When the rain stopped, the fields dried out. Fountaingrass and aster swayed, brittled by the sun. Purple flowers grew in sand. 

Katari went to the forest to find the witch. She stood beneath a gnarled oak, her face grooved like bark. Wind blew through her windchimes, metal scraps and discarded glass, bits of string. The forest swelled with life, the sound of a thousand insect wings. 

She made Katari tell the story of what happened to her body, the asymmetry of sun and moon. As Katari spoke, the witch stoked a fire, smoke billowed from the black cauldron into the afternoon sky. 

The witch handed Katari items to weave a cimaruta as she spoke.

Katari recounted how the only thing she ever did naturally was sing and dance. She danced for her grandmother in the kitchen and danced in the fields behind her home. Noticing her talents, her mother enrolled her in formal lessons, but Katari found the classical postures too restricting for her wild heart. Still, her movements brought pride and smiles to her sad family, so she learned to move in formal ways. 

“Her right arch caves,” the dance master said, suggesting she see a doctor, but her mother was too busy to correct the imbalance. She had other things on her mind, other priorities than her youngest daughter. 

Katari was in no pain. She thought little of it. She thought of other things, of what would happen to her soul when she died, of whether she was behaving just right. Her attention wandered, and wandered, rarely in her body, which was full of fear and dread. 

Katari wove her dancer’s shoe into a gnarled branch, telling the witch of the girls who despised her. How they threw her off the stage. 

“In love with a boy who loved you?” The witch grunted, knowingly.

“He tormented me too,” Katari said, explaining how they conspired and told the dancer master lies.

The witch handed Katari a dagger as she described the actions of the dance master. How one day she went to class and when the class was over, she never went back. 

The witch threw feathers in the cauldron.

Tears fell from Katari’s eyes.

“But that’s not all,” the witch said.

“No,” Katari said, weaving the bone of a swan into the charm, describing how over the years, she became more and more rigid. How she forgot her love of dancing. How no one smiled at her anymore, how her grandmother died, how her family members grew up and moved away. 

She spent many winters alone, reading tragedies, classics, and love stories, looking for something in the pages. She molded herself into unnatural positions, trying postures and poses to see what might earn her love. She forgot about herself. She worked and worked, her hand and limbs tightening with every repetitive movement. The women she worked alongside were cruel to her, called her strange. 

“What if you had a dream taken from you, before you even had the chance to dream?” 

The witch asked, blowing dust into the pot.

Katari threaded a moth beneath the rope. 

 “And then, your husband,” she said, handing Katari a quill. 

Katari described the accident, how her husband, the only one to show her consistent kindness, had, in distraction, pushed her off a ledge.

“Scar tissue,” the witch said, squeezing her own arms. “On the inside, it tightens and tightens until you can no longer move!” 

Tears fell from Katari’s eyes onto the cimaruta, her body seemingly split in two. 

“Come,” said the witch, beckoning Katari to follow her into the field.

Together they dug a hole, and the witch instructed Katari to lay inside. 

She handed Katari a cup and instructed her to drink. 

Katari lay down as the witch began to cover her with grass, flowers, and branches. Crows perched in the trees cackling, as the sun faded behind the horizon. The moon rose over shades of lavender and blue. When the witch had finished, she placed the cimaruta over the pile. 

Katari felt herself floating over her body, her face just visible beneath the pyre. Her expression was relaxed, the usual lines softened, as if she had let the whole world go.  

From above the treeline, she could see she wasn’t her body. The usual tension, holding, and tightness of scar tissue that had deepened over time was no longer present. Katari could see the body was relaxed, and wondered why she’d had such a hard time being inside her old form.

In the night, Katari moved through different bodies. She became a grasshopper in love with a flower that was melting in the rain. She became a milk snake molting in the grass. She became white moths, dancing over the reflection of a lake. She became a silver fish, shimmering in the afternoon sun, and then the river flowing over rocks and earth.

Her body stayed in the pyre for days and nights, until on the eighth night Katari awoke, and dug herself out of the hole, lifting the branches and dried flowers that covered her body. 

She walked through the woods, one side of her form still stiff. Smoke billowed, the witch sat over the fire, smoking from a pipe. With the witch was a fiddler, who began to play a song. 

The witch nodded at Katari who began to dance, lifting her arms, and twirling, like she had when she was a girl. 

“You have to move, to heal,” the witch whispered into the fire. The flames grew and grew, rising into a space in the canopy, into the stars and the whole of heaven. Katari felt the fire was her own heart, burning. 

She danced and danced, feeling the stiffness loosen and release, as though she was shedding old skin, molting like a sparrow. 

“Who would you be if you had been loved? 

Who would you be if you had a chance to dream? 

Who would you be if you had a chance to be?

Who lives within your body?” 

The witch sang and Katari sang, their voices intermingling and drifting through the forest and Katari knew that someday she would be the witch, and the witch would burn and rise with the smoke.