Witch Pocket

Alone with him in the dark bus shelter, I thought I’d try to make friends. I reached into my vest’s pocket and pulled out a pack of gum. Drawing one off for myself with my teeth, the way John Wayne might have culled a smoke from the pack, I held the package out to the man. Dark, lean, young, he just continued to glare.

I jerked the pack at him, eyebrow raised. “Go on.”

He shook his head. “Don’t like gum. Kill for a beer, though.”

“No need to go to those lengths,” I said. I reached into the vest pocket and drew out an ice-cold bottle of beer.

He blinked and his jaw dropped. When I held it out to him, he eyed it skeptically, as if expecting that when he tried to open it, coiled snakes would pop out or something. But when he twisted the cap off and brought it to his lips, he found it was just exactly what he’d asked for. He downed half the bottle in one shot, then belched and poked the neck at me. “How’d you do that?”

“I have a witch pocket in this vest.”

“…What’s that?”

“It’s a pocket that creates whatever I want. I just think of it, and whatever I wish for appears in it.”

He laughed. Then he looked at the beer and considered it. “Don’t suppose you could pull a twenty out of it, could you?”

I shrugged. No skin off my nose. I reached in, and pulled out a crisp $20 bill and handed it to him.

He gazed at it in the dim light. “Is it real?”

“Does it matter? Who knows? Who cares? As long as someone gives you twenty bucks worth of stuff for it, it’s as real as it has to be.”

He smiled, nodding at me. “Good point.” He looked my vest up and down in a way that made me wish I hadn’t been so eager to win his amity. “Hey, how much you want for that thing?”

“It isn’t for sale. But if you’d care for me to produce a few—“

“Listen. I want to have that vest. That… witch pocket, whatever. Once in a lifetime gimmick, and I ain’t leaving without it. And you ain’t leaving with it. So make up your mind to it.”

I sighed. I nodded. Glumly, I shouldered out of the vest, and I held it out for him. He snatched it. “Okay, vest,” he said, “I want a brick of gold bullion!” And with that, he stabbed his hand down into the pocket. I watched him reach around inside it, his face showing flashes of amazement at the depth of the pocket, and puzzlement as he groped around. And then… he gasped in pain, his face confused. Then, suddenly, terror, and he screamed. The sounds of snarling and bone snapping inside the pocket sickened me, and I shrank back as the man’s arm was hauled deeper and deeper into the pocket, his own blood spraying out of it and onto his chest and throat and screaming face…

When his shoulder met the pocket, there was a brief respite. In a face white with blood loss were set his eyes, saucer-wide with horror, searching my face for some kind of explanation. The pause lasted just long enough for me to provide one: “I said whatever I wish for, jerkwad.” Then, with a final scream and a spray of blood, he disappeared into the pocket.

I put my vest back on and awaited the bus in peaceful solitude, chewing my gum.