Call Her Lucy

Short Story – Contemporary Fantasy / Dark Humor Fantasy

Lucy didn’t so much live in the woods as haunt them. Her cottage sat in a clearing shaped like a question mark as if even the forest wasn’t entirely sure about her. The candles in her windows flickered purple, not because purple was spooky, but because she couldn’t keep the mana from leaking out of her fingertips and into anything remotely flammable. Her cats had learned to stay low.

Beelzebub, the black one, was the shape of midnight with legs. Cheddar, the orange one, was the shape of a bad idea with whiskers. Between the two of them, the cottage stayed warm, loud, and very slightly cursed at all times. Lucy liked it that way.

At the moment, she was hunched over a cauldron, whispering words that could have been a curse or a grocery list. Hard to tell with her. Her eyes glowed softly, the same what coals do just before the fire whooshes to life. That glow meant she was casting. Again. For the ninth time today. It wasn’t that she had a spell she needed to finish. She just liked to practice. Practicing kept the anger sharp.

“Ma’am,” Cheddar meowed, which in cat meant: You dropped another ingredient, and I’m eating it unless you stop me.

Beelzebub’s ear twitched. “Don’t eat the nightshade, idiot.”

Cheddar licked it anyway. Immediately regretted it. Made a noise like a deflating balloon and staggered in a slow circle.

Lucy sighed, scooped him up by the scruff, and set him on a pillow. “Cheddar, sweetheart, I need you alive to test potions on.”

“Bleph,” Cheddar said, which meant: Worth it.

Lucy pushed her greasy noodle hair back. The ring on her finger flashed once. Then twice. Then, impatiently, a third time, as though saying hello in a language no one should hear spoken aloud.

“Stop that,” she hissed at it.

The ring did not stop.

It was a dainty thing, almost elegant. A thin band of tarnished silver. A square stepped, hexagonal setting, and in the center, polished smooth and still moist (yes, moist) if you looked too closely, a shriveled but very present eye.

Lucy didn’t know the girl’s name. Didn’t care. Didn’t ask. She’d plucked the eye out herself and shaped the magic around it like soft clay. Now she used it to store mana and siphon life energy. A battery-pack powered by someone who had the poor sense to be the rebound for her ex-boyfriend Poe.

Poe… that idiot.

Lucy’s stomach twisted at the thought of him. The ring hummed in response to her spike fo emotion, warming against her skin like it was trying to take a sip.

“Not now,” she muttered, clutching the cauldron with both hands. She felt the ring press eagerly against her knuckle. Like the hungry little vampire it was.

Elsewhere in the woods, Poe the troll was having a lovely afternoon. He whistled. Whittling wasn’t something trolls were known for, but Poe insisted on doing it. Said it made him feel “rounded out” as a person. He also journaled, made his own nettle tea, and, most annoyingly, had grown into a stable, emotionally secure adult. So obviously we hate him.

He’d also found a girlfriend. Not dead, and not trying to kill him. Her name was Francisca, and she laughed like chimes in the wind. Poe adored her. Francisca adored him. It was terribly wholesome, and it grated on Lucy’s nerves like someone sawing porcelain. Poe never thought about Lucy anymore. Didn’t even mention her. Had healed, had grown, had moved on.

Which was very rude.

So Lucy sent birds to spy on him. Picked apart petals to see if the winds favored him. Drew cards that told her nothing except he’s fine, you’re the problem, which she burned immediately. She waited for him to ruin the relationship. To fall apart. To crawl back begging for a curse or a kiss or both.

He didn’t.

By late evening, Lucy had finished her brew. It glowed a soft red, like brake lights through fog. It smelled like peppermint and injustice.

“Perfect,” she murmured, turning toward the mirror hanging crookedly on the wall. The ring sighed happily, pulsing with pent-up anxiety.

She lifted her hand… and the eye inside the ring stared back at her, bright as a lanternfish deep underwater. Lucy smiled at her reflection, but really she smiled at the ring. “Let’s go say hello to Poe.”

Beelzebub arched his back, fur standing up in a sharp ridge. “He won’t like that.”

Cheddar rolled off his pillow. “I wanna gooooo,” he slurred.

“No,” Lucy said.

Cheddar blinked. “I wanna gooooo.”

“No.”

This continued for thirty-seven seconds.

Finally, Lucy snapped her fingers and Cheddar froze in place like someone had hit his pause button. Beelzebub sighed with relief.

Lucy took a breath, drew on the power humming through the eye, and with a twist of her wrist, folded the world like fabric. Her cottage vanished. The trees vanished. The floor vanished. Even Cheddar’s frozen expression—confused and mildly proud—vanished.

She reappeared ten feet away from Poe’s hut. It wasn’t anything like hers. It was warm. Lit within. Comfortable. You could smell stew simmering. Something with rosemary. Lucy hated rosemary. She stalked up to the window. Inside, Poe sat at the table with Fracisca. They were laugh. Not cursed-laughing. Not forced-laughing. Just laughing because they liked each other.

Lucy’s eye twitched. The one in her head, not the ring.

The ring’s eye glowed.

She reached out to place her palm on the window—just to cast a teensy spell, nothing big, just something to make Poe sneeze hard enough to through out his back—when Francisca suddenly turned her head. Not toward Lucy. Toward something on the wall. A mirror.

Francisca stood up.

Poe blinked. “Everything ok?”

Her brow furrowed. “There’s a presence here.”

Lucy froze. That wasn’t right. Francisca was supposed to be normal. Human. Barely magical at all. Down there with dung beetles, just not as interesting.

Francisca stepped closer to the mirror. Someone’s watching us.

Lucy’s stomach dropped.

The ring quivered against her skin, hungry.

Francisca placed a gentle hand on Poe’s shoulder. “Stay here.”

She whispered a word Lucy hadn’t heard in years. A word that cut the air in a clean, white streak. A word that made the ring flinch.

Francisca walked toward the door. Lucy did not wait to see what happened next. She vanished in a streak of green fire, leaving nothing but a hint of ozone and the faintest, embarrassed meow from miles away.

Lucy reappeared in her cottage, stumbling into a pile of spellbooks. Cheddar unpaused and immediately fell off the table.

Beelzebub hissed. “What did you do?”

Lucy didn’t answer. She ripped the ring off her finger and slammed it onto the butcher block on her counter. It bounced once, rolled in a slow circle, and stared at her accusingly.

“That wasn’t’ supposed to happen,” she whispered.

Beelzebub narrowed his glowing eyes. “Who does she think she is?”

Lucy swallowed. “Francisca,” she said quietly. “She’s… something.”

The ring blinks, once, like it was shaking its head at her.

Lucy backed away. For the first time in a very long time… she felt afraid. Not of Francisca. Not of Poe. But of the realization curling cold and tight in her stomach: She wasn’t the only one in these woods who knew how to use an eye. And Francisca’s gaze had been far, far brighter than hers.

Author’s Note

Lucy was born during one of those unhinged late-night TikTok Lives where you’ve been painting a 3D-printed witch book nook for too long and suddenly everything gets a little too silly and a little too sincere. Someone in chat inferred that Lucy was kind of… emotionally questionable and my brain went, “Say less.” Poe, Francisca, and the ring fell into place like they’d been waiting for their cue. This story is basically the result of sleep deprivation and my deep belief that magic would absolutely make breakups weirder, not easier.

Artwork: Brujita by Demitry Belmont.