My Best Friend The Witch: Talisman

My best friend is a witch, a real spell-casting witch. I know you probably think that sounds cool, like Esme and I must have lots of fun adventures with her magic. I wish. Most often, I just feel terrified of her. She’s frighteningly powerful, as well as dangerous, reckless, and cruel.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

***

One night, I woke up when I heard someone knocking on my window. I knew it would be Esme since my bedroom is upstairs. I figured that she would be riding her broomstick.

“Jamie,” she whispered to me. “Open up.”

I opened the shades and nearly screamed when I saw her giant face staring back at me. It was Esme, only she seemed to be scaled up several times larger than normal, making me feel like I was seeing her from inside of a doll house.

“Jamie,” she said in a half-whisper. “Open the window, please.”

I opened it and asked, “What is going on? What happened to you?” I looked down at her body, seeing that she had a bed sheet wrapped around her like a towel.

“I had a little accident with something I was working on,” Esme explained. “I need a little help. Can I come in?”

“How?” I said. “You won’t fit through the window like that.”

She smirked and said, “Hold my wrist.”

I noticed something that looked like an enlarged wrist watch strapped to her huge arm. I grabbed her arm with both hands and watched as she used her free hand to turn the dial on her wrist. Suddenly, she shrank to only two feet tall. I held on as she dangled far above the ground, watching the sheet she had been wearing flutter down to the darkness of the lawn below.

“Pull me in,” she said. “Hurry.”

She was surprisingly light now, making it easy to lift her into my room. I set her on the floor, shut the window, and sat down on my bed. Then, feeling uncomfortable by her nudity, I grabbed a shirt from my dresser and handed it to her. She slipped it on, though it hung from her like a long dress.

“Thanks,” Esme said. “That’s better.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’ve been trying to fix this thing all night,” she said, holding up the wrist with the band on it. “I was worried that I’d have to get my sister to help me. You know her. She would never let me live this down. You live nearby enough that I thought I could sneak over without being spotted.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Can you just explain why you’re changing sizes?”

“Oh,” Esme said. “I had an idea to create a talisman that would let someone grow and shrink themself.” She pointed to the dial on the wristband. “Just turn the dial and grow huge or shrink tiny. Sounds useful, right? I mean, I thought I could find some use for it. At least I could auction it off for good money.”

“But, something went wrong with it?” I asked, knowing how Esme’s experiments were always a little too ambitious even for her frighteningly strong magical skills.

“I miscalculated a little,” she admitted, looking like an embarrassed toddler at her size. “You see, I needed the talisman to grow and shrink along with the person wearing it. I didn’t want it to break or come off accidentally, so it’s cursed to stay attached until the wearer returns to their normal size. However, it doesn’t work quite right. It’s supposed to let you change sizes by degrees when turning the dial. Right now, all it does is make you either really huge or really small, which means I can’t go back to my normal size, and that means I can’t take it off. It’s stuck.”

“I see,” I said. “How am I supposed to help?”

“Well,” Esme said. “I can’t fix it with one hand, and I can’t work on it with both hands while it’s attached to me. However, if I could just slip the talisman onto you, then it should resize to fit your arm, and I should resize along with it back to normal. After that, I’ll have both hands free to fix it while you’re wearing it.”

“Won’t it grow me or shrink me if I put it on?” I asked.

“Probably not,” Esme said. “It shouldn’t change your size so long as you don’t touch the dail.”

I sighed, knowing that I really had no choice but to help her if I wanted to keep on her good side. “Okay,” I said.

“Give me a little space,” Esme said, removing the shirt. “I’ll need to be big when I pass it to you.”

I moved to a far corner of the room as she tried to position herself in a way that would allow her space to grow. Then, she turned the dial and expanded to fill most of the room. Again, her nudity made me uncomfortable, even more so due to how much of her there was to look away from.

“There,” she whispered. “Take my hand.”

I lifted my arm, and Esme held my normal hand in her giant hand. Then, she pushed the wristband from her arm, over our hands and down onto my wrist. As soon as the talisman was removed from Esme, it shrank down to fit my arm like an ordinary wristwatch, and as she predicted, her body shrank down to its normal size.

Esme let out a sigh of relief and let go of my hand. “That’s better.” She said, looking down at herself, finding her nudity more embarrassing at her regular size. “Hey, could I borrow some pajamas?”

I told her where to find some and waited, standing still for a tense minute while she got dressed. I lowered my arm slowly but did not let it hang freely. I made sure not to disturb the wristband. It felt as if I had a bomb strapped to me and I needed to be careful not to let it go off. Once Esme was dressed, she asked to see the talisman. Taking care to be delicate with it, I held up my wrist for her to examine it.

“Looks like it’s not broken,” Esme said, holding her hands above and below it. “Something’s faulty about it, though. Let me see if I can revise the enchantment on it a little.” Her green eyes lit up like glow-in-the-dark stickers, and I felt a tingle around my wrist. “There,” she said, as her eyes darkened. “That should fix it.”

I let out a sigh of relief and relaxed all the muscles that I had been tensing without realizing it. “Can you take it off me, please?”

“Hold on,” Esme said, her focus not leaving the talisman. “I just want to test if it's working properly now.”

“Wait,” I said, but Esme ignored me and turned the dial.

It is hard to describe the experience of explosive growth. Initially, I had no sense that I was getting bigger. From my perspective, it seemed as though my bedroom shrank down suddenly to the size of a storage box. I just barely managed to crouch down fast enough to avoid bursting out of the ceiling. My butt did knock over a bunch of things on shelves, topple a lamp, and crush something plastic, as well as some other unseen damage to furniture. It was only when I felt cool air against my body that I realized I must have burst out of my pajamas.

“Esme?” I said, trying to whisper but hearing my voice echo loudly in the small room.

“Oof,” Esme said, standing up from the other side of the bed. Apparently, she had been knocked back there by my expanding body. She appeared a little stunned. “That was… unexpected.”

“Turn me back, please,” I begged, holding out the talisman to her.

“I’ll try,” Esme said, climbing onto the bed and turning the dial the other way.

Again, it is hard to describe how it feels to shrink suddenly. The room expanded around me explosively, the ground falling away beneath me as it did. I hung in the air a moment until gravity pulled me down to the carpet, where I landed on my butt with only a light thump. I got to my knees and looked around the floor, seeing a mess of fallen and broken objects scattered around me as well as the tattered remains of my relatively huge pajamas.

An enormous foot landed on the floor beside me, and I shrieked, crawling back from it.

“Calm down,” Esme said from above. I looked up, seeing her looking like a giant again but realizing that she was the normal-sized one now. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she carefully set down her other foot and looked down at my wrist, quizzically. “That should have worked,” she said, frowning.

I stood up and found that I was only just over knee high to her now.

“Now what?” I asked, my voice sounding so small and weak compared to hers.

Esme thought a long while before slowly confessing, “I don’t know.”

“What!?” I said. “Do you mean I’m stuck like this?”

“I’ll need to do a little research,” she said, standing up. “I’m just going to run home real quick to grab some books.” She walked to the window and opened it.

“Don’t leave me like this,” I begged her.

“I won’t be long,” she said and leapt out the window.

I sighed, wondering how my night had become such a mess. Only minutes ago, I had been sleeping comfortably in my bed. Now, I was two feet tall and naked, and my room had been wrecked by my own size-changing butt.

I climbed back into bed to wait for Esme to return, feeling some comfort in covering myself with sheets and blankets. It kept me warm, despite the cool night air blowing in through a window I could not close.

An hour later, Esme arrived back on her broomstick with a bag full of old books hanging from her shoulder. After that, I waited for another hour as she consulted different pages, making notes, and referencing several books. I understood none of what she was doing, so I focused my attention on my phone, which now was the size of a large tablet relative to me. Occasionally, she would take my wrist to examine the talisman before going back to her books.

Eventually, Esme declared, “I have a solution.”

“Great,” I said, setting down my phone and holding out my wrist to her again.

Her big hands gripped the talisman as her eyes glowed once more. Then, without much fuss, the talisman alone grew back to its normal wrist-watch size. Esme then slipped it from my small arm and held it up to scrutinize the back side of it.

Meanwhile, I sat on the bed, rubbing my wrist where the band had been attached, waiting to grow back to my normal size, but I was not changing at all. I was still two feet tall.

“Esme?” I asked, with growing concern. “Shouldn’t I be getting bigger now, too?”

“Uh,” Esme said, slipping the talisman into her bag. “I wasn’t able to undo the whole enchantment. The best I could do was remove the part of the enchantment that made the talisman change its own size to fit you. Now that it’s off, the size-changing spell it cast on you should fade on its own. Once that’s gone, you’ll grow back to normal right away.”

“How long will that take?”

Esme looked a little embarrassed. “A day,” she said, “or two.”

“What!?”

“No more than a week,” she added, “or two.”

“Can’t you just grow me back to normal now?” I asked. “You’re always changing my body whenever you like.”

“I could,” Esme said. “However, that might cause more problems. The two spells could interact in unpredictable ways. You might grow or shrink to any size. You could even change over and over again, uncontrollably.”

Not wanting to risk that, I said, “Fine. So, I’m stuck at this size for the next couple of weeks? What am I supposed to do? We’ve got school. I can’t be out sick that long. What am I going to tell my parents?”

“Don’t worry,” Esme said. “I have a plan. One of the books I brought has a description of a glamor I can cast on you to make everyone believe that there is nothing unusual about you.”

“You mean that the best you can do for me is make everyone believe that I’m normally two feet tall?”

Esme nodded.

“What am I supposed to wear?”

“Well,” Esme said, “You do have baby brothers, right?”

***

So, that’s how I spent the next two and half weeks, wearing my twin baby brothers’ clothes to school, pulling my bag around in a little cart behind me. Esme kept me company at lunch and after school, but I had to cope with the rest of the difficulties of living as a two-foot-tall girl on my own. I soon became sick of climbing up onto giant furniture and dodging giant bodies in the hallways. Everything was either frustratingly too big to handle or too high to reach. Esme’s glamor spell worked well enough. Nobody seemed surprised at all by my size. I did feel ignored and overlooked much of the time, though.

Then, one day, in the middle of history class, the size-changing spell ended. With no warning, I grew back to my normal size, tearing apart my brothers’ baby clothes as I did, leaving me sitting naked at my desk. I gasped and covered myself up. As glad as I was to be back to normal, being nude in class made me terribly nervous. Fortunately, Esme’s glamor kept working, meaning that nobody noticed anything unusual about me being back at my regular size and completely naked. When class ended, I rushed to the locker room to put on my gym clothes. Esme undid the glamor that night, and we never spoke about the whole embarrassing ordeal again after that.

I try not to think about what might have happened if the spell had made me even smaller. Sometimes, though, late at night, when I’m in a dark mood, I find myself wondering what Esme might have done if I had become bug-sized or even microscopic. Would she even have tried to help me at all? I’m terrified by what I think her response might have been.

***

You would think that I would avoid Esme after that, but I still let her come over to see me. Unsurprisingly, I’m the only friend she has left.

When we were kids, Esme used to be pretty normal. She was a witch, yeah, but her magic was pretty weak. We had a good sized group of friends. Then, as we became teens, Esme’s magical powers grew even stronger. I mean, she turned some poor boy into a giant woman one day at the beach. He kind of deserved it, but that scared us. We could see clearly how dangerous she was now. One by one, our other friends started making excuses for why they were too busy to hang out with us anymore. I was dumb enough to be the last one left with Esme, and as long as I’m her friend, everyone else avoids me just the same as Esme.

I considered leaving as well, but then I realized what that would mean. Esme without any friends would be even more dangerous. She might even want to do something awful to us out of spite, like put a curse on us or something worse. The truth is, I’m too scared of her to tell her I don’t really want to be friends anymore. I think she might have realized how I feel, but she keeps coming over to hang out. Maybe she’s trying to torture me. Maybe she’s so lonely that she’d rather have an unwilling friend than no friend at all. I don’t know, but whatever the reason, we’re stuck with each other.

So, we carry on together, pretending to be best friends while I dread every time she visits. There’s more to say, but that’s enough for now. Wish me luck. I’ll need it.