The Carnival of the Witch
by Kel Rocha
The sparrows will take her hair.
They’ll pull the dark straw off her head for their nests, and once they figure the hair thin and strong, they’ll tighten each of its ends between the branches. They’ll pull fingernails loose from her flesh and use them to pluck those strings. They’ll sing.
Over the hipbones, a spider will weave her web, and the botflies attracted to her flesh will make of that surface a bongo.
After those flies and maggots, frogs will pounce on her ribcage. They’ll fashion each opposite bone into the key of a xylophone for the strikes of their tongues to draw notes out of.
Unclothed of flesh, her toes will end in spires. Mice shall pluck them for their sires, to crown the heads of their lances. They’ll hop onto their salamanders and joust.
From her teeth, faeries will carve out ivory teacups for the tea they’ll brew as the temperature rises beneath her. Once it rises, lord, it’ll be too late once it rises.
She will leach into the earth. Her bits and bobs and ends will disperse for roots to suckle. Mycelium will share the news of her. Take her to lands far away. She will walk in every direction. She will rise and sink. Of her, we’ll never be rid.
Hear the dance of the fireflies, the feast of the butterflies. They call out her name, known to the earth, everlasting. Seal her, cover her. Do it quickly.
Do not let her spread.
Kel Rocha is an autistic artist and writer based in São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication, and her passion for cozy fairy-tales and surrealist horror often blends in her writing, paintings, and sculptures. Over the past three years, she has shared her handmade woolly mice with an audience of over 100,000 Instagram followers at @kelfelts, inspired by the books that shaped her childhood.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Carnival of the Witch”? During an oratory exercise in college, a fellow student asked what I believed would happen to me after I died. At the time, I took the question quite literally. I began my joyful description of the decomposition of my body, of how it would feed the nature around it, and spread into the earth. I realized shortly after that her question had been more theological in nature, but the growing horror in my colleague’s eyes as I spoke kept brewing in my mind. It did so for seven years before I finally let it spill onto a page. Quite the witchy number, I think.
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