19 dead

Before we were bewitched, my cousin and I were normal girls.  We woke every morning to dress in our fresh white bonnets and pale pink and blue dresses and our lovely white socks, just to go out and run errands for our mother and father.  Well, not my mother or father, but Betty’s mom and dad.  My parents died when I was an infant. Our house burned in an instant.  The flames licked at their ankles as they ran out the house, my mother cradling me in her arms.  My parents, Rosalyn and John Williams, thought we all were safe outside of the house.  But we were not.  They died and I survived.  My uncle came, the same uncle I live with today, Reverend Parris.  My cousin was born two years later when the Reverend and his wife Christina realized that I needed another friend. My cousin Betty and I have been best friends since the day she was born.  

In 1692, the worst year of our lives, Betty was nine and I was twelve-years-old.  I was lucky enough to live to fight another day, whereas those people we accused of being witches did not.  All but one of those accused witches died because of me.  We didn’t think that we were being so bad at the time, but we faked illnesses and accused people of witchcraft because our religion told us to do so.  It was a dreadful year.  Nineteen people were hung, and one hundred and eighty imprisoned, and all because of a fun game that Betty and I had made up.  

Now, my life is different.  It has been two years since the horrific Salem Witch Trials, and I have yet to clear my conscience.  I can still see the faces of those who were hung because of me, and I feel them haunting me most days and nights.  I wake in the middle of the night and hear screaming and see figures, and I am unsure if they are there or not.  They seem real, but they never stay long enough.  I pretend that this never happens.  If the Reverend knew, he would start the Witch Trials all over again.  He is a very respected man, leaving our family with a very high status.

         I live in Salem Massachusetts, and I am the face of the town.  Everyone knows Betty and I for the role we played in the Salem Witch Trials.  It is a brutal name to carry.  I worry about the Reverend finding out about my night terrors and my possible ghost sightings.  If he finds out, twenty more people would end up dead, just as it happened before.  I am consumed with guilt for those people I  killed.   I did not mean for it to happen like that, but it did.  I killed people.  I am a cold-hearted murderer.  I blame myself for the happenings of the Salem Trials, not Betty who was indeed my partner in crime.  It was I who had the idea for attention.  It is I who will rot in hell for my crimes.