The “Whitch” Face By Pi Kielty (Posthumously)

The “Whitch” Face

By Pi Kielty (Posthumously)

Found: 2017, Box 4, folder iii

Released: September 29, 2017

Patti and her busty friend, Cindy, pulled into the parking a little before ten o'clock. The bright blue and red fluorescent signs along the top of the building and above the front door illuminated the dark night in this brightly lit, small suburban downtown.

From behind the steering wheel, Cindy began opening the door latch, but Patti interrupted and said, “Just a minute.” Patti pulled down the sun visor and the yellow light around the mirror illuminated on her beautiful round face, accenting the small, well-shaped nose in the shadow, and those famous amber and green eyes. Those eyes, one of which looked more green, the other looking more amber, would change their tether on men in certain light as the pupils grew larger or smaller, depending on the light and the dark of the mood in a room. Patti turned to look at both sides of her face, and checked the green face and skin make up on and behind her right-sized, perfect ears, and up the arms of her sleeves.

Drawing her brownish curly hair on either side of her face below the rim of her pointed black hat, she put the passenger's sun visor up, grabbed her broom from the backseat, and then said, “You sure this looks okay?”

“Don't worry,” Cindy told her. “You look great. I can't even tell its you.”

“Then, it's show time,” Patti said.

“All right!” Cindy said, getting excited for her confident friend and co-worker to meet some guys, finally, after the breakup last summer. “Got my car keys in the pocket, I.D., cash. Let's do it, girl! Let's rock this party!”

In a knotted frilly white shirt, and her short, short cut offs and high heels, Cindy led Patti by the hand to the door, where they waited in line for other Halloween revelers for the bouncer to check their age and collect a cover. When they arrived at the register inside the door, the bouncer with slicked hair and wearing overalls and straw gave them THE smile. “Looking good, ladies,” he said. “I need to check your I.D.'s, though, since I haven't seen you here before.”

He looked at the driver's licenses under the lamp resting on the counter. “Then again, I can't really tell if its you behind the green makeup, but it looks okay to me.” He took the $10 bills each held out, and gave them each a stamp on the wrist, but the stamp would not hold over the green skin paint on Patti's hands. The bouncer did not notice, nor would he care. “Have a fun night, ladies.”

“Thank you,” they both said in unison, and in unison they walked through the double door into the main bar.

The sound of the thumping beat and the tricky tempo of the hopping words of the dance mix overwhelmed a sense, like feeling the air vibrate bangs in of sound. The dance club, gone spooky orange and black retro in décor for the night, all made it seem something else than real. Almost everyone wore diverse costume. The tweezing laser orange strobes zipping and dancing in golden, prismatic pinpoints on the smoke and dust in the room, gave the atmosphere appropriate homage to the hallowed night, its festive celebratory eve of the dead. The alcohol made it a party.

To the far corner of the club, along the black painted wall with orange crepe paper streaming from the high ceiling, Cindy pointed and yelled to Patti who could barely hear her, “There they are!”

Two men, both in normal clothes of jeans and T-shirts, the kind that looked unused and unreal—too unreal, but even less true—stood looking at the dance pit immediately below them. Cindy made her high-heeled strut and Patti followed carrying her broom through the crowd, some of that crowd a group dressed like pirates, three dressed as a sheikh with two harem girls in silk and goldish brocade, and others interesting in their imaginative costumes.

The girls arrived at the high table with two empty chairs waiting for them in the otherwise standing room club. When Cindy stopped her Duke mosey, she flicked her long and straight brown hair off her shoulders, gave one of the men a big smile, a hug, and a long-smootch. Patti held her broom, her long black wicked witch cape swayed as she half turned to look at the dancers jumping and bumping in the pit.

When Cindy and her new boyfriend stopped their welcome dance, Cindy turned around and grabbed Patti by the broom and pulled her over. Yelling above the D.J. Mix, she told the man, “This is my friend from work I told you about!”

The boyfriend said, loudly so she could hear, “I'm Randy! Pleased to meet you! This tall fella is Mike!”

“Hi!” Patti said waving. “I'm Patti!”

Mike drew nearer, his face close to Patti. “Hi! What's your name?! You have to speak up! I have trouble hearing!” He pointed to the left side of his head.

“Patti!”

“Nice to meet you, Patti!” He almost had to shout now anyway, even despite his injured hearing. Patti could very well see the scar and burn on the side of his face next to his left ear. “What do you do, Patti?”

“For work? I'm a dental hygienist.”

“Oh!” Mike replied. “Is Cindy a hygienist, too?! Randy said you and she work together?!”

“Well, I work on teeth! Keeping them clean and all! Cindy works as the receptionist!”

“Oh, now I get it!” Mike said. Patti's eyes caught a beam of the bright spot light that the stage hand in the catwalk above the dance floor began to shine around the pit. Her green face glistened from the moisture of the paint on her skin. The brownish, fair hair looked blonder as its curls framed her rounded cheeks. And the paint on her chin began to crack from the talking.

“Nice venue! For a Halloween party!” She told it to Mike as she looked at Cindy motioning for her to follow. “We'll be back! Looks like we're going to get something to drink! Need anything!”

Mike held up his beer and said, “No, I'm good! Let me buy you the first one!”

“No, please! I got this! You can buy the second!” With that, Patti smiled, and the green paint on her chin cracked more, and her dimples popped out.

With a vodka sour on ice in her hand, Patti and Mike restarted the conversation, trying to talk and hear each other above the boom pumping the throbbing dancers in the pit.

“How did you hurt your hearing?!”

“A car accident a couple of years ago!”

“Oh, I'm really sorry to heat that!”

“It's okay! No one died!” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Just then, Patti realized he focused on her eyes as the amber in the one eye changed its shape. “I just got used to it! How old are you!”

“Twenty-four!” She answered. “How old are you?!”

“Twenty-five in December!”

“Oooo, birthday boy coming up!”

“Yeah!” he said, with an awful shucksey smile.

“What do you do for a job?” Patti asked, lowering her head, but still looking up at the tall Mike, as she sipped some of her vodka sour through a straw.

“Software engineer!”

“Nice! What does Randy do again?!” Patti asked, turning her head to see Randy and Cindy sitting on the high stools at the tall table against the wall.

“He's an electrical designer! He and I grew up together!”

“Where are you guys originally from?!” Patti wondered.

Mike told her. And as the conversation progressed Patti learned more about Mike, where he now rents an apartment with Randy, what he drives, where Mike and Randy went to school.

Just as the conversation needed to change topics, Cindy came up, grabbed Patti by the forearm of her flowing black witch dress, and said, “Girl friend, let's go!” Patti looked back at Mike, handing him her half finished drink, and Cindy pulled both of them through the throng of people. The next continuous mix over the over-thundering sound system began to play its rapping, hoppering undergroove tune.

On the dance floor, Patti's black polyester costume unfurled lightly, the rolls of the cuffs and the tail of the train and cape flopped lightly with her moves around the fulcrum of her broom. Patti and Cindy swooned their bodies and hustled their ware, and the crowd swarmed in directions all around them. Too many people to see them clearly when they reached the center of the pit, Mike and Randy tried watching the girls and check out the goods, but the indefinity of wall mirrors on two sides of the floor made the dancers multiply. Then the fog machine started, and the colored stage lights flashed in red, blue and yellow, and Patti and Cindy found themselves near a man dancing with two women. He moved up to his new partners, and the new group of five—all costumed—gave the one man among them his feeling good and great grinning smile.

Cindy stepped on a small stage in the corner, up high and in the apex reflection of the corner connecting mirrors. She started a shaft dance on the pole in the middle of the stage. Her hot thighs below the cutoff shorts wrapping and warping themselves on the cold chrome. The one man dancer, dressed like a pimperneller in silvery framed sun glasses, elevator shoes and a leopard skin hat, left the other three woman to join her. One more minute later, he pulled gently on Patti's broom below him and she took the large step up on the dance stage. Now a group of three, after a minute Patti used her broom to sweep herself off the stage, making it through the dancers and up out of the pit to the corner table with Mike and Randy.

Back at the table, sweating, the green face and skin paint held good. “Oh, my god, she's crazy!” Patti said, laughing while looking at Cindy still dancing on the stage with the man. “That's why I love her so!”

When she turned her head to see if the guys had heard her, she saw that Randy and Mike looked unhappy, stern, and rather too serious for the fun. Too real, but untrue at once. It looked like more than any jealousy with Randy. It looked more like anger with Mike. Patti's amber in the eyes flared, turning the one less green, and the other much stronger in color, the way her father's eyes used to light up when he felt a change in mood.

“What's up guys?!” Patti said, grabbing her glass of vodka sour from the table. “She's just having fun!”

“Having fun, sure, but with the wrong color guy!” Mike said.

Patti looked wide with those amber and green tinted eyes. “Huh?! Oh, nothing to worry about. They're only dancing and having a silly moment!”

Patti looked back at the dance stage, and Cindy had disappeared, but the pimperneller guy now danced with the two other women, still on the stage, doing moves, doing grooves, now into a different club song, a hot, sawing beat, but in the rampaging mood of Halloween death disco industrial. Then Cindy showed up beside her, which startled Patti. Cindy had sweat all over face, and perspiration on her tied white blouse. Her brown hair, no longer kempt, had strands in her eyes, and cross strands around it from whipping her head and body around the pole. Patti grabbed Cindy and led her into the ladies restroom. Randy and Mike looked at each other, each with indignant scowls and raised eyebrows.

After a half hour since their disappearance, having looked around the club, Randy sent a woman he vaguely knew into the ladies restroom, once he described the two girls. The woman exited with a broom and a pointed, black witch hat. “No one else in there right now!” she said.

Later, at her apartment, Patti walked out of the bathroom following her shower, wearing her university sweatshirt she used as pajamas. All the green face and skin paint washed off completely, and with a towel wrapped around her curly brownish hair, she sat down on the chair at her vanity and looked at herself in the mirror, sweetly with confidence and with her usual pride. She no longer kept a picture of her ex-boyfriend anywhere. He had run off with another girl over the summer, a rich girl whose parents lived on the rich lake, and who had a sailboat, and a speedboat.. She did not hate him, but neither would she lament his passing from her life full of future promises.

To her left, in front of the vanity mirror, she admired the framed anniversary photo of her parents. They still looked young, healthy as ever, and had the happy loving look between them they had until her father's tragic death. Patti had his eyes, the amber in the one, the green predominate in the other. His cheeks and brow she shared, too, but with her own soft and feminine trim, but the dimples, nose, and the chin belonged to her mother. She never, ever wondered in her life what the “wrong color” meant. Patti looked at her face, her skin a perfect silkiness like her mom still had, from years of care and the good genes of her family. Her father's color, different, and strong, with confidence, and his pride, she shared slightly more. She felt still closer to him three years after his accident.