Photographs lacking context offer numerous possible stories, and few photographs are more mysterious than those without a known author or time period. In every print issue of Don’t Take Pictures, a writer is presented with a found vintage photograph to use as inspiration for a micro-fiction story. In doing so, the photograph is given new meaning, and the truth of the image is subject to interpretation. To coincide with our our current issue’s theme (The Fiction Issue), we are looking back at some previously published stories.
Photo courtesy of John Foster/Accidental Mysteries
The darkness fell apart in shards and melted into dawn. Snow crunching underfoot. Her three companions left behind, frozen. They were part of the mountain now and there was nothing else for them. Before their end, they’d told her the witch who used a blade and not a broom was long since slain. The old hovel not far ahead. Broken and rotted in the snow, left to the teeth of the winds and ice of the mountain air with its door hanging on a hinge, groaning in the zephyr and calling out to her.
A blue flame whimpered in the hearth, awaiting its mother’s impossible return. Dead leaves, frozen and gray dancing over the ashen wood and she saw the mummified witch in the corner, shriveled skin taut over ancient bones, mouth wide and fingers twisted into claws, never to embrace again. An old box, long and slender rested in the witch’s lap.
The Witch’s Blade…
She removed her glove and brushed dust and brittle hair from the box, splinters in her hand. The lid fell to the floor and she took the hilt, no…the handle? Just a broom after all. They were either all wrong, or they all had lied. The witch laughed, mouth gaping and black spots where her eyes once were, frosted with mountain wind. She took the knife from her coat, handle of whale bone and gifted from mother, armed against the wolves of night. She whittled the broomstick till it was flat and sharp like a blade and the witch crumpled into dust against her corner.
This is mine now, she said.
You have no use for it.
She stood up and stepped from the hovel, the bright snow and mountain winds.
She left as a witch not with a broom, but a blade.
Eastin DeVerna is a writer of comics and prose, creator of Samurai Grandpa, and The Runner: A Post Apocalyptic Tale. He lives in North Carolina where he enjoys reading and gardening, but most of all, spending time with his wife and daughter.
This story first appeared in Issue #14, Fall 2019