Tasha K. Rookswater

So: witches! I feel like a lot of witches in middle-grade stories tend to be basically humans with magical powers. Sometimes the story is told from the perspective of the witch (like "Kiki's Delivery Service"); sometimes the witch is a kindly figure who helps out the protagonists (Morgan Le Fay in the "Magic Treehouse" series - possibly she's a sorceress, but I'm not sure there's a difference for this purpose). If the witch is the villain, she's more likely to be non-human, but she's still got pretty understandable, human motivations: take over the kingdom, get revenge for something, etc. There are a lot of good stories there! But what I don't feel like I see enough of is incomprehensible witches. Witches that are like some kind of weird, mysterious force of nature, doing things for their own reasons that aren't necessarily explained to the audience. Like in "Macbeth" - why are the witches wandering about on the heath y...

There were thirteen of them. Thirteen mushroom-headed Nouns all clustered in the little clearing. One, Caden realized, for each shard of the broken lens. Had it split the power somehow, like a prism split light into rainbows? And if it had, did it hurt them? He took the glasses off his face, to make it safe to speak. “Um, are you okay? Mushroom? Mushrooms?” “Gah!” the nearest one cried, jumping back. “That’s freaky.” “What?” Caden asked, confused. “Your Noggles, you just took them off , like--” The Noun seemed to notice the other kids. “You’ve all taken off your--ghah!” The other Mushrooms didn’t seem to have noticed anything. They weren’t even looking at Caden or his friends, only at each other, and sort of--humming? Making a noise, anyway, weird and wordless, and, Caden realized, getting louder. “Do your glasses not come off?” Hunter asked Duck. “Well, not in public ,” Duck said, as though it were obvious. Maybe that was why Hairspray had disappeared, Caden thought. Not be...

Behind the soccer field, separated by a chain-link fence, were the woods. Part of them belonged to the conservation area, and part of them had something to do with the university, and if you went far enough there were the train tracks and the hydro right-of-way. It wasn’t wilderness, not even close. But it was the next best thing when you were limited to what you could reach on your own short legs. The air wasn’t quite as cold under the trees, with the evergreens blocking the wind, and soon they left behind the fire alarms and the sirens of emergency vehicles and the whooping and yelling of students released from routine. Everything was very still. Snow crunched underfoot. A bird called harshly, kark, kark, and another answered. The day felt bright and jewel-toned, like stained glass. This is what setting off on an adventure ought to feel like, Caden thought. It didn’t last, of course. It couldn’t. Before long his nose and cheeks and fingertips were numb with the cold. Trudging thr...