GRISELDA GOES SHOPPING

Griselda is a witch with remarkable gaps in her knowledge....

“I've got the right spell for just about everything, except chicken soup,” muttered Griselda, staring with something close to despair at the mess of glutinous matter at the bottom of her cauldron.

“Then why not feckin' do what everyone else has to do and go to the shops and actually buy a tin of the muck?” demanded Henrietta Blackboil, her only friend in a world that finds most genuine witches well-nigh friendless. She had called hoping for a free meal because she'd spent her last few pounds on vodka, and was beginning to feel hunger pangs gnawing at her insides. Not that she liked chicken soup �" she hated the stuff �" but had enough sobriety left in her skull to tell herself that beggars can't be choosers.

“I don't like shops,” growled Griselda honestly. “When I was a nipper I had my ears boxed by Tawdry Thompson the shop-keeper for pinching sweets off his counter, and I've not liked shops since then. Not that I'd pinch sweets any more �" not when I have the perfect spell to create as many as I like out of thin air!”

“Well, it's clear as feckin' mud that you can't do soup,” growled Henrietta. “Come on �" I'll keep you company, we can go to the huge supermarket outside Brumpton, but you'll have to drive.”

“No car,” smirked Griselda. “It'll have to be my second best broomstick.”

Henrietta's heart slumped into the pool of vodka somewhere near the inside of her feet. “Second best?” she asked, weakly.

“It's the only one with a long enough stick for two knobbly bottoms,” grinned Griselda. “Come on! I'll drive and you can hang on and pray I don't do any loop-the-loops!”

“Pissin' hell!” growled Henrietta, but, being both hungry and penniless, she climbed onto the broomstick behind Griselda.

Don't let anyone try to tell you that witches on broomsticks, zooming through the air with the ease of ancient gods, is the stuff of fairy stories, because it's a great deal more than that. Griselda had long mastered the art of defying gravity and common sense, and could do it with a huge range of long domestic objects, including uplighters and vacuum cleaners, but she preferred the broomstick on account of the way people screamed when they saw her riding one. Her tatty cloak and pointed hat accompanying a truly aquiline nose and desperately over-sized chiselled chin, making shapes in the skies as she hurtled along, sent ordinary every-day sensible folk running for shelter and screeching themselves hoarse.

The supermarket outside Brumpton was (and is) a massive place. Outside, there is a huge car-park with spaces for ordinary cars, those occupied by the disabled and those with toddlers in tow.

Griselda looked around herself from a hundred feet �" and scowled.

“I see no appropriate spaces,” she muttered.

“Just get down there, witch!” shouted a terrified Henrietta, who blanched at the notion of flying on a broomstick, but particularly hated hovering. When she looked down it made her feel sick, and she did occasionally vomit, especially after her alcohol intake had been staggeringly monumental �" and that was the situation at the moment, so, true to form, she vomited.

“Ma!” shrieked a child she had doused with the noxious contents of a stomach that had suffered alcoholic abuse for many long decades.

“Filthy cow!” hissed Griselda, and she zoomed down and parked in the cycles bay where she attached her broomstick using a chain with combination lock attached.

“That's it!” she chirruped, “come on, hag! Let's get some soup!”

The insides of supermarkets can be confusing enough to those who use them regularly, but to one who has never been inside one before they can be far worse than merely confusing.

They offer brightly lit rows of wares with signs begging the shopper to consider this brand of meatballs or that container of donkey-milk. They profess to know everything there is to know about good health and associated foodstuffs whilst trying to encourage the shopper to buy extra-large packets of lard. And all the time there are points to be earned. Confusing points, seemingly worthless points, points that promised to create millionaires out of harassed single mums and old women merely by letting them flash a card at the check-out. And added to that array of confusion Griselda had never been in such an establishment before. She was a stranger to its insanity whilst ordinary folks had grown up with it. Ordinary folk had come to terms with the fiscal battle for their purses.

She did the only thing she could do. She squawked.

Then she grabbed a mop from an assistant trying to clear the product of a broken bottle of dermo-something-or-other off the floor, mounted it and zoomed into the air, leaving a weeping Henrietta Blackboil shivering in a corner of the entrance lobby.

From her elevated position, Griselda saw the entire contents of the supermarket with a panoramic sweep of her eyes.

And there, not three confusing rows of tins away, were the soups.

With a swoop worthy of a fighter pilot on acid, she zoomed down, grabbed a tin marked “chicken soup” and careered off in a gentle spiral.

Gentle spirals are what flying on soggy mops was meant for, and she decided to treat the army of other customers to a display of aerobatic delights. She hurtled down the frozen food aisle a couple of metres off the ground, she careered past bakery and buns at twice that speed, and somehow found her way a yard off the ground and, not taking proper care of signposts and where she might be going, inside the gents' toilet where two or three men were facing the urinals with looks of deep concentration on their faces as they endeavoured to stare at everything except the man standing next to them..

What she saw in there was to affect her for the remainder of her days.

“I never knew,” she blabbered to the check-out girl as she paid (with money created by a spell she knew well) for the chicken soup. “I just never knew...”

The girl looked at her quizzically.

“If you get near one, grab it and hold on to it for all it's worth and never let go,” she blabbered, “I never, ever guessed...”

Reviews

[emmajoy]

EVERYONE should READ THIS and thereby spend the remainder of today laughing! Who knows, tomorrow too. The story flows beautifully,! Never knew witches had such a colourful vocabulary and their characters are so finely defined! Somehow the names Grizelda and Henrietta add a sense of precise intention: read us, learn us and - enjoy.

This really is a romp, has its own style, its own flavour.. and an incredibly wicked wonderful ending!

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks for your thoughtful review. I've always thought that we're too genorous to children with our tales of witches and scary things and ought to keep some for our adult selves with, maybe, an odd little reference to ... wickedness

[emmajoy]

How true.. its the spell that counts over the age of eighteen!

[Peter Rogerson]

Exactly!!!!

[hcarson]

haha, i liked this one, a grown up story of witches with all the kiddie daftness..briliant full marks :)

[Peter Rogerson]

I'm pleased some people share my sense of the ridiculous...

[DrAnuradha Bele]

Genius! Pure genius! I was laughing so hard, my daughter woke up. Its brilliant. There is a subtle commentary on the way of the ordinary people and how we must seem to somebody different than us. I love it!

[Peter Rogerson]

I hope your daughter recovers! I wrote my Griselda short stories over a fairly recent period, and still am, though this one hails originally from 2014. I originally posted them to little attention on Wordpress and as I'm fond of them I thought I'd give them a second outing here. Glad I did if it wakes daughters up!!!

[DrAnuradha Bele]

Its brilliant. She is brilliant! Do write more. I'll buy these if they get printed in a book, worth re-reading.

[Peter Rogerson]

I don't like blowing my own trumpet, but I did publish a novel on Lulu.com some years ago in which Griselda decides to enter politics (at the highest level). Here's a link to the e-book, and it is available in paperback:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/peter-rogerson/spellbound/ebook/product-17510175.html

[DrAnuradha Bele]

Awesome. I will check if they ship to India. Do continue the series. Thank you.

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks. I will certainly continue whilst I have breath and the old brain still functions...