Monologue by Morwenna Silver, aged 12

I touched the place where I could once feel a long smooth cascade of hair, but in its place I found dry, grey, old crackly wire. I touched the place where I could once feel a smooth sweet smelling cheek, but in its place I found only wrinkled, thin, ghostly skin stretched across mean bones. I touched the place where I could once feel a kind, fresh, young heart beating, but in its place was...well...nothing.


Back in the days when I could remember my age and didn't have enough fingers on my hand to count all my friends. I could have had the pick of any man in the whole village but I was greedy, I wanted more, I had built myself up in my head. I had decided that I was worthy of a rich man - maybe even a lord. I suppose I was almost vain. As my friends and admirers grew tired of my foolish fantasies of becoming a lord's wife, they began to mock me...


"Hey there, your highness," they would call at me, "Who would have thought it! An orphan whose parents were nothing but filth." And so on. But here's the thing - all the kind villagers that had taken care of me had told me horrible tales of the cruelty my ma and pa had inflicted upon me. But I had refused to believe it. I told myself that my ma was the most beautiful, kind person the village had ever seen and that I was to inherit a great sum of money that she had and that was why I should marry a lord. I was in denial about who I really was.


This childish game cost me everything - my friends, my reputation and any hope of marrying. All gone. Just like that. Now people would call me 'snob' and they would say that I would live alone for the rest of my days. So I did and I earned my living by curing sick children with my remedies. And that was when it all began. People started to whisper and things get round quick in our village. Country folk don't like the idea of a woman living alone on the edge of the village. It spread quick - quicker than chicken pox - and pretty soon the word was out. And that word - I can hardly bring myself to say - is witch.