She gripped the edge of the counter.

I walked clock-steady over to her and turned her right around. "Usually you kiss a girl. Or you ask her up for dinner."

She let go of the counter easily. Boneless, like a toddler.

"Or you take her out to a movie. Or if you don't like movies you send her-" and my voice failed. I came down on my heels onto thorns. Flowers.

"So you know why." Her head was down. Her shoulders hunched. She muttered like a beaten child.

"Tell me why."

A pause. "Not gonna-" Her hair was too short to hide behind: a utilitarian woodsman's cut. The way her chin shrunk into her chest, it hadn't been once. It had been long and dusty blond like beehives.

"Tell me."

"-if you know-"

The joints of my fingers were aching. "Just say it."

Alice opened her mouth. A cough.

A river of flowers poured onto the floor.

I yanked my hands back, swearing. Roses spilled over them between us, scraping breasts and belly, digging thorns into my sleeves. I shook, and they clung, dragged me back, rooted down into the rug. The blooms were thick, sick scarlet. The smell was a slick in the back of the mouth. "The hell-"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. And then bent over, heaving, and choked.

"Alice!"

A thorn curled under her front tooth. She twitched her lips a little. In the firelight, I couldn't tell if they were blue.

The thorns tore when I pushed through them: legs, arms, chest. One step and blood dribbled down between my breasts. Two, and it tingled at my knees. Her lips were blue. Up close I could see it. Her eyes were big and emptying out.

"Breathe for me," I whispered, and heard the rattle of leaves in her throat.

I thrust my hands into the thorns and pulled.

They came out bloody. Hers, and mine. They came out rooting and squeezing: I threw them to the floor and the roots died blind. I pulled until I had the last of them and checked her heartbeat, the color of the delicate skin beneath her eyes. State Parks employees got mandatory first aid training-even the ones who just wrote and set the manuals.

Her heart was pounding. Her lips were dry and purpled. I couldn't feel breath.

"Breathe for me," I told her. No answer.

I laid a hand on her chest. Laid her back on the floor she'd joined herself, hardwood, stained with roses. My bloody hands stained her shirt.

Pinched her nose, touched her lips to mine. Began to breathe.

I swept the petals into a clear compost bag when it was over. Red rose, and white rose, and rue.

The roses scratched her throat. The rue was poison-not to be taken orally. Dr. James looked down Alice's throat with his pointed penlight and scraped down low in Alice's mouth with a tongue depressor, and put her on a liquid diet until the bloody scratches healed. "No rough food," he told her and me, her nearest neighbor. "No shouting. Nothing acidic. Lukewarm soup, not hot."

Alice pressed her mouth shut. Alice turned away.

The doctor packed his cracked black bag and I saw him to the door. "You'll make sure she takes it careful." A statement, not a question. A sprig of sharp goldenrod scratched at my right arch. I kept both feet planted.

"I'll come up afternoons. Maybe Mrs. Nguyen-"

"She won't otherwise," he interrupted, and looked down his blob of a nose at me. I looked away. My face felt warm. A lone white violet vined around my ankle and hid.

"I'll make sure," I said, small, and he nodded and let himself out.

I watched him drive down the trail from Idaho and then went back inside.

Alice leaned against the kitchen counter, solid butcher's-block wood she'd cured and fitted herself. Her hands were clasped in front of her mouth. I couldn't see her eyes.

"Doctor gave me these for you." Ibuprofen. Household medicine anywhere but Idaho, where Alice didn't let chemical things. "He said one every four hours, when it hurts." I set the bottle down before her, clumsy. The doctor'd bandaged my hands up fat with gauze.

Alice swept the ibuprofen bottle into a drawer and took out ginger for tea.

"He said no hot liquids-" I protested. Not very well. My voice was sympathy-raw and too thin to be strong or firm.

"Goodnight," she whispered, hoarse. Rose-stricken.

There was a hedge grew up around Idaho that night, lavender and rose-teeth and rue. I found it in the morning with a Tupperware of white bean soup under one arm and pressed cough drops in a bag on the other, with the soles of my scratched-up boots sprouting bright pink eglantine and filling in Alice's reclaimed path. There'd been no sheets on my doorstep this morning. I'd slept wrapped in the winter storm blanket on the cool kitchen floor. I woke to a halo of mayfly weeds, withering into compost, laying down soil for an army of spiky green aloe.

I touched a finger to the twining growth, and it hissed at the thought of blood.

I went back down the mountain.

The second day there was a message on my phone from Mrs. Nguyen, down in town. Alice hadn't come for her baskets, she said, in her odd mix of late-learned English and the drawn-out local accent. Could her neigh-bah go up the mountain and look in?

The hedge had sprouted purple lobelia overnight. They weren't used to the thin air. They died, outside-in, as they opened. Their corpses blanketed the dirt.

"I don't do this," I told the hedge, soft. "I have a manual to finish in five days. I have a boss and a job."

The hedge spat withering blossoms.

My teeth clacked together; a muscle in my cheek started to hurt. "Nuh-uh," I said. "You want something of me, you ask it. I'm not gonna hurt you for it. I'm not . . . whoever that was," and bit my cheek at the thought. "But I won't be-" I rolled words around in my mouth, looked for the one whose taste matched foul "-herded."

My footprints filled with cactus on the way down the trail. I only looked back the once.

Two days before I was to rotate in, Alice sent me a letter.

No stamp: she wouldn't have mailed it, not in our little town with its one post office and one whitewashed wood church. Both run by Mrs. Jeffrey Mays-that was how she styled herself, Missus Jeffrey-who would surely comment to the pastor on crazy old Alice sending handwritten letters to the Forestry woman up the highway. Handmade letters: the paper was textured and soft, speckled with flower petals and the twisting skeleton of a stem. I almost placed a toe on it to see if it would grow.

Inside was a sachet: soft fabric and pungent, full of smells and sweet and strange that made my eyes water. "Green," I whispered to myself. It didn't smell like grass, or forests, or gardens. It smelled green.

This'll do it, the letter said, in Alice's angular hand. The perfect loops trembled. Not unpracticed; just seldom used. Steep it into tea. I'm sorry.

"Drink me," I murmured, and coughed a laugh. Cupped the sachet in my hands and imagined it staining them green, streaks the color of sunlight on maple leaves that would never wash away. She was sorry.

There was a lot of magic here, in the tucked-away hills by the Canadian border. No way of knowing if this was a love spell, or a hate spell, or one to strip the flowers away from the ground whereon I stood.

"Oh, Alice," I whispered, and put the kettle upon the stove.

I drank it when it cooled. It tasted like the forest in midsummer.

The flowers fell out like cancer, shriveling away and fading into dust that coated the kitchen tiles. When it was done I flexed my feet, felt the muscles. They looked naked. A bare few days, and I'd grown used to the scent of roses.

The aloe was blooming in the kitchen floor. A butterfly hovered around one of the blossoms. I could pot them. There was a potter halfway to the city who threw solid pots for plants. She sold them by the roadside, painted Indian colors. Tourists bought them wrapped in newspaper fifty miles before the clattering painted sign on Alice's parked red truck. There was a market for growing things here, in the hills. They bloomed better. As if by magic.

I teased the daffodils from the shower drain and put them into water. They'd stood up against the onslaught of chemical soap and synthetic shampoo. I bundled them into a bouquet and brought them when I locked the house up for my week in the city office.

Perhaps on my way down, into the smoke and asphalt, I'd drop them off at Idaho.

Don Webb's story is, ultimately, about fear and hatred of anyone who is perceived as "different": race, gender, creed . . . so many reasons we devise to destroy our fellow humans. But his witch, Barbara, is of particular interest because she challenges our ideas of "good witch/bad witch" and exposes how shallow our own beliefs may be. There are certainly those who do believe in a God who is opposed by Satan, but one wonders how many of the residents of this small fictional Wisconsin town actually believe in either. Of those who do, theologically they would believe witches must be in league with the Devil and use their powers to harm people and property. Yet Barbara not only has done no harm, she has done considerable good. And popular culture now tends to side with the witch rather than condemn her.

So, the question arises: Is the following scenario unlikely? Or do we still fear "the other" on such a primal level that we instinctually destroy rather than think? Don't worry. Merely offering food for thought. There will be no quiz at the end of the book.

Afterward.

Don Webb.

After twenty-four years of working for Wisconsin Data Systems, Barbara made her first tactical error. She revealed that she was on the side of Darkness to someone she'd known for seven years. She was fired within a week, then there were the harassing phone calls and she began hearing things outside her house at night, and woke to find foul things written on the sidewalk in front of her house.

It had happened like this: The boss had had yet another bad idea, he wanted to remove all horizontal communications between fellow workers. No one would talk about the Project save to him. He didn't like innovation, "self empowerment," or "total quality culture." He had dismissed them jokingly as "Tools of the devil" not knowing how right he was. No one, of course, would stand up to him.

Except Barbara.

Barbara had the work record and the smarts and the "Question Authority" button. She should have risen far on the management ladder, but she liked what she was doing-she liked writing code. She was good at it and she believed that the answer to life's questions was to find a job that provided endless pleasurable challenges.

The meeting went as everybody hoped it would.

Barbara called the plan "Bullshit."

Then a polite and detailed logical analysis showed why the plan would not only stifle creativity, but cost money, slow production, absorb the boss's time and otherwise disrupt the company. The boss had almost begged her to stop when she reached her fourteenth point.

He retreated as he always did, saying it had been a proposal, an experiment, and that he had merely wanted feedback.

After he left the room, some people giggled.

Robert Hiker followed Barbara back to her cubicle. They made small talk while various folk drifted by to thank her for standing up to the boss (as always).

Then Robert said, "Do you get what you want with the boss because you're good with people or because you're a witch?"

Barbara laughed, "Isn't 'good with people' and 'witchcraft' the same thing?"

"No, I mean it. I mean we all know you're a witch."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh we've noticed that you pick up certain stones, that you make teas when anybody is sick, that anybody you really don't like isn't real lucky. It's okay because we know that you're a white witch."

"You mean some goddess-worshiping woman who takes her clothes off a lot and dances under the moon? I suppose that's all quite beautiful and everything, but that's hardly me."

"But you are a witch."

"Robert, you've known me for seven years, been to my house, taken me to the movies, would have made a pass at me if you weren't scared of your wife. You know I'm the one who helped you through your bad flu last year. You've borrowed money from me."

"What's your point?"

"I am wondering out loud if I can trust you. Trust you as a friend and trust you to think rather than spasm-off in knee jerk reactions."

"Sure. You can trust me."

"You know," Barbara said, "I think I can. I am witch, a Black Witch. I am on the side of the Prince of Darkness."

"You can't be serious, you're the nicest person I know."

"Think about it, Robert. I always stand up to the boss. Does that sound more like Lucifer or Michael? When someone's sick I don't pray for help, I do things. I don't call upon God as male or female, I am working to be as God. Lucifer is my role model, the rebel against cosmic injustice."

"Do you drink blood or something?"

"No, Robert, I don't drink blood, do black masses, or anything else the tabloids might ascribe to me. You know me, remember?"

"Yeah, I guess I know you."

He backed out of her cubicle and she knew she had blown it. She figured he was bright enough: she had taught him C++, she had made potato salad for his birthday (he loved potato salad). Maybe it was just the shock. At least he wouldn't blab it around the office. It wasn't exactly the kind of thing that made office gossip.

She hoped.

She was wrong.

It was in their eyes the next day. All of the forces that keep stupidity the ruling paradigm of the Earth: fear, loathing, forced humor. By the end of the day, she knew that her work place of twenty-four years had turned on her. People didn't drop by her cubicle to chat, no one asked her to lunch. When people had to hand her things they kept their bodies as far away from her as they could. The boss had called in and taken her keys away from her. He said it was a new company policy that only he could have keys to the office.

She had felt this kind of hatred before from male chauvinists. She knew that time could cure it, but she didn't know if she had time.