We were playing dress-up at my Great Great Grandma Mavis’s cottage when my kid sister Jemima wore the witch’s hat.

Great Great Grandma Mavis hadn’t been well, so my momma and us had moved in. I’d never really got to know Great Great Grandma Mavis before, in the flesh, so to speak. She sat in an ornately carved wooden chair near the stone kitchen hearth, right by the roaring fire, with flickering flames reflecting off her eyes, sharp as diamonds. She couldn’t really speak, simply smiling benignly whilst my momma fed her soup. Family legend said that Great Great Grandma Mavis had never set foot outside her own home.

Us kids, Jemima and Josephine and me, had to make our own fun since momma had her hands full. So we ran amok upstairs in the tumbledown house where the beams in the low thatched attic roof looked older than Methuselah. There was a woven rattan folding changing-screen covered with what we called “witchy symbols” (actually just some foreign alphabet), and a long wooden chest full of clothes fit for every Shakespeare play.

Jemima was reciting what she remembered from Macbeth, whilst Josephine twirled around like a whirling dervish, resplendent in a ruby-red hooded cloak and emerald headdress. Everything seemed, weirdly, to fit us like a glove.

“When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?” Jemima bellowed, with a storm whipping up fittingly outside the scratched glass windows. I shivered, suddenly feeling uneasy, and I wrapped a fine green overcoat, with brass buttons, snugly around my tiny torso, as if arms held me.

Josephine screamed, and the whole house seemed to shake as if the wind was lifting it away. I thought my sisters were playing a game when Jemima also started catterwauling, but when Josephine fled from the room, I noticed the old woman, perched smiling upon Jemima’s head, and wearing the witch’s hat like a snail wears a shell.

“Get it off get it off!” Blubbered Jemima hysterically. 

I grabbed a broomstick which Josephine had previously been pretending to ride, and I flapped rather pathetically at the old woman, who, somewhat offended, said “Be sensible, child, I only emerged to see what the commotion was.” And with that, she crawled backwards inside the hat, her long fingernails disappearing last. 

Jemima flung off the hat, and we both sprinted downstairs into the tempest which was now brewing. 

Momma and Josephine were clutching each other, tight enough to draw blood, and wailing like widows at a wake, whilst Great Great Grandma Mavis disappeared feet-first up the chimney, a peaceful smile upon her face. My momma had a heck of a time afterwards, declaring Great Great Grandma Mavis dead.

Legally dead, anyway. She still lives inside the chimney of her cottage, where I myself have since grown very old. My idiot son dismisses, as dementia, the whisperings of my every eternal sister, which I hear everyday from inside every nook, every cranny, every coat and every hat.