Fisher Witch — Josh Pearce
Scarlet's lover called her a witch the day he ended things, even though that wasn't quite fair—she only knew the one spell. She whispered it to herself as she sharpened the point of her favorite fishhook, scraping it against the strop over and over, until the steel fairly glimmered with its own light. She affixed it to the front of her shirt so that when she saw him again—for one last clinch, a final embrace—it pricked his skin and caused him to pull away.
He was hooked. A thin line ran taut from her fishhook to his chest, and he plucked at it, not realizing yet the fear he should be feeling, not realizing yet what internal part of his body it was. Scarlet jerked on it once, hard, and the black-red vein sliced through the fatty layers of his chest all the way up to his throat. The big vein there came out, spraying blood, then all the other capillaries and arteries as he tangled them up in his fingers like a cat's-cradle, trying to hold it together.
And with one last tug, his heart popped out of his throat and landed in her hands, trailing tendrils. She wrapped it all up in a skein, and then frowned. There was one loose thread, long and light as spider silk, trailing from his heart and out under the door. Scarlet pulled on it. It did not break, but grew thicker and redder the more she reeled in. When she'd gathered an armful, it suddenly resisted, as if there were a great weight at the other end. She braced both feet on the floor to give it all her strength. Something far away snapped, and the rest of it was easier to haul in.
The crimson net of someone's circulatory system, the flopping heart caught in the center of it like a dying fish. This was the heart of her lover's wife, ripped from her office cubicle in the middle of the day. It was a bundle of bloody wires, but there were also five separate strands leading out elsewhere: one to the wife's mother, ones to her father, to her sister, and to her nephew. A few dozen other, weaker hairlines that split apart like candy floss.
The scarlet Fisher Witch kept hauling in her nets, hoping for the harvest to end. But everybody was connected to at least one other person, nobody was entirely isolated and safe, and if God had had a heart, she would have torn it from him, too. The veins were thick and tough—she couldn't break them apart with her bare hands. The nets kept coming in with the tides of her daily movements. Some of the catch were small, weak, hardly formed. Others swollen and fatty, leaking yellow tallow from the gills. Scarlet cried out to be free of her revenge but the netting clotted in her hair and stuck to her skin with dried blue-black crust. The liquids turned her skin to mud in mixtures of purple, icterine, and smalt.
All around the world, people watched their loved ones unravel like cheap sweaters, and tried to sever every social web strand that tied them to another. But how could they? At the end they all succumbed, sometimes torn up by the roots from several directions at once.
The only defense, someone reasoned, was to cast the same spell, on the other side of the world, and try to undo the witch before she succeeded in killing everyone. And so began a great game of tug-of-war. Somewhere, then, is a person at the very middle of the global web of relations. She is unaware of the fraying cords coming to eventually meet in her body, joined together only by the knot of her heart.
AUTHOR BIO:
Josh Pearce has been published in Analog, Asimov's, and Clarkesworld. He can be followed on Twitter at @fictionaljosh or his website at fictionaljosh.com
