His

He was past caring if she noticed that he didn’t care for what passed for art these days. An old cord with feathers stabbed through it? Any child could do that. In fact, he had done the like as a child. He’d picked feathers around the chicken coop and poked them into cracks in the wall, horse bridles, the weave of the hammock that hung on the porch. And he’d even used different types of feathers and patterns sometimes. He’d known how to at least find good ones: long and firm and spotted and speckled and brown and golden and white as Grandma’s fake teeth after they’d soaked in baking soda and vinegar. This? Any kid raised on a farm had seen better than this.

Hers

She yearned to touch it. The witch ladder, that is. Not the glass. The roped cord was fine, but she wondered what it would be like to make one from knotted hair; hair streaked with gray and white and long enough to hold the memory of heartbreak and disappointment. She counted the feathers. Fifty. Some of them were almost beautiful. Most were a little frazzled and even broken at the quill. Some barely had vanes, they looked like a cat’s fur after an unwanted bath: wilted, unbecoming, but still containing a dignity of sorts. Maybe the feathers were omens. Maybe each feather was knotted into a spell that shaped a year, protected its owner. Maybe each was a birthday gift to children and children’s children: a promise for new seasons to begin. Maybe the protection wears off at fifty. Maybe that is when you gain the power to knot your own spells.

*Publisher’s Note:

Marina Abramović at Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM): A site-specific installation featuring the Serbian performance artist’s new video works, The Witch Ladder and Presence and Absence (24 September 2022 thru 2 April 2023).

To view a large still from the video which shows the artist with The Witch Ladder, along with five drawings she produced in response to her interaction with the object, see the middle panel of the PRM exhibition leaflet.

(Links were retrieved on 19 December 2022.)

Amy Marques

grew up between languages and cultures and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She penned three children’s books, barely read medical papers, and numerous letters before turning to short fiction and visual poetry. Her work was nominated for Best of the Net 2023 by Streetcake Magazine and is published or forthcoming in journals including Jellyfish Review, Gone Lawn, Star82 Review, and Sky Island Journal.

Author’s website: https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com