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“Wow,” says my friend, reaching, “What's this?”

“Careful,” I warn. “Pointing bone.”

When not downright effusive, witches tend toward the elliptical. Words, after all, have power: why waste them?

She draws back her hand, quirking an eyebrow.

“Well,” she says.

The bone was so perfect that at first, when I found it, I thought that it was one of those molded plastic bones that people strew around at Halloween. One touch was enough to tell me differently, though.

A longbone from someone's hind leg, long as my palm and long finger together, beautifully dry, with a pointed, crooked finger of bone on the end.

Whose bone it was, is anyone's guess. Larger than a cat, certainly.

Whoever you were, thanks. Every old warlock should have a pointing bone.

Just in case, you know?

Pointing bone, also called the finger of Maghu: a wand used exclusively in cursing. As an atlatl (spear-thrower) is to a spear—a force multiplier—so a pointing bone is to a curse.

Point, aim, fire. Struck, the target wanes mysteriously away and dies.

Not to be taken up lightly. Oh no, my precious.

“May I?” she asks, admiringly. I nod.

A murder, a massacre, a death camp.

How do you cleanse a place where something truly infamous has happened?

Not hard. You let the place of death become a place of life. You return it to the Mother.

Such a place becomes accursed. Only Earth herself can cleanse it.

Best to do what the ancestors did.

Our topic at Old Craft discussion group that night was hexes.

It's a meaty topic, with ethics in the foreground.

One guy felt that he'd found the perfect solution to the problem. He was big into Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk-saint who happened to be (as a friend of mine rather uncharitably puts it) Deity-of-the-Month at the time.

When something dark needs to be done, he explained, you make an offering to St. Death—I suppose witches would say the Hag here—and offer it to her. Then she takes care of it.

That way, no matter what happens, you're clean of it.

Although I didn't say anything at the time, his comment triggered a moment of insight for me. It taught me one big difference between real, bred-in-the-bone witches, and the Deity-of-the-Month crowd.

 Cursed be the burners.

Cursed be they.

Cursed be they, forever.

They really should think twice before they start setting fires in the Witch neighborhood.

In the four nights of unrest following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, assholes came to our city to set fire to buildings: assholes from the Right, assholes from the Left, and just plain assholes.

Cowardly-wise, they came here to do their morth-work and then ran away, back whence they came.

Well, we can do morth-work too. Hit us, and we hit back.

Here in the Witch neighborhood, we rebuild, but we do not forget. Whenever I pass the site of a burned-out building, I renew the curse.

Cursed be the burners.

Cursed be they.

Cursed be they, forever.

Their ill-work will dog them, wherever they go. To their graves, it will hound them.

There's only one way out: remorse. Remorse, and it better be public.

An empire of the imagination, Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore, the US's oldest (and only surviving) independent science fiction/fantasy bookstore was not only a well-loved local landmark, but a site of pilgrimage for readers all over the Midwest as well.

Now it's gone.

(It also had the grungiest men's room in the Midwest, which—on the evidence of it—had never once been cleaned since the store was founded in 1974. Ah, fandom.)

An unknown arsonist or arsonists burned it to rubble and ash on the night of Friday, May 29, in the arson that has stalked the first George Floyd protests here in the Twin Cities like a withering shadow.

I stand on the sidewalk before the hollow cave of the ruins. Strata of burned books carpet what was once the basement floor.

Touchingly, some people have left flowers. I, however, am here for another purpose.

Holy cusswords, B@&m*n! Cussing is of course a euphemism for cursing, which can mean using a socially unacceptable word, naming a power in an undignified manner ("taking the Lord's name in vain") or formally casting bad magic. Present day Asatruars use the Old Icelandic word blot, meaning sacrifice, as a name for one of our rituals. In modern Icelandic, the word has become blota, which means a cuss word. That which is holy transformed over time into what is a curse and then into what is an empty phrase that may once have been a curse, merely a cuss now. Or is it still a curse? Or is it still holy?

Words have power; that's why a magic spell is called a spell, the same word that means to write a word. When we use a minor cussword like f--- or sh-- that refers to a bodily function, the thing that makes it a cussword is the social taboo of the word and of the action, that is, it refers to something society considers unacceptable to do in public. The same goes for cuss words that refer to parts of the body; they are socially taboo because they refer to body parts normally covered by clothing. These words and concepts are not inherently bad, merely socially taboo. But more religious oriented cusswords like d--- or the name of a god are in another category. To say d--- is to literally curse, that is, to place a curse of damnation on someone or something. If we believe in magic we should be cautious about using such words. If we believe in gods we should be respectful of their names. To say H--- is to call upon Hel, goddess of the dead. The situation may call for that, or it may not. We should be mindful whether the situation calls for calling upon such a god.

We started by turning off every light in the house.

Every coven worth its wood* has a story to tell about its first hex.

Here's ours.

The group had been together for not quite a year when we decided to move in together. The next nine months were some of the most difficult—and also some of the most gratifying—of my life. Much of what we've been doing together ever since was first gestated during those nine fateful months.

One cold day in January I got a call at work. There'd been a break-in.

That night was Hex Night.

First we went through the house and turned off every light.

Then, in the dark temple, we pounded out a slowly mounting cacophony of rage.