Tasha K. Rookswater

“Once upon a time,” Caden said, “there was, um. There was a world.” He stood to one side of a stage that was made from boards laid across haybales. The woman running things had given him a microphone. That was it, as far as sets and equipment went. Presumably most people brought their own. Two other stages flanked his. One of them held a crew in the middle of building some sort of complicated scaffolding. On the other, a line of women in Santa hats and short skirts did a dance routine to recorded Irish music. They looked cold. There wasn’t really much of an audience for any of this. People passing by looked curiously at Caden’s stage and at the dancers, but mostly didn’t slow down. The Winter Carnival’s main shows were in the evening, Mushroom had explained. Right now was for a grab-bag of amateurs, just to have something going on so there weren’t a bunch of empty stages dragging the ambience down. The Noun had seemed miffed at that. Well. Maybe they’d surprise people. “Um,”...

The city was covered that day in a layer of new clean snow. Caden spent the morning at the kitchen table, making notes, going back and forth to the bookshelves all over the house to look things up in his favourite stories. At eleven-thirty he ate a banana-and-cheese sandwich, put on his coat and boots, and headed out the door, Paz trailing behind him. The seven of them had agreed to meet in the parking lot on the east side of the university campus. It was near enough to Ruth’s school that she could walk there easily, it was close to where the Nouns had been spending their time, and it was spacious enough for Caden’s plan--his old plan, that was. But his new plan would need lots of room too. Masami and Hunter were already there. Ruth turned up a few minutes later. They waited. Duck and Mushroom were nowhere to be seen. “Could they have gotten lost?” Hunter wondered. “Or gotten the time wrong, maybe? Can Nouns tell time?” “They managed it yesterday,” Ruth pointed out. “I think they...

Caden woke, thrashing, tangled in his blankets. He was breathing hard, and he thought he might have cried out, but he wasn’t sure. The nightmare was already fading at the edges, in the usual way of dreams, but the last image stood out sharp and clear in his mind. Craters in the ground, huge and black, their edges melted into glass. Ruined buildings on the horizon like broken teeth. A setting sun, red in a smoky sky. And there’d been somebody with him, standing behind Caden’s shoulder so he couldn’t see them. He’d asked: “How long has it been like this?” And the answer had come: “Since always.” His breath was steadier now, and he could look around the room in the dark and see the safe, familiar shapes of his furniture, and the outline of the window, and the bar of orange light from the streetlight that shone across the foot of his bed--but none of it was reassuring. Caden knew it had just been a dream, but he also knew, or felt like he knew, that it could easily be real. If they we...

It was Wednesday lunchtime before they all managed to get together again. As expected, the elementary school was closed, so there was no problem inviting Hunter and Masami over to Caden’s house for the day. Ruth didn’t normally come home for lunch, but she was allowed to if she wanted, so they had an hour. Mushroom and Duck reappeared; they hadn’t gone back to the Nouns’ world, but had decided to stay and see a bit more of the human city while they waited to discuss the witch situation. Ruth had advised them to stay near the university campus and tell anyone who asked that they were part of an experimental theatre group. It seemed to have worked; at least, they hadn’t gotten in any trouble. So there were seven of them in Caden’s room, including Paz, whose participation was the price of getting to have his friends over. “Just let her play with you,” Mr. Keller had said tiredly, before disappearing into his office for the day. “It won’t hurt you to make her feel included.” Right now sh...

“They evacuated your school to ours while they try to get everything fixed,” Ruth explained. The six of them were headed back toward Ruth’s school now, at a walking pace since there’d been no sign of pursuit. “Rutherford Junior High--that’s where I go--is only about six blocks from Hesiod Elementary,” she added for the Nouns’ benefit. “It’s too cold for all the little kids to stand around outside, so they packed them into our gym. I went to check on you and Paz so I could text Dad you were okay, and your teacher said you hadn’t shown up today. And I thought, well, mysterious emergency the day after you found those glasses--I assume your friends know about everything?--anyway, I figured it was probably all your fault. Then Bethany said someone was setting off fireworks in the woods, and I thought, hey, Caden’s missing and stuff is exploding, gosh, could these things be connected somehow?” She shrugged. “So I followed the lights and the noise, and here I am.” “That was brave,” Mushroom ...

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...