The Sunflowers are Bleeding

“I need to kill my wife.”

The witch smiles up at the rabid man before her and runs her purple-painted nails along the back of her cat. “Of course, dear,” she purrs, and he has this odd sort of look about him as if he didn’t expect her to agree so quickly to his demands. That rabidness wavers, solidifies, and cracks under the pressure. He holds fast to the crumbling bits.

“She can’t—won’t—bear my children and has the gall to raise her voice to me. But the priests won’t allow a divorce, so I need her dead.” Black eyes more monstrous than she bore into her glittering baby blues. “Can you do that? Tonight. No fuss.”

The tom cat in her arms lets out a trill and she scratches beneath his orange chin. “Of course,” the witch repeats, “I’ll have it ready in just a moment. Have a seat.”

**

Lillith, better known as the Wintersweet Witch, has complicated feelings about men. She doesn’t hate them, because they give her a steady income and they always come crawling to her doorstep—it’s in their nature. Their requests are sometimes entertaining to listen to. But she doesn’t like them, either. They’re too bulky, too loud, too aggressive. They fill up the space in her kitchen without even moving an inch from their designated stool in the corner. They leer at her lace-covered bosom and sketch their gaze down the curves of her body. She supposes she should hate them, considering they all come to her for a poisonous remedy to their trivial problems. Maybe she does, deep down, but in the end it doesn’t matter.

Animals of all sorts inhabit her tucked away home in the woods; familiars she’s collected over the years. With a snap of her fingers a miniature flock of bright-feathered birds carry over bottles and dried flowers and deposit them into her open hand. She doesn’t need to say anything before a buck pokes his head through her open window, and she plucks an assortment of leaves and bark off his antlers. Lillith hums as she works and dances around her pets, and they bring her what she needs. A lovely little perk of that magical attachment. Familiars are far more helpful than men.

The rabid beast in question sits perched on the stool she has tucked back into the far corner, far away from her workstation so that they can watch and stay out of the way. Her one rule is to not explore her home. No one has dared to break it, not when its inhabitant can brew up their death.

“What is all that?” he asks, and Lillith dashes away her scowl before it can surface. Annoyance—they are an annoyance, too.

“Ingredients, my dear,” she chirps. He scowls enough for the both of them, and Lillith stirs the bubbling mixture in her pot on the stove. “Poisons are tricky things, you know.”

He grunts. “I just watched you add three different kinds of poisonous plants. Surely that would be enough to kill a beast?”

“A beast, perhaps,” she agrees, and covertly splashes in some other ingredients. He’s paying too close attention. “But this is your wife we’re killing. Wouldn’t want some innocent bystander to accidentally get killed instead, now would we?” Her tone is patronizing, and he knows it by how he bristles, but Lillith moves on before he can say anything about it. “Trust me, my dear, I know what I’m doing. Your wife isn’t my first. You paid for my services for a reason.”

She always got the job done. No target left alive; no scorned man left unsatisfied. That was the Wintersweet Witch promise. You go to her, you come out with a solution to everything and anything.

The rabid man huffs and puffs but leaves her to her work. Good, because she’s almost done. A little sprinkle of this, a drop of that, and a string of her hair… and done—almost. Humming to herself once more, Lillith abandons her brew to rummage around the kitchen until a dried pomegranate seed sits in the palm of her hand. She sets it on the counter, where a pigeon stands guard and bows over it with repeated coos, then grabs a small vial.

As she pours the still-warm poison into the vial, making sure to strain anything that hadn’t completely broken down as she did so, her customer leans forward to watch. The liquid is a murky green tint with whorls of color here and there from the petals of flower she used, and it’s a thin and smooth consistency as it pours. “It looks disgusting,” he says.

Lillith grins and caps the vial, then holds it up while pinched between her fingers. “It’s death, my dear. It’s not meant to be pretty.” He stands and tries to swipe it from her, but she yanks it back before he can. Grin versus glare, it’s a battle she’s won for years. “There’s one more thing you have to do before the poison can work. It’s a bit of a spell, you see, and the final task is for you.”

As expected, he puffs up his chest. He’d look more suited as a ball of spikes. “I don’t take orders from—”

The witch holds up the pomegranate seed and cuts him off, “If you want your wife dead, you’ll eat this. It won’t work until you do.”

He eyes the innocent little seed in the palm of her hand. “Why?”

“Spells are spells and spells aren’t logical,” Lillith dismisses. “The poison is tied to you and your wife. You eat this, and she will die, and only she will die. You don’t eat this, and no one dies. Understand?”

“No,” he says, but takes the seed anyway. “I suppose it can’t hurt, though. Fucking witches.” He mutters the last bit under his breath, but she hears it anyway. At the first crunch of the seed between his teeth, Lillith smiles and her familiars flutter about in a frenzy. At the second, they shudder and shy away. When he swallows, Lillith hands him the vial.

“Be a dear and offer to bake her a nice cake, hm? I hear they’re just lovely around this time of the year.” The man grabs the vial and tucks it into the fold of his coat, though his suspicious gaze never leaves her face as he backs towards the door. Lillith flutters her fingers in farewell. “Oh, and happy killing.”

**

Sometime as the moon rises to its peak in the night sky, there’s a shudder in the witch’s cottage. A distant cry of a woman’s screams. The crack of a skull on wood. Lillith hums her little tune and strokes the fur of her tom cat familiar, whose spine and tail are raised in alarm.

A skitter of tiny little feet on her floorboards catches her attention, and she smiles to herself. There, sitting at her toes with its beady black glare, is a hedgehog. She was right—he does look better that way.