This week has been hectic, so here is another story that I'm repossessing from my distant past. This is starting to feel like graverobbing myself. I hope that by friday my mojo will be back and I'll be able to write something new, if not necesarilly original.
Going Cold Turkey
As a Witch, Wanda was quite capable of brewing glory, bottling fame, and even putting a stopper in death. But she couldn't, for the life of her, cook Christmas dinner for friends without cremating and mutilating half of a farm. She glared in frustration at the assemblage of burnt, undercooked, and/or oddly shaped dishes laid out on the table before her and knew, with her guests arriving at any minute, she was going to have to play her ace in the hole.
After last year's Christmas dinner disaster, she'd taken time out to master a spell that was capable of making a feast out of anything. Closing her eyes, she sank into a deep, spellcasting trance.
Ian was the first to arrive at the witch's house and was sufficiently old enough a friend to let himself in. He found the dining room in a state of chaos: Wanda standing at the head of the table chanting a spell, magic energy dancing through the air like lighting, and the food on the table morphing before his eyes. He moved closer to watch a pile of brussel sprouts jumping out of their burnt outer skins, and inhaled the thickening aroma of delicious food. It was to be his last breath.
The spell glittering above the table bore down on him suddenly, like lightning grounding itself, scanned him, and quickly approximating this new anomalous mass into the magic mental blueprint of a perfect Christmas dinner currently in the spellcaster's head.
"Smells deli-" he began, but he was cut-off as his mouth suddenly filled with a sweet and spicy, cloggy mass. He coughed and choked, vomiting up lumps of sage and onion stuffing onto the tablecloth, but he couldn't clear his airways. He clutched his throat for air as the stuffing went south, flooding down his gullet, filling and replacing his lungs and working its way out from there. Desperate for oxygen, he fell heavily against the table, only to find his hands lose substance beneath him, sending him crashing forward. The spell guided his fall towards a wide, flat dish in the centre of the table. He landed hard with his limbs splayed awkwardly, as the hands and feet shrivelled off the ends into meaty stumps. The stuffing expanded inside him, plumping and rounding out his torso.
All he could manage in such a position was a desperate wriggle, which became completely constrained as his clothes turned into string that bound his swelling body and shrinking limbs. Trussed up like a Christmas turkey, he could only watch as a gravy boat hovered magically off the table and doused him in scalding sauce, which permeated him with a powerful heat and left his skin sporting a succulent, golden-brown glaze.
The spell was almost complete. The vegetables finished arranging themselves into beautiful pyramids. The garlic bread finished buttering itself. His skeletal structure finished being stretched and fused into that of a bird, and his head shrank without trace into his cooked carcass of a body.
Wanda snapped out of her trance. As she looked down at the largest roast turkey she'd ever seen with rapt hunger in her eyes, Ian knew that his goose was well and truly cooked
Would think as a long time friend he would know better than to enter a witch's home unannounced.
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