A Witch’s Envy
by Matt Hollingsworth
CONTENT ADVISORY: body horror, gore, pedophilic leering, murder.
A story travels from village to village: There once was an old witch who desired youth and beauty, and to achieve her rebirth, she chopped off her daughter’s head. With each telling, the story changes. Every word is eventually replaced, yet the witch still chops off her daughter’s head and steals her youth. If each voice that tells the story is different, if every word has changed, is it the same story?
A witch lived with her daughter in a log cabin far from any village, nestled among a vast black forest of colossal trees, wild creatures, and menacing cell phone towers.
In the evenings, the mother and daughter would rise with the moon, stretch, and yawn, and the witch’s old bones would rattle, and her joints would ache. She rubbed sand from her eyes, regarded herself in a mirror, and every time, she became dismayed at her wrinkles. Her daughter washed her face in the sink. She took her place beside her mother to gaze into the mirror. My beautiful sweetheart, the witch would think, struggling to find an imperfection in the girl’s skin.
The mother-daughter duo would bundle themselves up in cloaks made of human leather, a trio of crows accompanying them as they spent their nights dancing through the trees, their feet tracing runic patterns in the pine needles as they searched for dump sites. Protectors of the forest, they would clean up the garbage, loading baskets with society’s cast-off detritus—corroded batteries, smartphones with cracked screens, whiskey bottles full of cigarette butts. Their wicker trap captured men who encroached on the forest to dump trash, men who murdered woodland creatures and littered the countryside with shotgun shells, men whose mothers should have taught them better than to leave such a mess. The trapped men would go wild with panic until the witch snapped their necks.
At the end of each night, the witch and her daughter finished collecting technological waste and planted it near their cabin in a garden thick with briar patches. Wires bloomed with motherboards and mechanical gears. Servos and CPUs sprouted. The garden yielded parts for their household appliances, their TV, their computer.
And what of the men they trapped? The witch beheaded them and planted their corpses to fertilize the tech garden. She mounted the heads on the wall, plugged cables into their neck holes to network them with her computer, and forced the men to search the dark web’s technological hive of ones and zeros for a magical means to restore her youth.
One evening, the men discovered a promising incantation. The witch used their mounted heads to speak the spell—a chorus of voices to amplify the sorcery—and the magic blistered them as if they were scorched by hellfire. The witch, on the other hand, felt nothing, felt no rebirth. She checked herself in the mirror. Though she was not burn-scarred like the heads, her jowls still hung loosely, like turkey gizzards.
“Lovely bird lady,” cawed the ever-present crows, preening and splaying their feathers. “You are of our flock.”
“So desperate is your quest for youth,” said the heads, smoke rising off their burnt flesh. “So pitiful. And yet, you remain grotesque. Contrariwise, madam, gaze upon your daughter. Were you that beautiful when you were young?”
Her perfect daughter yawned in her sleep. The witch remembered rocking her baby girl in her arms, remembered her own youth and breastfeeding her little sweetheart, remembered being quite the online influencer—@HotWitchMama—with a hundred thousand followers. Life had been pain free, wrinkle free. Her body had not yet betrayed her.
When the heads sang the second incantation they discovered many moons later, the witch felt her skin tighten as if she were bone-filled, blood-filled, meat-filled sausage. She gazed hopefully into the mirror. Her skin was drawn taut, wrinkles stretched like she was being suffocated with a plastic bag. A hot flash struck her and her sweaty face reddened. Menopause be damned!
“Beautiful. Queen of forest,” cawed the crows.
“L-lord in heaven,” said the heads, their flesh nearly fried off their skulls by the magic, their voices stuttering with agony. “Your efforts only m-make you uglier.” The witch sneered at the heads and they fell silent. These savages encroached on her forest, but she refused to allow them to encroach on her mind. Or so she tried to convince her wrinkled reflection.
Her daughter giggled, far away in dream.
Come autumn, the heads shrieked a third incantation. The witch’s heart ceased pumping for a beat. Smoke billowed off her—a phoenix reborn. Powerful witchcraft. Quivering with anticipation, she checked her reflection. She remained a hunched-over granny, her hair white as bones, her body wracked by the pain of time.
The crows cawed not a word.
The heads guffawed.
Her daughter pulled up her blankets and turned her back to the witch.
“Your pubescent lass is beauteous beyond words,” said the newest head on the wall, a man with curly locks. “I can imagine her untainted juices.” He whistled and licked his lips. “Return to me my body that I might bend her over my knee, give her fanny a good spanking, and shove my—”
“Hold your tongue, loathsome pedophile,” the witch said. She snapped her fingers, and the man’s curly locks burst into flame. The head sizzled and screamed, and the leering grin melted from the face. Fire poured up the wall, engulfing other mounted heads, and the witch cackled at their pleas for mercy. The thatched roof ignited, and the room reddened with firelight, until the witch clapped and rubbed her palms together to magically snuff out the flames. Such carelessness could destroy her home.
She removed the broiled skulls from the wall and slammed them onto iron pikes that she spiked into the earth surrounding the cabin. Their moans lured the crows, who swooped down to land on them.
A crow pecked at the blackened flesh and cawed, “Ashen taste.”
Another crow tore off a charred nose and swallowed it. “Burnt. Disgusting.”
The third crow ate a moaning head’s lips. “Why for do humans burn meat they eat?”
The remaining heads on the wall went quiet, for they had witnessed the witch’s power, and wretched though their existence might be, at least they were not being devoured by crows.
When the sun blazed at its zenith, while her daughter slept, the witch lay awake in her feather bed. The trio of crows nested in her hair. They groomed her and strung her tresses with treasure they had scavenged—human teeth, shotgun shells, dried-up eyeballs—and they told her never had the dark hand of Satan created a more beautiful woman, told her she would forever be @HotWitchMama. The witch knew they were liars.
The heads continued to whisper poison, calling her old and ugly, saying she would soon die and not leave a beautiful corpse. Even if they discovered magic to restore her youth, they said, for the sorcery to work, the proper voice had to utter the words, no decrepit crone or host of putrefied heads, but the voice of someone young, someone from whom she needed to steal vitality: her daughter. Youth strikes but once in a lifetime. Youth is fleeting. Her daughter’s springtide would fade. To obtain anything of value, you must claim it before it escapes. To snatch nectar from a flower, they said, a hummingbird must be quick.
The witch buried her head beneath her pillow and ignored them. She loved her daughter. Murdering her kin to steal her youth would be wrong.
But how can you ignore a voice speaking from within?
“You need not kill her,” the voice in her mind said. “Chopping off her head shall suffice. If that pouty child’s mouth speaks the incantation, the magic shall work. And when you gaze into the mirror, you shall see she is part of you, and through you, she yet lives. After all, daughters are made of their mothers. You but reclaim that which you gave her.”
After turning sixteen, her daughter declined to accompany the witch to the wicker cage to retrieve their prey, proclaiming that she could no longer participate in such cruelty, as if protecting the forest from hunters and polluters were cruel. She sewed herself a cotton coat to replace the cloak of human leather. Typical teenage rebellion.
Without her newly enlightened daughter’s aid, the witch alone trapped men—a task her increasing frailty made none too easy. When she mounted the heads, their voices joined the chorus: “Chop off your daughter’s head!”
The witch refused to listen. She loved her daughter.
As the witch’s vigor faded, her daughter grew ever more comely. “Look, Mama,” she said, her voice sweet as marrow, “a beauty mark.” She had drawn the dot on her face while dolling herself up with lipstick and mascara and rouge.
“So young is she,” the voice in the witch’s mind said, “and so unblemished is her skin, she needs no makeup. She looks like a harlot.”
One night, in the forest, the witch came upon her daughter freeing a man from the wicker cage.
“Never return to these haunted woods,” the girl said, “lest the witch kill you and make you a servant.” She directed her attention to the cage. “Ardere,” she said, “cavea numquam quis iterum capere.” And her words ignited the wicker.
Before the man ran away, the witch snapped her fingers and turned him into a toad. And before the toad hopped away, the witch snatched him up and gulped him down, warts and all.
“Ewww, Mama.” The witch’s daughter contorted her face in disgust. “Gross!”
The witch clapped and rubbed her palms together to snuff out the flames, but the fire had already reduced the wicker cage to skeletal embers. Had her daughter gone mad? She might have burned down the forest. How could the witch trust someone so careless to inherit the duty of protector of the forest?
After arthritis made dancing through the forest too painful, the witch rarely ventured forth from the cabin.
By the time the heads discovered the youth-restoring incantation, she had aged badly, and no longer recognized herself.
“Chop off your daughter’s head,” the voice in her mind said. “Force her to speak the spell and the magic shall restore you, body and soul. Pain free, beautiful inside and out.”
It is an undeniable truth that envy eats a hole in your heart. If you should find yourself envious of others, you would do well to let go of that envy, let it fly away. Take aim with your shotgun and shoot it from the sky.
There came an evening when the pitter-patter of raindrops against her face woke the daughter. Her mother loomed over her, and tears—not rain—dripped from her cheeks. She held the axe shakily aloft, clenched in her arthritic hands. Careful not to damage the mouth she needed to speak the spell, the witch aimed true and, with a single blow, beheaded the girl.
The witch struggled to drag her daughter’s corpse out to their garden to plant her among the motherboards and mechanical gears, among sprouting servos and CPUs. She mounted the head on the cabin’s wall, and its youth and feminine beauty shone amid the gray, burn-scarred heads.
The witch stared at the computer monitor and mouthed the incantation—the theft of youth. She hit Send, and a binary signal shot up the wire and into her daughter’s head, whose dead eyes drilled into the witch, whose dead lips trembled, whose dead voice shrieked the incantation. The sorcery struck the witch like lightning and knocked her down. She writhed and felt as if she were burning from inside, as if her bones were breaking, then mending, as if dust were being swept from her tombstone.
The witch rushed to her mirror. Her white hair turned black; her hunched-over posture straightened with a cracking sound like timber falling; the crow’s feet lining her eyes softened and faded; her joints stopped throbbing. A smile formed on her full lips.
Her daughter glared at the witch with forest-black eyes. The girl’s facial muscles shriveled until those eyeballs rolled out of their sockets and hung from the skull.
That night, freed from the grip of arthritis, the witch danced in the forest, a young lady who pranced all the way to the witchwood—a dead oak, twisted by time. She checked herself with her phone camera, puckered her luscious lips, and shot a selfie in front of the oak. Under the full moon’s gaze, she looked luminous, ethereal. Young. She shared the selfie on social media. Likes and comments poured in for her, for @HotWitchMama: Gorgeous. Stunning. Sexy.
The witch’s cackling echoed through the forest.
Reinvigorated, she cleaned up dump sites, which had proliferated in her absence, and by daybreak, she had restored a broad swath of the woodlands to a pristine state.
Satisfied, she returned to her cabin. She weaved a wreath of brambles to veil her daughter’s face, unwilling to tolerate being watched by those accusing eyes dangling from their optic nerves.
The heads whispered to her daughter while the witch slept. “Lo!” they said. “A new comrade, the fairest of all, reduced to a hideous corpse. Betrayed by her mother.”
“Silence,” the witch’s daughter said.
The men sensed her power, for even young witches, even dead witches, are more powerful than mere men. Like most menfolk, however, they lacked control over themselves and continued to taunt her.
“Shut your filthy mouths,” the girl said. “Non clamabitis turpitudines vestras.”
The heads fell silent under her spell, their faces blank like cattle. She herded them into the dark web to search for sorcery to free her.
Years.
Bled.
Away.
With the aid of the heads, the witch’s daughter continued her quest to free herself.
And, as is wont to happen with time’s passing, her mother, the witch, aged. Her breasts sagged, wrinkles crept across her skin, and her aches and pains returned. This she could not tolerate.
Because today’s helicopter parents hover over every move their children make, witches can no longer lure them with cakes and candy. The only way to procure a child from whom to steal youth was to become a mother again. With the wicker trap long ago burned to cinders, she had to employ other means to ensnare a sperm donor. And thus, the witch posted to social media her most alluring selfie, a photo that garnered many likes, many comments with heart emojis. Her inbox filled.
The crows roosted on her shoulders as she considered each potential paramour.
UR hot, wrote @PrincessCharming, a woman with sparkling teeth.
“Cannot make baby by mating with female,” cawed the crows.
My darling, wrote @HumbertHumbert, a middle-aged man with a lascivious look and tobacco-stained teeth, you are delightfully young.
“Repulsive,” cawed the crows.
I want to cum on your face, wrote @MeSoHorny69, a clean-shaven man wearing a bowtie, with perfectly straight teeth. He sent a dick pic that looked like a mushroom-headed root vegetable. His profile listed the nearby village as his home.
“Face is wrong place for planting seed to make baby,” cawed the crows. “But he lives nearby. Convenient. Sex him.”
The witch DMed @MeSoHorny69 and tagged the witchwood’s location. She would seduce him in the woods.
@MeSoHorny69 proved eager. He would come that very night. Then he would cum once more.
To make herself presentable, the witch donned her finest red frock, the fabric interwoven with mustard seeds to ensure fertility; to blush her cheeks, she pricked her finger, milked out blood, and smeared her face with red; to perfume herself, she stuffed her pockets with rose petals—archaic witchcraft. Modern cosmetics be damned!
She set forth for the witchwood, accompanied by the crows. Clenched in her arthritic hands, she held aloft a torch to light her way, and tramped through the forest, snow slushing between her toes. She spiked the torch into the snowdrifts near the witchwood and bunched up her breasts. Dressed in her red frock, she shone in the gloomy night.
The crows flocked to her and roosted on her shoulders. They dropped offerings at her feet, flotsam and jetsam they had scavenged: a plastic six-pack ring, dentures, a kitchen sink.
When the witching hour came calling, @MeSoHorny69 stumbled up, singing about unrequited love, reeking of gin.
“You’re even sexier in person,” @MeSoHorny69 said, and he loosened his bowtie. Was he so drunk he failed to see her ugliness? He caressed her cheek. “Look at you. An angel.”
They fornicated in the snowbank beneath the dead oak, and after the man implanted his seed—not on her face—the crows attacked him. He crawled off, but the crows plucked out his eyes, plucked out his tongue, plucked out his perfectly straight teeth, one by one. They ate his flesh, and when naught remained but a skeleton, they collected his bowtie and his bones and stole away into the black night.
Though she could not see through the wreath of brambles, the witch’s daughter listened to her mother’s scheming and knew the old woman’s belly was growing and filling with new life. She knew the witch would rear the baby only long enough for it to learn to speak the incantation before she murdered the child to harvest its youth. Was freeing herself most important to the witch’s daughter? Or rescuing the baby? Or claiming righteous vengeance?
She sent the heads on increasingly desperate quests for sorcery. They gave up on the dark web, which had proven unfruitful, and instead scoured scholarly texts at institutions of higher learning.
Nine months passed.
Finally, they discovered just the right spell in the archives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Upon returning to the cabin, they presented the incantation to the witch’s daughter, who immediately uttered the words, and the heads joined in, the chorus rising to a shriek.
Deep in slumber, dreaming of youth, the witch heard not a peep, though the shrieking rattled the windows, though the fire in the hearth blazed bright, though a gale roared through the cabin and drew those flames up the chimney and out into the brilliant day and scattered them into the woodlands, and the pines ignited, and the conflagration spread, and the black forest burned and became blacker still.
On the cabin wall, her daughter’s flesh grew back onto her skull. Her dangling eyeballs rolled up her cheeks and into their sockets, and the brambles fell from her face. She peered out the cabin window at the burning forest and chuckled, for her vengeance would be complete only if she destroyed everything her mother held dear.
All thirteen other heads on the wall, all witch’s dozen, unshriveled and unrotted, and color flushed their cheeks—handsome men, princely men, with bristly beards.
The earth rumbled, and out in the tech garden, bone fingers clawed up through the soil. Headless skeletons emerged from their graves—the remains of the witch’s daughter, the remains of the men. They foraged servos from the garden, which they connected to their elbows and knees; and rotary actuators, which they lodged inside their ribcages in place of a heart; and circuit boards, which they attached to vertebrae to link to brain stems, building of themselves a horde of cyborg skeletons.
Once they completed their work, they shambled into the cabin, one bony fist clenching the axe. They stood against the wall, and the mounted heads fused with their new bodies, bodies composed of a helter-skelter mash-up of worm-eaten bones and robotic parts amid tangled wires. The witch’s daughter stank of lithium grease. Her joints creaked and whirred as she stretched her arms, and she found she was the one holding the axe.
The witch pulled up her blankets and turned her back to her daughter.
The horde encircled the witch and grabbed her wrists and ankles. She jolted awake.
She struggled, but the metal hands gripped her all the more tightly, and she screamed at the agony of her wrists and ankles breaking. “Hello, Mama.” That voice, sweet as marrow. Her daughter glared at the witch from among the freaks. Servos whirred as the girl raised her skeletal arms. Oil dripped from her cybernetic elbows. Light flashed off the axe as it fell.
But her aim was not true, for she lacked experience at chopping off heads. The strike merely nicked her mother’s neck.
The witch screamed.
Again, her daughter raised the axe, slammed it down, and this time the blade chopped through tendons and esophagus. The witch’s screams broke into a croak, and a toad sprang from her mouth and hopped away. With a third strike, the girl severed the head completely.
An army of toads spilled from the witch’s body and hopped out the window and toward the forest inferno.
The witch’s daughter mounted her mother’s head on the wall.
She carved into the witch’s belly with an apple-paring knife and pulled out a baby—a sister. The baby surveyed her surroundings: the motley monstrosities, the leering witch’s head. And that tough little girl did not cry.
The forest fire lit the cabin red. Flames raced up the pines, the afternoon sky black with smoke, and from high in a tree, the crows took flight. They swooped through the window and roosted on the witch’s chopped-off head.
“Exquisite,” cawed a crow.
“Prettiest lady Satan ever created,” cawed another.
“Ravishing. Enticing,” cawed the third crow. “Delectable.” And with that, they plucked out her eyes, plucked out her tongue, plucked out her teeth, one by one, for crows cannot deny their nature. They ate her flesh and declared for her their love, declared her the tastiest meat ever, told her she was now part of them, and when naught remained but bone, they collected her skull and stole away into the black day.
Embers from the forest fire landed on the cabin, and the roof ignited. Flames curled in through the thatched ceiling. The witch’s daughter smirked at her cyborg accomplices and spoke a hex, and they stopped moving, bound into place. Cradling the baby, the witch’s daughter lumbered outside. She cackled and watched the cabin burn with the cyborgs inside, screaming their final words. Those men would never again speak filth.
And the witch’s daughter walked away from the cabin and the forest inferno. Where would she go? It is an undeniable truth that those bastard heads deserved to burn, much as her mother deserved to be decapitated. Consumed by vengeful fury, though, the witch’s daughter had destroyed not only her own home. She had also destroyed the forest, wiped out flora and fauna alike, had devastated an entire ecosystem. In a tale such as this, who is the good witch and who the wicked?
A story travels from village to village: There once was a girl whose envious mother treated her cruelly, and to escape, the daughter chopped off her mother’s head. With each telling, the story changes. Every word is eventually replaced, yet the girl still chops off her mother’s head. If each voice that tells the story is different, if every word has changed, is it the same story?
Want another gripping story by Matt Hollingsworth? Read “Hush” from Horrific Scribes, May 2025.
| EXHIBIT THREE: Return to “Guilt“ | Proceed to the next Gallery Two: Domestic Betrayal attraction, “Postmarked for My Bones“ |