Witch by Tim O'Rourke

wine, too, somewhere.
    I put on a pair of jeans, a coat, and a pair of boots. I left my apartment and made the short walk down to the shore. The beach was empty, apart from a couple of dog-walkers way off in the distance. I turned my back on them and began walking in the opposite direction, towards the massive black cliffs which loomed in the distance like giant ogres. Waves crashed up the beach, then retreated again. The sea was a dark green and looked uninviting. Pieces of dirty wood wrapped in black seaweed floated in the foamy waves. The wind was cold and it made my lips taste salty. With my long, blond hair down, it blew about my face like a mask. I liked that, I wanted to be hidden. I wanted time to clear my head, just like my father had suggested. I didn’t want to dwell on what had happened, I’d done enough of that in my nightmares, and part of me feared falling to sleep that night. Would my dreams be haunted by those dead people again? I guessed I had a few more nights of disturbed sleep before I’d truly come to terms with what I had done – before the accident .
    Bent against the bitter wind, I headed along the shore, a set of footprints trailing away behind me. I’d been walking for about ten minutes or so, when I thought I heard someone calling my name. At first I wondered if it wasn’t my imagination, or a trick being played by the howling wind. I looked back in the direction I had come, but all I could see was the tiny black outlines of those dog-walkers way off in the distance.
    “Sydney!” the voice came again.
    I looked to my left to see someone running down the grassy sand dunes towards me. It was Michael.
    “Oh, Christ,” I murmured under my breath as he ran towards me.
    I turned around and set off at speed in the direction I had come from. I didn’t want to see Michael – I had nothing to say to him.
    “Hey, Sydney!” he called after me. “Wait up!”
    Over the sound of the wind and the crashing waves, I could hear his heavy footfalls as he came running after me across the wet sand.
    Burying my chin into my chest, I leaned forward and sped up almost to a slow trot. It wasn’t long before Michael had caught up with me.
    He gripped my arm and said, “Hey, what’s the rush?”
    “Leave me alone,” I snapped, yanking my arm free and setting off up the beach again.
    “I just want to talk to you, that’s all,” he said, walking beside me.
    “About what?” I said, refusing to look at him.
    “What happened yesterday, of course,” he said.
    “That was a mistake,” I said coldly. “Nothing like that will ever happen between us again.”
    “I wasn’t talking about that,” he said. “I was talking about the accident you had. You know, that family dying and all.”
    I stopped mid-stride as if walking straight into an invisible wall. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I hissed, glancing sideways at him.
    “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice soft.
    “Who said it was my fault?” I glared at him.
    “No one said it was your fault,” he said, looking startled by my overreaction. “It’s just that I thought you might be feeling a bit guilty as you had been drinking whiskey with me.”
    To hear him say that felt as if I’d been slapped in the face. Despite all the efforts my father had taken to provide a fake breath test and witnesses, here was someone who could testify I’d been drinking before the crash. He would know, as he was the person who had given it to me.
    “That wasn’t enough to make me drunk,” I said dismissively, and turned away, wishing that he would just fuck off and leave me alone.
    “I never said you were drunk,” he called after me.
    I could hear the sound of his footfalls in the sand behind me again.
    “Look, Sydney, if it helps, I feel guilty about what happened, too,” he said.
    “What are you talking about?” I snapped, wheeling around to face him again.
    “It was me who gave you that drink, after all,” he said, looking at me. “I