“I didn’t do it, it was my husband!”

  “Silence, witch! Our ears have had enough of the whispers of your devil’s tongue. If the goes to heaven, you will be proven innocent! If you survive, you shall be executed!”

  “Noooo!”

  Thunk. The guillotine fell on the damned’s neck, severing her head from her body! Grabbing her hair, the priest lifted the head up out of the basket.

  “We pray for your sins… wait… did you guys see what I saw?”

  “It twitched!”

  “Her eyes. They’re blinking!”

  The priest quickly backed away, but the head hung in the air even without support! A whispering voice floated past, riding on the wind.

  “Revenge… I’ll curse you all…!”

  Screams erupted, but the deed was done. The crowd’s voices shrank into dry croaks as their skin fyed apart, the angry mob decaying rapidly and burning to ashes. “Witch! The witch’s curse!” “God save us!” “Noo I don’t want to dieeee!”

  …This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I suggested we py together, but it’s certainly entertaining.

  I held the magnifying gss to set fire to the pile of ants swarming the candy we dropped, following Wednesday’s hand who flew “Marie Antoinette’s” detached head over the swarm.

  I much preferred this to pying with spiders under the bed, but it was still a bit…

  -Well this is nice, but about we try something else? Pying so cruelly can hurt our development.

  -You think drawing lines is fun.

  -Nuh uh, Tron is great! Creating all the maps and portals and power ups, and zooming and circling around to cut off each other’s paths, nothing’s more fun when you have nothing else to do! You may have gotten bored of it, but I’m sure there are plenty of other kids who can see my genius!

  “I’m going back to pying with Marie.”

  “Fine! Fine. How about we look- I mean hunt for leprechauns instead?”

  “Hunting leprechauns…?”

  I nodded mentally, a bit embarrassed at getting so worked up over my invented game getting trash talked. Was I getting more childish? Brushing the thought aside, I pointed with my hand to a yellow powder on the dirt.

  “See those trails? That’s leprechaun gold dust; it makes you sneeze. If we follow it to cracks in the soil, and jab it with something iron, we can kill the leprechauns in their homes.”

  It was a game I used to py every spring, especially toward Saint Patrick’s day. I had stomped on the cracks in the sidewalk to try and wake them up instead, but I needed to word things like this to get Wednesday to pay attention.

  Predictably, she perked up, and immediately brought out two fire pokers from the outdoor stove, one for each of us.

  I was still wary about taking control of the body, but I’d come up with precautions after too many times being caught up in family hijinks without my good luck charms. By wearing a bracelet with good luck charms on the left wrist and only taking control of that seemed to keep the bad luck in check to a certain extent. When combined with the Addam’s Luck? from Wednesday, it made for a retively safe technique.

  Together we charged into the extensive backyard, weaving around eborate tombstones to stab at the various cracks in the ground.

  “Gimme your gold!”

  “Oh my, it tis a giant child coming to kill us!” “Noo, don’t steal me buried treasure!” I ughed and mimed their tiny voices.

  “Isn’t that a pirate?”

  “Leprechauns can be all sorts of people!”

  “I see.”

  We -I- ughed and pyed along, stabbing the irons into the ground until a shadow loomed over us.

  “Heya kids! What are you poking around for? That’s not how you raise the dead.” Fester’s throaty voice rasped behind us.

  Wednesday looked up, “We’re hunting leprechauns by following their dust trails.”

  His bald eyebrows furrowed, “Who taught you to find leprechauns like that? You have to get to the nd at the end of the rainbow to find them.”

  I blinked. “Wait, really?”

  “Yeah, your father and I came back from a party with them once, and we couldn’t get the green out for months! You’re just kicking up pine pollen, whoever told you that was either stupid or a weirdo.”

  …Blood flowed to our face, and I looked down, trembling. I could feel the teasing and schadenfreude radiating off of Wenesday in our head.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” He bent down to feel our forehead with his cmmy hands.

  Taking full control, I wound up and kicked his shin before bolting away!

  “No, you’re weird! Baldy!”

  And then I tripped and face pnted into a big pile of pollen. I tried to scramble up and run again but—

  “—achoo!”

  I sneezed so hard that I could feel it in my lungs, and my eyes watered so much that running would be useless in this state.

  “Ugh…!”

  I didn’t want to touch my eyes and make it worse, but I knew if I blindly stepped forward or leaned on something I would surely fall over, break something, or hurt myself. All I could do was carefully wipe my nose with a non dusty part of my sleeve, sniffling and crying.

  “Crybaby.” Wednesday smirked mentally.

  “It’s just the allergies!” I expined calmly.

  “Sure it is…”

  “Ah, Friday! I haven’t seen you in a while! You packed a good heft behind that kick.” Fester’s voice interrupted my next retort and pressed a soft handkerchief to my face.

  “Thankyou… ‘m sorry for kicking you.” I mumbled nasally as he wiped my nose.

  “Heh heh, that’s how I can tell you two apart. Wednesday isn’t as cute and nice as you.”

  I felt a twinge of annoyance and bregruding acceptance from the girl in question at that comment, so I just ignored it.

  Sigh, I might as well stick around since I’m already out. Wednesday didn’t seem inclined to front while feeling snotty and teary anyways.

  Taking a deep breath -through my mouth- I visualized trails of watery light running through my body, balled it up in my chest, and expanded it around me in a spherical shield. It was a magic technique thingy I read about and trained to protect me from “negative energies”, which I hoped included my bad luck. It probably didn’t do much but help me feel better in reality, but my common sense has long since fallen apart so who knows at this point.

  “So, leprechauns are really real? It’s not a joke or something you tell kids for fun?”

  I asked for the ck of any other topic.

  “Of course they are! Why wouldn’t they be?” He ughed incredulously and grabbed my hand, walking me over to a dock by the nearby swamp. Shaking off his boots and socks, he hung his foul feet and wiggled his yellowed toes above the murky water. I couldn’t decide if his feet or the swamp smelled worse.

  “Hm… then what isn’t real?” I asked, letting loose our braids and dangling our feet off the ledge. I figured it would be easier than listing every magical thing ever. I could feel Wednesday tuning in with anticipation too, as we were properly learning about the supernatural side of the world for the first time other than occasional tidbits.

  “God, probably!” He shrugged. “There’s solid evidence that some “pagan” gods and other deities are or were real at one point though, so no one can be sure. I’d love to live to see the apocalypse of Revetion myself if it does happen, but I’m torn between hoping for that, nuclear apocalypse, global warming, or Ragnarok. Oh, all the options! Isn’t it so unfair that we can’t have them all?!” His voice grew rapid and forceful as he grew more excited by the second.

  “I was wondering about another thing, actually,” I quickly interrupted before pausing, thinking how to properly word it. “Why… do other people look at us strangely? Why are they so different from us?”

  Fester’s fervent eyes softened, as he looked down at me, and ruffled my hair. It was much more fluffy when not pulled taut.

  “Friday, Wednesday, let me put it this way. There have always been two types of people in this world, across every civilization throughout all of time.” He recounted solemnly. “People who fit in with the majority… and those who don’t. The normal and the abnormal.”

  He held out his left hand for normal, and his right hand for abnormal.

  “But there’s also a third “type” that floats outside; something that defies humanity’s categorization. That is, the paranormal.” His eyes crackled with an electric glow, as he stared us down with a near-manic grin. “Toward the beginning of humanity, the paranormal was everywhere, and everyone collectively walked alongside the mystical in their daily life.” His left and right hand glowed with power.

  There was a bubbling sound, and a trio of dead fish floated up to the surface of the water, twitching and smashing.

  “But over time, humans learned more about the world around them. The overwhelming momentum of the majority sought to do away with the unknowable, growing to fear and suppress it to gain a sense of control.” The electricity in both hands died down to crackling sparks.

  A frog family hopped out of the water, croaking up a storm.

  “And over time the abnormal people, already stigmatized and clouded with mystery, became the only refuge for the strange and unusual that used to be a part of everyday life. And simultaneously the abnormal, rejected by the majority, embraced the paranormal out of a sense of shared comradery.” The electricity in the left hand finally faded to a barely visible glow, and the sparks of the right hand lit up with a pale crackling blue like a live wire.

  What must have been an entire school of fish emerged from the muddy wetnd, increasing the foul stench to the point where I had to wrinkle my nose even after all my “training”. I followed Fester’s legs down with my eyes, his single big toe dipping gentle into the water, crackling away.

  Rolling my eyes, I swatted Fester’s shoulder and immediately pulled my hand back from the sharp static shock. Resigning myself to floating hair, I looked out at the swamp to take it all in. There were a lot of details missing, but the core of it made sense. It left me in awe to think humanity had such a rich unsung history with mysticism and supernatural phenomena.

  “…That’s really dumb. If the normals really wanted to make sense of the world they would have just researched the supernatural.” Wednesday spoke before I could.

  Fester barked out a series of long, wheezing ughs, “You’re right! It’s super dumb, isn’t it!? Though, I don’t know if that research would have gotten very far. Consistency and the paranormal don’t get along very well, you’ll find!”

  The sparks faded from his body, and he tried to reach out and ruffle our now frazzled hair, but Wednesday spped his hand away and tried finger combing it into her favorite scalp-pulling braids again.