorm.

*

Half an hour later the little girl appeared at the edge of the forest, just as Rölli has mentioned she might.

Noora-Kristiina realized with a sudden jolt of fear that she was lost. She stepped down from the low bank at the edge of the forest that lay opposite to her house, and silently began her climb up the imperceptible mossy rise of the hill, trying to figure out just how far away from home she'd accidentally gone.

The gound beneath her feet was spongey and wet. Young as she was, Noora noticed this immediately and began to place her feet more carefully as she entered the rocky moss-green and mostly treeless expanse of what she vaguely recognized as a marsh of some sort.

"Where am I?" Noora whispered timidly, thinking that no one would hear. But in quiet places like this, which at the first hasty glance might seem devoid of all manner of life, Noora was being studied by many pairs of curious and ever-watchful eyes.

Things happened very quickly.

The little girl felt as though she wasn't quite alone, and didn't like it. In the past, when she was especially small and absolutely terrified of the dark, Noora would wake up from her misty nightmares screaming wildly, and when her mother came to see what the matter was, Noora wept and told her about the creatures that just wouldn't stop staring her down, regardless of how cleverly she tried to turn away from their inevitable owl-like gaze. Her mother had tried comfort Noora by telling her that the eyes she felt were only those of angels, and that there was no reason to be afraid.

Somehow, though, that had always seemed to scare Noora-Kristiina even more. There was no escape!

Noora spun haphazardly around to meet her persecutor head on, and she encountered the witch, who had come up only seconds before to stand right behind the little human. To some extent, the witch was just as afraid of Noora as Noora was of her, and niether knew what to expect from the other.

Noora-Kristiina saw Inkeri and cried out in sudden heart-stopping fear. The witch did pretty much the same. Her hand flew to her brest, and she drew back sharply.

"Who are you?" Inkeri ventured, never once letting her guard down.

"What?" Noora-Kristiina said in surprise.

"Did you come from the place beyond the woods?" Inkeri wanted to know next. She regarded the little girl suspiciously. Her white-blonde hair was so find that it curled within the confines of its braids, but her beguilingly upturned eyes were the brackish, shadowed green of marsh water. These eyes were the only steel in Noora's nature. Otherwise, the child looked undeniably sad and lost. Inkeri couldn't help but pity her.

Noora remembered being told several times before by both of her parents that she should never tell a stranger where she lived, no matter how generally harmless the stranger might seem to be. And the little girl wasn't sure of exactly who this deathly pale, disheveled woman was. So she decided to simply ignore the question she'd been asked as to where she came from.

The witch saw no reason to ask her a second time.

Inkeri clicked her tongue, and the unexpected noise of it made Noora jump, after which the girl had to fight to keep her breath sounding slow and normal. Her heart raced tremendously.

"Can you tell me your name, little one?" the witch said waveringly, trying to be as congenial as possible, as to cause no further fear in the lost child.

"I am Noora," the little girl answered, unwillingly. And Inkeri actually felt the urge to shrink back from the girl, so that the girl wouldn't shrink back near as much from her.

"Noora," the witch repeated with some of an unaccustomed smile. "The name has a good sound to it."

Noora-Kristiina said no more of her name. She only whispered, shy of the witch's disapproval, "Please, I am lost."

"Yes, I certainly thought so," Inkeri replied quietly. "I've been watching you since you first got here, the magpie, and I--" Inkeri turned away for a moment to fling a graceless gesture towards the birch trees, where she thought Harakka might be, though at the moment, the shaman-turned bird had flown off somewhere, and was completely out sight.

"I noticed that you walked out of the forest," the witch finished accurately. "Do you live there? If so, then tell me, because you're very young, and I think that it's quite important for me to see you safely back to your home. You don't have to be afraid of me, little Noora, fierce as I look." At that, she gave a short, happy cackle and cocked her head to study Noora at a different angle.

Noora-Kristiina fixed the witch with a wary buy truly hopeful expression. "Will you really help me?" she said.

"Of course I'll help you. I've said it once before, and I'll say it a thousand times. The bog is no place for children, ever."

"How old are you, though?" Noora-Kristiina asked impetuously, not knowing quite why that particular question came to her mind and was spoken aloud. Noora hoped that the woman hadn't been offended by it.

Inkeri, however, only smiled a bit further before saying firmly, "That doesn't matter. Let's just get you home where you belong, right now."

And Noora nodded, allowing the witch to take hold of her hand as they entered the forest together.

High above where no one could see, Harakka was flying and keeping watch of things with a keen eye, as he did often.

*

The found a place between the darkening linden trees which Noora-Kristiina said she recognized, and that was where Inkeri left her to navigate the rest of the path on her own.

One minute the witch was still there, standing beside Noora, and the next minute she was gone without a trace.

Noora shivered slightly at the witch's strange dissapearance, but in the end stared straight ahead and began to walk purposefully, more eager than ever to finally get back home.

It seemed as though she'd been gone for hours on end, and the listless gray light in the forest reminded her strongly of oncoming twilight. But she'd never seen the pulsing orange glow of the sun dipping down behind the trees. Maybe it really wasn't that late, after all. And now, in truth, the sky didn't seem much less bright than it had been when she first went on her impromtu journey.

The little girl reached home the same way she'd left it, on the narrow, mossy path by the high stone wall of her garden. She stepped out of the woods, preparing herself for the trouble she'd surely get into for being gone for such a long time, and for going so far away from the house, as well, but when Noora's mother came to meet her at the door, she wasn't angry.

"Did you find anything interesting in those woods today, Noora?" her mother asked with a little grin, having absolutely no idea of just what sort of things her daughter had actually encountered while she was lost in the bog.

But Noora said, "No, Äiti. There wasn't too much to see out there today. How long have I been gone?"

"Oh, only about half an hour or so," Noora's mother answered, and then, when she saw the horrified look cross her daughter's face like a dark cloud, she fleetingly wondered if Noora was getting sick.

"Äiti," Noora-Kristiina breathed with a great and heavy weariness. "My head's spinning. What's wrong with me?" Her head drooped and she seemed to wilt completely. This was crazy. Noora had wandered through the forest for at least an hour before stumbling onto the marsh and finding the woman who had helped her get back home.

*

The woman! Noora had never even learned her name.

Nor had Noora ever actually known that she was, in fact, a witch. Such an uncanny explanation for the stranger's sudden comings and goings had never crossed Noora's young mind. And why should it have? Encountering the rare manner of witch who wishes to hold up permenant residence in a watery Lapland bog with no company aside from a talking magpie and the occasional garden troll isn't exactly an everyday occurence.

"So, when you went outside earlier today, you got past the woods?" Anna-Maria asked her younger sister later that night when it had grown very dark and they were supposed to be sleeping. Noora couldn't sleep at all, and Anna-Maria could only imagine why.

"Yeah," Noora replied. It was really weird. First, there was nothing but the kind of trees that we always see around here. And then I came to this green, marshy sort of place, where there were a whole lot of rocks, and such."

"But how can that be, Noora? There's not supposed to be anything at all on the other side of the forest! I always thought that there must just be another neighborhood around there. Nothing more than that..."

"I know what I saw, Anna," Noora-Kristiina whispered in the pitch-black darkness of the girl's bedroom.

"Well, I believe you. But it would've been nice if you'd found out what that woman's name was. What did she look like?"

"Mm, she looked...not like us. I think she had been living in that bog for a very long time, and that's what scared me most about her, I think, to begin with. Her brown hair was long and tangled, and everything about her was ragged and tattered. Her eyes were gray."

"You mean, blue-gray, like Nikki's?"

"No...I mean gray, dark gray, like thunderclouds, or something. And she was so pale, Anna. She looked very sick, and maybe very sad."

"What did she sound like?"

"Funny. I don't know where she was from. The way she talked reminded me of Rölli, and the kinds of things he says."

"That scary troll," Anna-Maria sighed, sounding very old and wold-weary for her age. "Are you sure that this woman you saw wasn't really a troll? She wasn't Muratti?"

"No," Noora-Kristiina said after a short moment. "But something about her made me think of ivy."

United States of Mexico?

All right: so immigration in the United States has been a very serious and touchy subject for quite some time now, and even if the level of my basic writing skills isn't high enough to permit me to compose a full essay on what I personally feel about immigration rates and where they stand today, I would like to try anyhow, because it's not the Mexican immigrants who are troubling me. It's the American immigration officials themselves, and how a lot of the Mexican people are beging treated in this country.

This morning I was hanging out at Smiley's Flea Market, where I work on and off during the year, from about April to September, dealing mostly with the WWII items, GI-Joes, and Star Wars figurines my dad has managed to collect throughout his life. This, as you can probably imagine, is where I come off telling a lot of people who think I'm older than I really am for whatever reason that I work as an "antique dealer", of sorts. It's a job I truly do enjoy, and unlike many people, I have a genuine love for history, which is how I'm able to retain quite a bit of knowledge when it comes to objects of the Second World War, at least. I also have a great love for languages. I speak Finnish with reasonable proficiency, as well as some Swedish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. And with the exception of these first two languages I just mentioned, such foreign dialects can definitely come in handy when you're working at the flea market, where you encounter people from a number of different countries...

Including, of course, the Mexican-Americans, who flock to the flea market by the hundreds, whether it be to buy secondhand clothes from me, or to sell eggplants and tomatoes to me that are cheaper and usually of far better quality than any you can hope to find in a grocery store. I watch how the Mexican families walk through the rows of cement tables at Smiley's with their friends and kids, simply seeing what there is to see. Since Spanish is their native language, they speak it amazingly fast and fluently. A lot of the older Americans passing them by, who haven't had the chance to study Spanish in school as much as the younger generation has, often wonder what they might be saying to one another. And that's innocent enough. Then, however, the American people turn right around and say that they can't understand for the life of them just why there are so many Mexican immigrants, and illegal ones at that, coming into this country to "take our jobs" and such. But what I'm saying is that, how can anyone even dare to ask a question like that, and expect the answer they want as the truth?

That's what I'm trying to make my general point out to be: life in Mexico can be extremely hard for underprivledged individuals, and if they get tired of it and decide to leave the country of their birth for good, there's so much to do. None of it is easy. Immigration rights are exceptionally difficult to come by. I can tell you about this myself, because for the last three years I've been in constant contact with the Finnish Embassy of America to find out about how and when I'll be able to acquire the residence permit that will allow me to reside in Finland for more than three months. Trying to get into a country legally is just about the most nerve-racking thing a person can try to deal with. It's full of confustion, fines, deadlines, and horrible little details that are all too easy to forget, with everything else on your shoulders, as well. So, I can see why deception and running from the border control might sometimes be an option. Plus, America is such a large country, it's easy to dissapear into a crowd and never be found again. In moving to Finland, I already know that I won't be anywhere near as lucky, or else I'd probably jump at the opportunity to function as an illgal immigrant, too; Finland is a small country with a population of only about 5,000,000. I could be wrong, but I think that Rhode Island alone, which is such a small American state, has about that many people living in it, or more.

Sometimes I wish that there no such thing as "countries". I wish that there were no borders, or border controls, or anything at all like that. Wouldn't that make it so much easier for everybody? If there were none of that, but still things like airplanes and ships that could carry people to and from different places in the world, just as long as you could still pay the correct fee, it'd be pretty darn cool. I could go to Finland and stay there forever, just as any Mexican citizen who wants to come here and try to better their life could come here with ho hassling or threats, and do so, and be happy.

I have an immense hatred for all the billboards I've been seeing around Asheville lately which depict things like a Mexican flag rising over an upside-down American flag, just like I hated it this morning at Smiley's when I heard some Yankee say the words "United States of Mexico" as a stupid reference to the high majority of Mexicans at the flea market. If they don't like it, then they should leave, and leave the Mexican-Americans along, whether they've come over here illegally, or not.

At least most of the Mexicans actually care something about their kids and keep them clean. unlike many of these American rednecks and yuppies. That alone shows you that there can't be all that much wrong with them. Right?