Heinz's Locker
In The Good Witch universe, Reese learns to fly, kind of.
I used to go to college, back in the day. Studied poetry and forestry and philosophy, thought I’d spend my life tramping through the woods, maybe taking one of those jobs mending trails, and writing poems about it.
Then I became a vampire.
But that’s a boring story, the same way stories about how someone got pregnant generally start with some boring dude who isn’t worth the total lifetime derailment the girl finds herself facing.
It’s what she does after the dude leaves that’s interesting.
I used to have lots of women friends.
We could pretend you’re one of them. Better than sitting here at Majik Mart 139 by myself at three in the morning, scribbling in a greasy notebook no one’s going to read, right?
The Stone Lion
Yeah, let’s pretend we’re sitting out on the deck at the Stone Lion. Smack Driven Driver just finished their set so our ears are ringing, but we can hear ourselves talk again. The crowd thins out fast. I’m drinking some good stout you can stand your spoon up in (might as well give myself pocket money while we’re pretending) and you’re probably drinking Zima.
No, sorry, that’s mean, and it’s a joke with a limited expiration date. We used to laugh at folks who drank Zima, back in the 90s. I’ll give you a Blue Moon with an orange slice pushed in it, okay?
You say, “What are you studying this semester?” and I say, “We just studied the Heinz dilemma, but I already know the answer.”
And you see I’m ready to let the slack of my jaw hang out a bit, so you ask: “What is the Heinz dilemma and how did you figure it out?”
I explain: “This fellow Heinz has a wife who’s dying. At the only pharmacy in town has the only drug that can cure her. Heinz cannot afford the drug. Without the drug his wife will die. Should Heinz steal the drug from the pharmacy?”
You ask: “What’s the answer? Should he steal it?”
A mosquito bites my arm but I’m too blissed out to worry. “Can’t blame her, she’s an obligatory predator.” That’s the sort of thing I’d have said in my twenties. I answer: “There’s no right or wrong. It’s like a moral mirror. You give your answer and your reasoning, and they can tell you how morally evolved you are.”
You pick your orange slice out of the mouth of the bottle and suck on it.
Heinz’s Locker
I’m dying in here.
There’s nothing to tell me how high up the window is. All I can tell is it’s old, warped glass. Should break easily. The big fellow in the room’s snoring, but he’ll wake up if — when — I break the window. Don’t know what he is. He looks human, but by his smell he hasn’t been human for a long time. I sure can’t hurt him.
I wander back to the far side of the room, keeping my pace slow and weary like it always is. Floor: worn-out green linoleum. Walls: crumbling brick. The tallest building in town stands 21 floors tall, but it was built in 1975. This room looks older. But what the heck am I trying to reckon? A fall out a third-story window can kill you.
I can see tree branches, thin mostly-bare oak branches like spidery little fingers with swollen knuckles. They’re top-of-tree branches. But they’re a hundred yards away. They don’t really tell me how high up I am. Or maybe I’m just too hungry and worn-down to think straight.
At dawn they’re gonna bring in the guy they want me to chomp on, and I’m not gonna do it, and I’m gonna die. Maybe not today, but things are trending that direction. I’m getting orthostatic-something-or-other. Keep passing out if I try to move around too much. Harder and harder to get waked up.
Or I will chomp on him, and he’ll die.
I don’t know why they didn’t get one of their unreformed vampires in here if they wanted to drain someone; there’s clearly at least one bloodsucker around, because he was the asshole who threw me into this room. Why can’t they do their own dirty work?
I honestly don’t know why they — I mean the unreformed vampires, the one percenters, I call em — want to turn me, or any of us. We can’t hurt them. Our lives are short. We don’t have superpowers; we have a chronic illness that comes with a fuckton of expenses and inconveniences. Sure, we could be assholes and just kill folks or collect a bunch of blood dolls and keep them under our thrall, but — for the most part — we don’t.
We manage to live two years or a decade or a century, looking like ever-more-sickly versions of whoever-we-were when we got chomped, and eventually we do die.
What, you disbelieve me?
Insulin costs my granny on TennCare nine dollars at the pharmacy, and half the time she doesn’t have nine dollars, and has to ask me for some cash. The fancy insulin my sister needs costs hundreds of dollars and she’s too poor to afford it, too rich for TennCare, and more often than not she’s posting on Facebook asking for help so she doesn’t have to wait until payday.
And does my granny rob pharmacies, does my sister rob pharmacies, do ANY OF THE OTHER FOLKS WHO CANNOT AFFORD INSULIN ROB YOUR FUCKING PHARMACIES YOU DUMB FUCKING SHITS?
Do their husbands rob for them? Their children, their friends, their wives?
No. Mostly, they scrounge and ask relatives with steady jobs (that’s me, yay Majik Mart 139). They go by free kitchens and churches that keep little cash funds on hand. They reach out on their social media networks and hope someone sends them a few dollars on PayPal.
So I can’t tell you whether folks should rob your pharmacies, you capitalist scum, but I can tell you that about 95% of people who need to rob pharmacies do not. Because I know those people.
I can tell you that about 95% percent of the vampires who could drain folks and live an eternal life do not, because I’m one of those vampires.
A vast, vast majority of people do not kill or rob. We do the best we can, and we die sooner than we should, because we’re decent folk.
If we all burst down the doors at once, all our relatives would have all the medicine they require.
I have to get out. My sister’s going to need money and my granny’s going to need me to drive her to Save A Lot and where the fuck am I? Dicking around having moral dilemmas.
“You always were a sweet little boy,” Granny says, forgiving me. She strokes my cheek.
She had a book I used to like, and I’m sitting at the table, looking up from a picture story and still in that half-story daze. My front’s warm from the wood stove and my back’s cold. Granny’s sewing a blue satin binding onto a blanket she’s repairing for me. The blanket will smell like my granny and like wood smoke. I have a little bed in the front room, but Granny lets me sleep with her because I’m afraid of hearing the grandfather clock strike when everyone else is asleep. Sweet is honey and firelight is honey and sweet, applied to people, means something golden and warm and glowing, amber liquid holding me and my granny and the stove —
I’m hallucinating.
This time when they bring in the poor terrified bastard they’re trying to torture, I won’t know whether I’m drinking him or dreaming I’m drinkin him —
Fuck it.
I press myself back against the brick wall at the back of the room, then spring forward.
I take a running leap at that wavery window and hit it with my left side body, covering my head with my left arm.
I fall ready to roll
And I fall
And I’m not anywhere. I’m the oak twigs and the bats. I’m a star. I’m —
I’m collecting my pieces from the ether and I’m doing something I never imagined, I’m traveling on air, I am air, but I have purpose, direction, extension with no form and no mass.
It’s a cool March evening. Air smells like mud and stone, dead fish and irises. Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god
I get my bearings — not hard in a city with a big river and distinctive mountains on each side — and gust toward my house north of Whitwell.
Blessed Interlocutor
Well, there’s no reason you, sweet girl whom I’m making up, should believe all that. When I was your age, I wouldn’t have believed it either.
Instead, sitting there on the deck of the Stone Lion a quarter of a century ago, I tell you, “I know the answer. If you know people who can’t afford their medicine, you can take a poll, or just check out who hasn’t been arrested, and get a back-of-the-envelop kind of answer. We may not all be Heinz’s wife, but we’re all Heinz. He’s all of us. We’re living the answer.”
You smile. I’m going to make you beautiful. Silver-gold hair, kind of Johnny Gruelle stylings. The sort of lady Tolkien would have drawn, if he could have drawn people a little better. You say: “They must have all been richer back then.”
“Or medicine was cheaper. Or more likely — ”
“More likely Heinz represented a particular layer in the social strata, someone who wasn’t so poor he never hoped to afford the medicine but not so rich he was guaranteed to afford it.”
Oh, I miss it. Being a student, these long conversations.
You finish up, “So it is a see-yourself-here puzzle, a character test, but the mirror’s held up to society, not the individual.”
“Shit.” I drain my bottle. “If I wrote that on my exam, my professor would fail me. The point is to isolate the individual and his choices.”
You lean your chin on your hands. Look at me with green eyes. Sun’s rising, but I don’t have to go anywhere. We can sit here all day. You say: “Well, that tells you something, doesn’t it?”
Straight on Til Morning
I travel up Signal Mountain and along Walden’s Ridge and bear west, following the north edge of the state forest. I try to steer by the stars but I still get lost some.
The sun rises behind me.
I pass through clouds and get clawed by a hawk only to flow together again. The sun shines through me and does not burn me.
When I touch down on my shady porch, I am as sick as I ever was, but a mosquito lands on my lip and I squish her. One drop. Three more mosquitos come along, and then I get at a young brown rabbit who’s picking clover.
I’m an obligatory predator nowadays, so I suppose I must be gentle with myself.
At least I’m on my feet. There’s another rabbit around. For now, I top off with well water — I do have indoor plumbing, but the well’s still good. Tastes like sulfur and tides me over sometimes.
I’ve tried flying again — sprained both ankles jumping out of the barn loft —but nothing works. When I remember how to fly, I’m going to start visiting pharmacies and blowing off all the doors.