Drawtober 2026: Witch’s Garden

Time: 10:46 a.m., October 31

Nellie woke late on All Hallow’s Eve. She would have woken even later if it hadn’t been for the bird in her hair pecking at her scalp. This was what came from being hospitable to crows: they never knew when to leave. She’d rescued Grimm two years ago after his foot got tangled in some fishing line. She’d set him free after a brief recovery period, and he’d returned two days later with a pebble for her. He hadn’t left since.

Cracking one eye, she beheld the curious face of Grimm looking down at her. He had his head cocked to one side, his yellow eye peering at her as though through a microscope.

“Up?” he squawked. “Up, up, up?”

“Yes, yes, I’m up,” Nellie grumbled. She flapped her hands at him, and he clacked his beak in outrage before flapping off her head and onto the bedpost. He squawked at her once more, feet clicking on the wood of the bed frame.

Blearily, Nellie swung her legs over the side of her bed and searched about for her slippers. Someone—probably Branwen—must have come in to open the shutters while she was still asleep, and now late-autumn light spilled across the room like golden honey. It made her head ache to look at it.

She found her slippers and slid into a robe (black, of course) before shuffling out into the main area of the cottage. As soon as she opened the door to her bedroom, she heard the telltale sound of a crackly, off-key singing and smelled cinnamon and nutmeg on the air.

Branwen glanced up when Nellie shuffled into the kitchen, giving her a bright smile. The insufferable older witch was a morning person, something Nellie would never be and had come to despise on principle. She was kneading bread dough, her forearms and elbows white with flour. Beside her, an old record player spun, playing “Monster Mash” on a low volume.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Branwen said cheerfully. She picked up a stoneware mug and slid it in front of Nellie as soon as she was seated at the kitchen table. “Earl grey with milk and sugar, and I have two aspirin for you.”

“I feel like I was run over by a horse,” Nellie mumbled, picking up the mug and pressing her hands against it. It was deliciously hot to the touch. She raised it and pressed it to her left eye to quell the throbbing there.

“Well, that is what you get for partying with poltergeists. I warned you not to.” Branwen turned back into the small kitchen and began pulling ingredients from the old refrigerator to make an omelet. Nellie watched her, squinting against the sunlight and gratefully sipping her tea. Witches usually develop a particular affinity for some kind of magic, and Branwen was undoubtedly a kitchen witch. She had been baking up a storm for the past two weeks in preparation for tonight: pies and scones and cakes and all manner of breads. Nellie had had to chase her out of the garden more than once when the other witch had come sniffing around for yet more rosemary.

Nellie sipped her tea. “Where’s Maeve?”

“She headed down to the apothecary a little while ago,” Branwen said. “Something about needing fresh grave dirt, I think.”

“We have grave dirt.”

“Yes, well, apparently it isn’t fresh enough for the ritual tonight.”

At the mention of the ritual, Nellie felt a flutter of nerves in her chest. It wasn’t her first All Hallow’s Rite, but it was the first time she was wholly responsible for it. Her mentor Rowena had been called away a few months ago. She and the rest of the Council were dealing with some nasty business up north, and Rowena didn’t think she would be back until Yuletide. Which meant Nellie, for the first time since she’d become a witch, had to perform her part of the ritual alone.

A plate with an omelet appearing in front of her rattled Nellie from her thoughts. Branwen pulled out one of the chairs and sat down with a kind smile. “You’re going to do brilliantly. There’s no need to be nervous.”

“Who said I was nervous?” Nellie grabbed a fork and began digging into the omelet, savoring the nutty flavors of mushroom against the sharp tang of oregano. Branwen rolled her eyes and slid a pair of aspirin over the table. Nellie took them gratefully, swallowing them down with a mouthful of tea.

“Do you need any help in the kitchen?” she asked.

“Not as such. Everything is well in hand.”

“What about invitations? I know we had a few stragglers to go out.”

“I sent Prince earlier this morning to deliver them,” Branwen said.

Nellie arched her eyebrow. “How did you make His Highness to do that?”

“I don’t make Prince do anything, I ask him politely. Something you should learn to do if you want to get along with him.”

“All right. Well, what about decor—”

“Nellie, my love, everything is well in hand,” Branwen said. She was back to kneading the dough with firm, callused hands. “There’s only one thing you need do today.”

Swallowing, Nellie set down her fork. “Right. Right. Got it.” She stood. Grabbing a carving knife from the woodblock on the counter, she headed out to the garden.

Nellie’s affinity for plants was not as clear cut as Branwen’s for the kitchen or Maeve’s for books. Hers was not a gentle or a structured gift. When she made roses bloom, there were more thorns than flowers. Tulips straggled to her call, but nettles sprang up readily. Her work with the garden was so rife with pricks and poison that she often despaired of growing anything that wasn’t hazardous to everyone’s health. She would sit in the garden with her hands dug into the dirt, focusing with all her will and power on growing something kindly—lemon balm, perhaps, or some wisteria—and deadly nightshade would sprout instead.

“You can’t force these things,” Rowena told her once when she found her crouched in the garden at sundown, weeping over a patch of poison ivy that was supposed to have been marjoram. “Magic is not a thing to be forced. Magic is like our Prince, Nellie. It has to be asked.”

In the past year, she had made improvements, though it was still terribly hard. The act of relinquishing control—of letting the magic flow through her rather than forcing it to be a certain shape—felt nigh impossible at times.

The sun was high in the sky as Nellie stepped out along the garden path. Despite the glow, a chill wind blew across the garden. Many of the plants were wilted and gone by now, their stems turning brown and prickly beneath the October sky. Nellie picked her way along the path, ducking beneath trellises that held beans in the summer, all the way to the back of the garden. Where the pumpkins grew.

Pumpkins were particularly hard for her. Oh, they always looked fine—rotund and perfectly colored. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was what you found inside the gourd, for Nellie’s pumpkins always grew with strange innards—hungry mosses or strange spiders or sometimes simply rotten. In the years that she had been growing pumpkins in the garden, she had never managed to grow a normal one.

None of that would do for tonight. She needed a good pumpkin, the perfect pumpkin, in fact, to carve for the Master of Revels.

She pushed open the back gate, and pumpkins met her eye. Round pumpkins and lean pumpkins. Orange and white and red. Bumpy in all the right places. They seemed to leer up at her, daring her to pluck one out.

Stiffening her spine, Nellie knelt with her carving knife and got to work.

An hour passed beneath the October sun. Then another. Nellie, kitchen knife in hand, carved off the top of ever pumpkin in that garden.

Her dismay grew with each stem that came up in her hands. Rotten cores in some. Strange teeth and tongues in others. One held a strange black fire that was cold to the touch—she set that one aside for Maeve. Poison, putrid, unusable, every single one. When the last pumpkin was peeled open before her—it had been filled with acrid spider webs—Nellie set it aside with shaking hands. Tears were slipping down her face, leaving wet trails in the dirt smeared there.

She’d known from the beginning that she couldn’t do this. When Rowena had taken her hands and kissed her forehead before taking to the skies, Nellie felt all her confidence fly away with her. It didn’t matter what she did or how hard she worked or how badly she wanted it.

“Nellie, my love, what—oh dear.”

Through tear-streaked eyes, Nellie saw Branwen standing at the edge of the garden bed. The older witch held a plate with a coffee cake in one hand—one of the special ones with a happy memory baked into it. The sight only made her cry harder.

“I told you I couldn’t do it,” Nellie choked out. “They’re ruined. All of them.”

“Now, now, I’m sure there’s…something we can..do…” Branwen trailed off as she stooped to inspect one of the pumpkins. A hissing snake swayed from the hole Nellie had carved. It tried to strike at her, but Branwen quickly grasped it and pulled it out before flinging it away. She sighed and knelt, handing the plate with the coffee cake to Nellie.

“You mustn’t be so hard on yourself, Nel,” she said, rubbing circles on her back.

“Rowena believe in me, and I just—I can’t do it. I ruin everything I touch.”

“That isn’t true,” Branwen said firmly. “Have that cake, and then pick out the ones that are the least…pick out the ones you like. I’m going to look in the spellbook and see what can be done, right?”

Nellie nodded, despondent. Branwen gave her back one more reassuring pat before standing with a groan. The older witch hobbled back up the path to find the spellbook.

For a while, Nellie just sat there looking at the ruined pumpkin patch. The coffee cake grew cold on the plate. She felt sorry for herself, and then angry for feeling sorry for herself, and then even angrier for being angry, because obviously Branwen was sorry for her, too. They all were. The rest of them were so talented, and Nellie was just a mistake, from beginning to end.

A squawk made her look up. Grimm perched on the fence at the back of the pumpkin patch, his golden eye tilted on her.

“Up?” he squawked.

Nellie scowled at him. “Go away, Grimm. I’m not in the mood.”

The bird didn’t go away, of course. He hopped slightly. “Up? Up up?”

“Go away.” She reached out and threw a stone. It didn’t hit him—she hadn’t been aiming for him—but it did hit the wood of the fence and sent it shaking.

Grimm squawked and flapped up into the air. She expected he would fly away, but he did not. Instead, he dove at her and began pecking at her hair.

“Up!” he screeched. “Up, up, up, up!!”

“Gah!” Nellie flailed backwards, her plate and coffee cake flying off into the garden. She batted at the air around her head, occasionally catching a wing or a claw, but never driving the infernal bird off. He harried her across the garden, through the ruins of her pumpkins, all the way to the back.

“UP!”

“Stop it, Grimm!” Nellie shouted. She reached down, frantic for some method of driving him off—

—and her hand closed around a stem, uncut, still attached the plant that had grown it.

Nellie froze. It was a pumpkin. One she had not seen because of how close to the fence it was. The thing was half-buried in the soil, but it was still there. It was not perfect, not as the others had been. It was a blotchy kind of orange, and its shape was lumpy. But still, it was a pumpkin.

Grimm, his goal achieved, fluttered away from her and perched again on the fence. He cocked his yellow eye at her almost smugly. She glared at him.

“Don’t look so proud of yourself,” she muttered. “I still haven’t opened it.”

She knelt down and ran her hands over the gourd. Strange to say, she remembered this one. More than she did the others. This plant had been the last one to go in the ground. She remembered setting in the soil and wiping sweat from her brow. When she’d begun planting, she had been cross about something—she couldn’t remember what now—but that irritation had melted away by the end. She remembered sitting down against the fence and gently running a finger over the leaves of the pumpkin plant in satisfaction. It had twined around her finger, like a dog requesting more affection, which she’d happily given.

Nellie sat on the ground. Carefully, she pulled the pumpkin from its place, brushing mud off its surface. It felt…normal to hold. She shook it gently, and nothing chittered or rattled inside.

Holding her breath, Nellie carefully picked up her carving knife and slid it into the pumpkin’s top. She cut away at it until her slices met, a hexagon set into orange flesh. Wrapping her fingers around the stem, she pulled up.

The top came away. The smell of pumpkin hit her nose—earthy and tangy all at once. Inside was nothing but pumpkin guts and seeds.

Above, Grimm gave a squawk. He fluttered down to land on her head.

“I did it,” Nellie whispered. She cradled the pumpkin in her arms like it was a child. Grimm pecked at her head, and she let him, staring down at the pumpkin with a kind of awe. True, it was just one pumpkin. Amidst the field of ruined ones, it felt a strange thing to be proud of the one thing she hadn’t gotten wrong. But still—she’d done it right once. If she’d done it right once, she could do it right again. It would take time. Years, probably. But she could figure it out. It was possible.

Grimm pecked at her head. “Up,” he commanded.

Nellie shooed him away. “Yes, yes, I’m up,” she laughed. “I’m up. Come on now, you stubborn bird. You might as well help me find the plate before we go back in. Branwen will have a fit if I leave the good china outside.”

The crow hopped off her head and began flapping around for the plate. Nellie followed him, her pumpkin cradled in her arms. She was sweaty, dirty, and still a little hung over. Still, she couldn’t help smiling.