The mud witch rises from the mud like a monster. The mud witch likes that word, the way it sounds in her muddy mouth. Monster.

There was a time when the mud witch lived underneath the lake. For so long, she couldn’t understand why people didn’t seem afraid of her. Rinsed clean before she reached the surface, she was just another drowning girl, another ridiculous mermaid. So now the mud witch chooses wetlands and shallow riverbeds, places where the water won’t distort her.

The mud witch likes the sound of witch even more than monster. 

A crisp fall leaf. A crow’s rattle. The moon at its slivery silverest. The feeling you get when you see an owl when you didn’t expect to. 

If a monster is female, it’s called a female monster, but a witch is just a witch. 

The way mud is both a liquid and a solid. How it swallows things. The squish it makes. How it sucks you back, limb by limb, how it’s gentle about it. 

The mud witch wants you to fear her, but not for the reasons you think.

The mud witch isn’t going to take your life or drag you down into the mud to live for eternity with your mouth and ears and nostrils full of mud with only the blind squirming things that live in the mud for company. 

The mud witch, if she catches you, will let you go.

This, the mud witch wants you to know, is a far more terrible fate. You will feel, as the mud witch encloses you in her arms dripping with mud, her hair against your cheek like a cold mud pie, as the muddy weight of her slips and slides against your skin, as if you’ve been set free, finally found a way to let it all go. No struggle, just sink. That struggle to stay above ground is what keeps us in the eternal circle of suffering, what Buddhists call samsara and the mud witch calls dry land. 

The mud witch will allow you only the briefest glimpse of this truth before letting you go. You will spend the rest of your life searching again for that feeling—toeing puddles, digging in riverbeds, sinking elbows and knees, thick mud, thin mud, mud the color of mocha, mud the color of pea soup, mud with water and ice in it, cracked and crumbled mud, mud with bones and rock, mud stamped with the footprints of coyotes, but always hitting something that says: no further.

If you want real release, the mud witch suggests a water witch or a fire witch or even a sand witch (despite all the jokes, a sand witch will wreck you). The mud witch is keeping the mud for herself. 

The mud witch doesn’t actually care if you know that. You’ll learn it soon enough.