Once upon a Monday a Wicked Witch Arrived...

​In today's story – Once Upon a Monday by E.E. King – something wicked this way comes, wrapped in a beautiful package but smelling like hatred.

E.E. King is a performer, writer, biologist and painter.  Ray Bradbury said King’s stories "are marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” 

King has won awards and is published widely. She’s worked with children in Bosnia, crocodiles in Mexico, frogs in Puerto Rico, mushrooms in Montana, archaeologists in Spain and butterflies in South Central Los Angeles. Her books include Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife and Another Happy Ending. You can find her at http://www.elizabetheveking.com 


Once Upon a Monday
by E.E. King

Once upon a Monday, which is not a very popular day in most social circles, a wicked witch arrived in Hollywood. She claimed that she had come from Honduras where she had been battling oppression, but nothing could be further from the truth. In reality she came from a planet not so very far away. A planet where it was always Monday. A planet so turvy-topsy and versa-visa that plants grew with their roots in the air and their leaves in the ground. 

She said her name was Yadira Esperanza and that her name meant “hope,” but this was not the case. In fact, she was so evil, that paintings dissolved when she glanced at them, leaving empty frames. Books spontaneously burst into flames. Daisies, symbols of love and innocence, grew petals sharp as pointed steel. Even sweet Jasmine began to reek like week old fish. And humming birds froze in midflight before dropping to the ground, lifeless as confetti.

Yadira opened a school for girls. Their parents dropped off sweet children and returned to find them monsters. Clever lies dropped sweet as candy from Yadira’s tongue. She wove nets of deceit so strong and beautiful that the parents were trapped like helpless flies.

Yadira was short, round and very, very beautiful, with long, velvet hair and bottomless eyes. Because Yadira came from a planet where life was cold and even the stars duplicitous, she found Hollywood very easy. Here people believed in appearances.

No one looked beneath the surface. No one wondered why beauty smelled like hatred, or noticed that the creek that by her school stank. Fish floated down stream belly-up, frogs grew extra limbs and squirrels developed evil eyes that never closed. The girls in Yadira’s care grew into woman who spread sorrow like butter and sprinkled misery like sugar. 

Yadira and her girls opened a bakery where heart-break, bitter-sweet as dark chocolate was packed in shiny silver foil boxes and tied with red, satin ribbons. Many lovers who received these bonbons married, and Yadira became famous as a confectioner of consummation. No one seemed to know, or care, that these marriages ended in beatings and sometimes worse. 

Yadira grew fat, happy and careless. When she was not vigilant, you could see that her teeth were sharp as needles, that in the moonlight her pupils were narrow as a goat’s and that she had no fingernails. Still, even now, she was rarely that careless.

Whenever someone noticed what they should not have seen, something would happen. Someone they loved would sicken or die. Their house would burn down, their child break a leg or their pet would get killed by a speeding car. They would be so full of grief that they would forget – or not remember – which is almost the same thing.

Yadira grew old, but only because people were watching. Witches, as you know, never grow old. They are born old and thereafter grow in any direction they like. 

All around Yadira, discord flowed like the rain in Honduras, the land she had never seen.

One moonlit night, when the seeds of discontent had grown as big Banyan trees, when malice as delicate and pernicious as blind weed reached curling tendrils out through the Southland, Yadira vanished.

Some children too young to have been to her school, or to have eaten Yadira’s chocolates, swore that they had seen a tiny figure growing larger as it flew, until, silhouetted briefly against the moon, they saw an enormous witch. But they were not believed.

Yadira was mourned. Women in the confectionary shop tore out their hair. More than one of her students leapt from the school roof, pursued by demons of grief. The Mayor erected a golden statue in her honor. No one noticed that it immediately tarnished, developing a sooty black patina that scattered spores of sorrow in the moonlight.

She arrived in Honduras, with curling golden hair, and eyes as blue as a cloudless tropical sky. She said her name was Ashley. She came from Hollywood. She was beautiful as the stars, as lovely as the delicate white blossoms of Oleander, that fell silently around her, like a million, tiny, burnt moths.