Through necessity, we slept in the bog one night, on the firmest ground witches could find. The sole dry area, however, was scarcely large enough for our bags, much less our bodies. Therefore, we both accepted total stillness, since any tossing about would have us rolling down a slope to appalling circumstances. And fully static I remained after falling asleep, for my mud coating dried to stiffen me, the sporadic drizzles that night only enough to irk my face from the moistened mud drooling into my eyes, such an annoyance as to attack me unconsciously; for one drop of mud I thought a blinding torrent set me into a common state of nightmarish foolishness wherein I believed that a water snake was eating my eyes as I proved myself the sinner by swimming hellishly away. Then I awakened long enough to comprehend that the true difficulty was no more than stinging rain even as I rolled over to shield my face with my fingers, finding better use for that hand as I lost balance and began tumbling down the slope with no ability to cease, a mere witch’s limbs inadequate for overcoming God’s own gravity, into the muck, through the layer of slime, gagging at once in anticipation of having the stuff on my tongue and therefore spitting it out in advance, which only opened my mouth and allowed a true ingestion, a most effortful and required gagging ensuing as I immediately threw myself upward in a harsh awakening, clambering up the slope to collapse face down, arms spread across God’s mediocre earth for support, mouth in the dirt, but how to tell with all the muck on my tongue from immersion? Though Marybelle did not bother to awaken through this, being so superior a witch as to sense a sister’s thoughts in her sleep, she next rolled over while retaining her balance, nudging my bag with her sinners’ shoes enough for it to roll away and down, lost in the mud, the entire remaining night finding me concerned with the horrors of retrieving it in the morning, having to search the sludge with my face below the surface in order to reach bottom. Therefore, at first light, up I leapt to throw myself into the scum and thereby begin my torment immediately so as to end it as soon as possible, God willing, which He was not, though in a manner I was most successful, easily reaching upward from my position mired in the mud to grasp my case where it had lodged on a stone, remaining dry and muckless. But a failure I was in attempting to crawl out of the sludge with the bag instead of tossing it upward or asking Marybelle to remove it from my grasp, for too great was the weight for me to overcome the slippery bank, sliding backward and down, both myself and the bag well mired again in the mud, this another instance in my doomed life of finding a nightmare come true to torment me, Marybelle by then awake and on her way, surely having reveled in the finest night’s sleep of her lifetime, I bloody well hoped.