Dana Jaye Cadman’s “The Winds” was a runner-up in the 2025 Great American Fiction Contest. Are you a writer with a great short story? You can enter our annual short story contest online!
“Gotta crave something you can only get from a brand new man,” she said, “can’t be someone you know yet if he likes you any. Otherwise you’re not scared enough. Gotta be scared.”
Aunt M was a witch, but not the kind who could change anything bad about my life. She dispensed advice like this as if it was ancient wisdom and not just a reflection on her own poor choices. “Life’ll get in the way of intuition,” she’d say, undoing her own sagely status.
My mother warned me to not come back from summers with M entirely new. It was okay to listen to her old albums and read from her library and even cook up herbal remedies if I wanted, but best not to let my whole worldview change and be suddenly looking at life through M’s lens. “It’s cloudy,” Mom said.
“More like a storm,” my father would say. “But us Bridges don’t mind some spooky weather.” Then he’d twinkle at me, a joke, and a knowing Mom would just never understand, because she wasn’t a witch of any kind, not even an un-powerful one like Dad and M.
It wasn’t clear yet if I was a witch at all. That’s what the summers were for. Better to find out early what one’s proclivities are so you can take control of them. Didn’t want to find out in your thirties when you were already grown and working an office job that you could rewind time. Or worse, hope your whole short life that you had a big fun surprise coming and build everything around the possibility of magic when none was coming. Because then I most certainly should get an office job and start saving up money in a Roth IRA and buy a cute little house down just outside of town and start taking good care of it.
But mostly M didn’t say anything about magic, not directly. It was mostly stuff like this, about dating or art or dressmaking or cooking, which I didn’t mind because it wasn’t clear anyhow what the difference was between all that and potions and spells. Mom and Dad and M all set my expectations pretty low on what witches were able to accomplish. Not like we’re sorcerers, or demons, or monsters. Good magic doesn’t do much of anything, I was told. Not besides stuff modern medicine or tech had already figured out but more efficiently.
“So, about this boy,” M needled. “You like him then? That’s your first problem. Ruins how good you can see what he’s all about. Should we cast a clarity spell then?”
She was kidding. Love was one thing magic couldn’t do anything about. One of the great mysteries of the universe over which no one, not human or witch, had any control. There were illusions of course, tricks, but that was for those who didn’t have the burden of real magic and not those of us who have to be responsible with our powers. Supposedly. If I do end up having powers. I’d have been better off a sorcerer.
“Isa, come on now.” Aunt M was frustrated with my “get up” as she called it. Lazy half-human I was, according to her. She stood on the back patio in front of what was definitely a cauldron, though she refused that name for it. “I’m cookin’, girl, and you missed the whole prep of it. Most important part.”
“Sorry, M, I was—” Then I stopped. I knew not to explain.
“Daydreaming, no doubt, is what you were. You should know better than do that around here. Might be one thing back home where the ethers are paying you no attention to be making those visions real. But watch out here or things you think you want’ll come true and you won’t have reconciled whether you really do want ’em or they were just nice to be thinking of. Thinkin’s no fantasy, Isa; it’s planning and potioning up around here. You’re lucky ethers don’t know you from a rabbit now. But once I’ve got my claws in you for the summer, you’ll find you’re too powerful for all that.” M held up a rabbit’s foot and dropped it into the cauldron’s brew. It turned into the simmer. Liquified.
I let the kitchen door shut and walked over to the center of the patio to peer into the pot. “What are we making?”
“Don’t you wish it were a love spell, huh? Welp, no luck, love.” M handed me a bundle of reeds and grasses. “First, we set the scene. So here, the stuff of swamps and marshes.”
I held them over the cauldron. “Am I supposed to, like, say anything?”
M smiled. “You got something in mind?”
It just felt like the moment for a ritual. I had no idea how to be enacting that. “No.” I changed course. “So we set the scene?”
“We set the scene,” M said. “Imagine tall beach grasses in opaque still waters. A heron arches its neck like a wind.” She looked at me. “Well? Oh, Isa, close your eyes and imagine.”
I held the bundle of reeds over the cauldron, gripping them and readied for her to say let go, and closed my eyes.
She spoke gentler now, “What do you see?”
* * *
I’d failed the potion lesson at lunch so M put me on cooking for dinner. Make whatever I want as long as I don’t ask her about it, she’d said, so I stood in the kitchen trying to make sense of where her pots and pans were and what I could make from the strange staples she kept in her cabinets and fridge. Beans, pasta, all kinds of tubes of pastes and jars of pickled things.
I didn’t see a grocery store or a farm or a mailbox anywhere on the way up to M’s. Where she was getting anything besides what grew out back was a curiosity.
Was I supposed to conjure something? A chicken? The bookshelf over the teacups had recipe books, maybe some were secret witchly cooking instructions. I rifled through. Summer Hosting, Cupcakes, ….
M came into the kitchen light-footed and so dainty I barely recognized a presence. And then suddenly her voice, richly and syrup-like from beside the stove: “What you trying to learn?”
I was resting my finger on the spine of a book, Antimony and Appetizers.
“Calling on the ethers already? My girl. Well, you want to tell me about your crush or try your hand at some baking?”
Nothing could be worse. Talk about my life or learn some useless spells. But I did want to make dinner easier. “Maybe yeah, one on food. Wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Let’s see if you got it,” M said.
Suddenly the air felt cooler and heavier. The sunlight had gone out of M’s kitchen despite the walls painted in the yellows of dead grasses, and her pots all ceramic, intermediate tones and imperfect shapes lined the shelves on the west wall, where the window showed a purply gray sky collecting into a storm.
“Can I get a sweater first?” I asked.
“Why don’t you change the weather instead?” M asked.
“I’d turn it more dramatic if I could,” I said.
M winked at me. “Bridges like a storm.” She lifted her arms over her head. The lights in the kitchen, the whole house, the porch, and the streetlamps far past all flickered. Dimmed and glowed up. Turned purple and then green.
I shivered. The winds turned outside, swirling, pulling leaves right from the trees into a dance around the windows. The wind blew the kitchen door open. The patio held a cyclone of flower petals and grasses and leaves and feathers.
“Ethers!” M shouted, grinning. “Do it now!”
“Do what?” I yelled back at her. The winds entered and circled around M.
“Take it,” she said. She dropped her arms. The winds snapped away from her and turned to me. I became their center. Surrounded by all the newness of spring. I could see the details of the feathers, each spiny hair its own piece of the mosaic of color. The feathers of crows, rainbow oil slick. And the feathers of pigeons, perfectly lavender and gray as a gentle storm. And the veins of snapdragon petals. And the velvety sweetness of lilacs. Beachgrasses. The soft fronds of willows. It all surrounded me. M smiled. “Control it. Control yourself.”
I lifted my hands to the ceiling. The winds collected into a sphere of life. “Now what?” I yelled. “How?”
“Wish for something,” she said.
I closed my eyes, concentrating on the wind, and turned my palms toward each other. I had the force of growth between them. I could feel its gravity. I didn’t know what I wanted enough to will anything.
I could hear M shouting through the resonance of the winds. “One of your daydreams. Always craving something. Always in that mind. Ask for it then.”
“But they’re all for love,” I said. I knew that wasn’t allowed. Or even possible.
I dropped my hands. The winds hissed and buzzed and dissipated into the still kitchen air.
“Dinner then,” M said. “You’ll learn how to learn then. How to ask. Don’t worry. Dinner first then. Then, soon.”
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Comments
Typo: I meant ‘and speak’ in paragraph 3.
This is a fascinating little story. Perhaps Aunt M’s spells regarding love didn’t work because she’d tried them on herself without success, so they wouldn’t work on Isa either? I like your descriptive writing style here, from the lights changing colors to the cyclonic winds accompanying the spell, as well as the way Aunt M spoke.
The story (in my mind) seemed more like it took place in the autumn rather than the late spring or summer, probably due to the cooler temperature and the resulting rustling winds. But here it was due to Aunt M’s spell casting with Isa. This niece may have a little witch in her also.
Aunt M and her home seem like both would be a trip to visit. I’d like to see her cauldron and speak with her on a myriad of topics of her choosing, and also see if she’s got the moon in her eyes, Ms. Cadman.