“This is it,” Agnes thought, as she rose off the ground, feeling the saddle press against her as it pushed her upwards, “This is really it. I’m actually in a real flying program.”

She gripped at the handle of the broom, trying to control it as it worked its way upward jerkily. The runes carved into this broom were almost entirely unlike the ones carved into her own. Having had no official training before now, Agnes had devised her own runes, and done them in orders that made sense to her, as almost all hedge witches do.

Agnes’ mother taught her the basics of rune magic, but she had no real magical talent, and what she did have was mainly focused around healing herbs and minor tricks. Agnes, though, she had talent. She took to runes like a fish to water, or rather, like a bird to the sky. Her first real, substantial casting was levitation, with a homemade rune. It wasn’t long after that that she began flying. She didn’t have the broad skills of some, or the subtle and deep magic of others. She couldn’t cast with words or reach into the ground below her and draw on the power of earth. But when it came to runes, she had a natural talent.

As she rose further into the air, Agnes could see Billie, her roommate, in the rows of seats at the edge of the field. She wore her brown woolen sweatshirt. She was shocked to see her there, knowing that Billie held no interest in sporting events of any kind, much less enough to come and watch the riders train. Agnes was beginning to think of her as a real friend, something she had not had since early childhood. When she had arrived at the school 6 months earlier, she had never shared a room in her life, never been away from her mother. And now here she was, flying a broom on a professional track for the first time in her life, with an actual, professional broom. She was terrified, she missed her mother, she hated sharing a room. But if she had to share a room with someone, she was glad it was Billie, and if she had to be away from home, at least she got to fly on a professional broom while she was.

Unfortunately, the witch who carved the runes into this broom did not have Agnes’ talent for runic magic. They may have technically been regulation, but they were choppy, the edges poorly defined, and the proper intent just hadn’t been there. Once Agnes got around 20 feet into the air, the broom cocked wildly to the left, and shot out from underneath her, the back of the saddle slapping painfully against her tailbone. For a brief moment, Agnes felt a bit like Wile E Coyote, hanging in the air, and then she fell.

Twenty feet feels an awful lot like a million miles when you’re falling to the ground, but it doesn’t take nearly as long as you’d think. Before she had time to register what was happening, she felt the ground come up and slap her. The instant she hit the ground, the world around her shimmered out of existence, a haze appearing in the middle distance and rushing toward her at the speed of a locomotive, enveloping her.

“I thought we had settled this, Christine, we said we weren’t going to do this!” Agnes heard the voice of her father.

She sat in her little dirt back yard, drawing shapes into the ground with the end of a pine branch. Earlier, she had used this same branch as a broom, sweeping the ground behind the metal steps to the back door of their small trailer. Playing house with her neighbor, Sam.

She liked Sam, and she wanted to kiss him. A terribly dark secret she kept to herself, Agnes would have been mortified if she had known that both her parents and Sam’s parents were well aware of her desire to kiss Sam.

As she drew shapes into the ground, the ones her mother had taught her, and others she was inventing now, she could hear her parents arguing. They did that a lot, especially lately. Agnes worried that Sam would her them arguing, and that he would never want to kiss her back.

“You can’t show her things like that, Christine!” the sound of her father shouting came wafting through the open kitchen window above where Agnes played.

“It’s not going to hurt anything!” the reply from her mother came.

Agnes wasn’t sure why they were arguing exactly. Her mom had shown her some shapes and called them runes. She said they were special, and that only some people knew about them anymore. Agnes did not understand why this upset her father. Agnes’ mother had told her never to tell her father about the runes, that he wouldn’t understand. A few days later, her father had found the little notebook where she had been practicing. The notebook her mother gave her, with each rune drawn, and her mother’s neat and precise print beneath it giving the name. Fortune, God, Horse, Man, Wealth, Health, Love. There were many runes, but Agnes had added even more, combining some, adding entirely new elements to others.

“It’s witchcraft, Crissy. It’s wrong.” Her father’s exhausted voice carried through the open window into the still, cool fall air.

“They’re runes, Jack. They’re fine. My mother showed me, her mother showed her. They keep her safe, maybe help her find a good deal on a washing machine someday. Nothing more than that. They can’t hurt anything.”

They weren’t shouting anymore, but Agnes liked the tone even less than before. Now they sounded sad, they sounded like they always did after the shouting stopped. They sounded like Agnes felt whenever she got a cold. Like a car whose tank has run dry and is only still moving out inertia and habit.

Agnes continued to draw the runes on the ground. She drew the shapes her mother taught her, but she drew new shapes, too. She could see where to add a stave, where to add a branch. The rune almost didn’t come from Agnes, but instead, Agnes was just pulling it out of where it lived and bringing it here. Making it exist like it should have. Little orange lines glowed in her vision, and she could see where to draw the next part as clearly as if it was already there.

As she drew the last branch on the last stave, the little pine straw stick she was drawing with snapped out of her hand, scratching her palm as it went. It stood there, neat as a pin, floating 2 feet above the ground, looking for all the world like a real life witch’s broom, ready to take on a tiny rider.

“Mama!” Agnes shouted, “Mama, come look!”

Her mother appeared at the back door, above the little metal steps, and gasped.

“Look, Mama! I made it float!”

Her mother rushed down the stairs and grabbed the branch. When she touched it, Agnes felt the air change, like she had been in a soap bubble, and it had just popped.

“I see that, baby. I see that. Let’s go inside, Aggie. Hurry.”

“A good deal on a washing machine? You’re sending our daughter to hell, Christine,” came her father from the top of the stairs.

He glanced at Agnes before turning and going back inside. The way he looked at her made Agnes feel scared, like he was looking at a stranger. Had she been old enough to understand, she would have called it a look of disgust, of loathing, his brow tightly knit, and nose wrinkled like a foul smell clung around his head. But being as she was then, she only knew it made her scared, and sad.

“Come on, baby. Let’s go inside” Her mother scooped Agnes up in her arms and carried her up the stairs.

Agnes had a terrible feeling she had done something wrong. What if Sam had seen? He’d never want to kiss her now.