I don’t know if I should put the witch bottle back under my grandma’s caved-in porch, or if the bottle (technically, a mason jar) can be emptied for pickle-canning this weekend: there’s nothing that boiling water and bleach can’t kill—but what about washing away the so-called protection emanating from the jar (filled with mystery liquid and a red satin ribbon cut from the Christmas angel’s wreath), because something about it gave her confidence, and that’s why she called me at 2:00 a.m. three weeks ago to beg me to dig through the wreckage of termite-eaten wood and shards of possum bones and remnants of original foundation to retrieve her jar—if it breaks. something will come for me, she’d said—but the joke’s on her, that moldy jar didn’t do shit against the cancer devouring her marrow because supposedly it only warded off witches, and if I scrub it out and set it by the new mason jars piled in my garden shed, it could be freed of emotional liability, or if I gingerly lay it in my grandma’s casket, it might offer her peace in the afterlife, but I hate that this witch bottle isn’t even a bottle, but a fucking jar—I should cleanse it of false peace and protection, strip the jar of any dignity and pack it with cucumbers and pungent vinegar brine, and shove my eczema-cracked fingers over the rim to extract a dill pickle between my forefinger and thumb—but that won’t erase my grandma’s stupid faith and trembling cracked lips from the final night, as she clenched the useless glass jar covered in chemo—poison—seeping out of her eyes and palms and mouth, so this witch bottle will be dumped back under my late-grandma’s porch as wreckage from that night; it doesn’t deserve the satisfaction of fresh purpose.