On March 19, 2028, the vernal equinox and the first day of spring, Abigail Alden went on trial for the crime of being a witch. She was transported by van from the county jail to the courthouse, a five-to-six-minute drive. As they traveled up Route 31, Abby squinted at the fast food chains, used car lots, and discount furniture stores they passed along the way; she wished she had sunglasses to shield her eyes from the morning sun. At the courthouse, the sheriff’s deputies parked the van in a bay and took her upstairs to a holding cell, where she was permitted to change out of her jumpsuit (her jailhouse uniform was striped, not orange) into a gray pants suit, white blouse, and black flats. She had lost weight since she had worn the outfit last. Consequently, the suit jacket hung over her shoulders like a drape, and the pants needed to be cinched with a belt at the waist to keep them from falling down.

One of the deputies, the one who given her his belt, led Abigail inside the courtroom to a seat at the Defendant’s table. “This way doctor,” he said, using an honorific that no longer applied to her.

Abby sat rigidly in her seat, fixing her gaze on the judge’s bench. She felt the eyes of the onlookers behind her boring into the back of her skull.

After her arrest, Abby had been denied bail and spent nearly a year in jail awaiting trial. The experience had almost completely unmoored her, blurring her memory and stunting her ability to think. She did not understand what was happening. She did not understand why she was here. Perhaps, she dimly recalled, it had something to do with a girl.

The road that brought Abigail Alden to this juncture (not Route 31, that other one, the metaphorical artery) was long and twisty. If she had the capacity to explain it, Abby might say that it began when she was a child in western Ontario. She was a doctor’s daughter; her father was a prominent local pediatrician, the oldest of two brothers who both made careers in medicine. (Alec’s younger brother Aidan specialized in plastic surgery. He was always better adept at putting a good face on things.)

Abby’s father was very handsome and extremely brash, brimming over with confidence. He may have been full of himself; he may have been too cocksure, but he could do no harm in his daughter’s eyes. Dr. Alden was her idol. Abby absolutely adored him.

Near the end of his medical career, Alec Alden made a tragic mistake. He failed to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy in one of his patients, a preteen who was morbidly obese. She had reached the age of menarche and then suddenly stopped having periods. Alec attributed her amenorrhea to a drop in estrogen caused by her obesity. He recommended starting her on birth control pills, a recommendation the girl’s father refused. A few days later, the girl’s fallopian tube ruptured and she died on a bathroom floor in her home.

Abigail’s father was sued. The suit settled, but Alec’s confidence waned, and he was never his former self again. He began to drink heavily. According to some, he drank himself into the grave, which was untrue; he died when an aneurysm burst in his aorta, causing internal bleeding, the same fate suffered by the young woman he had misdiagnosed. After he died, Abby and her mother went to his office to collect his files and gather his belongings; they found liquor bottles hidden everywhere.

Abby vowed to redeem her father’s memory. She went to medical school in the States, specializing in pediatric medicine. After she obtained her degree, she moved to the rural south, taking a position in a clinic that served poor and underprivileged children.

One of them was a girl named Erika Hayes. Erika’s parents, Henry and Minnie, brought her to the clinic after she had begun to grow breasts and sprout pubic hair. Only five years old, she had also begun to menstruate, unsettling her parents.

The age of menarche has been steadily dropping in the United States; Abby knew that it is not entirely unusual for a first period to happen in a child as young as eight.

Erika Hayes, however, was on the far side of the bell curve. 

Abby diagnosed her with precocious puberty and prescribed GnRH analogue therapy, including a monthly injection of leuprolide acetate to delay further development.

The treatment worked. It slowed things down. It gave Erika more time to be a child.

In 2023, the state where Abby practiced banned physicians from prescribing puberty blockers. Abby was unconcerned: the ban contained an exception for cisgender children like Erika who were already receiving them.

Then Minnie filed for divorce. During the custody hearing, she accused Henry of molesting their daughter. “Not true,” Henry angrily retorted before telling the hearing officer that Minnie and Erika’s doctor were trying to turn his daughter into a boy.

“She’s grooming her,” Henry charged, referring to Abigail Alden.

“Dr. Alden ingratiated herself to the family,” Henry’s divorce lawyer chimed in. “She pretended to be their friend, but she was just trying to promote her own agenda.”

“It was like she cast a spell on my wife and daughter,” Henry agreed. “She put the whammy on us, for sure.”

“Good God,” Abby scoffed when she learned he said that. He might as well have called me a witch.

Henry was awarded custody. He stopped bringing Erika to the clinic, and filed a complaint against Abigail with the state Board of Medical Examiners.

Henry’s complaint gained traction in the press. Rumors also began to circulate on social media that Abby was a man named Abbie who had a sex change operation in the 1990s. The rumor wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. Pressure mounted on the Board to act.

Abby’s medical license was suspended. She spent her savings trying to get it back.

Then she was charged with a crime.

“This kind of thing happens from time to time in this country,” her pubic defender told her. “There was the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and the early 1990s when day-care workers were accused of being folk devils who forced children to engage in bizarre sex rituals, remember that?”

Abby wasn’t sure that she did. She had her head down back then, her shoulder to the proverbial wheel, working hard to become a doctor.

“In this state, the last witch trial took place in 1929,” Nick said. “Going back even further,” he added, “there was another one in the 1870s after Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, accused a man of exercising mesmeric powers on one of her disciples. And then, of course, there was Salem, the uncut original.”

“Fortunately,” he joked, “we don’t burn witches at the stake anymore.”

On the last day of her trial, the sheriff’s deputies were a few minutes late, and she had to wait by the jail’s sally port doors for the transport van to arrive. She stood in handcuffs and leg restraints with a detention officer at her side. A children’s moon hung above them, a pale disc in the blue morning sky.

Nick, her lawyer, had given her a book to read in jail. It was about the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who wondered what the earth might look like from the moon. As she waited for the transport van, Abby imagined that Kepler’s spirit was looking down on her from Tycho Brahe or some other lunar crater. The man in the moon, she thought as she stared at the disc in the sky. She thought she could make out his eyes (Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis) and his nose (Sinus Aestuum), but she could not see his mouth.

Kepler’s mother had been accused of witchcraft (perhaps this was why Nick had given Abigail the book), and the astronomer defended her at trial. She was acquitted, and Kepler was able to obtain her release from the civic guard, but she died the following year.

The astronomer blamed himself for her troubles. Before his mother was accused, he had written a sci-fi story about a trip to the moon using a fictional narrator whose mother was a witch. In the story, she summoned space-traveling “daemons” to transport him from earth to the moon using a shadow bridge created during a solar eclipse. Thanks to magical intervention, Kepler’s narrator was thus able to see the earth from the moon; he describes it in much the same way as our astronauts actually saw it. Unfortunately, Kepler may have inadvertently caused his mother’s ordeal by circulating a manuscript of his story, leading people to identify his mother with his fictional narrator’s.

As it turned out, Abigail’s public defender was not as good at defending her as Kepler was with his mom. Nick was reluctant to put Abby on the stand; he thought she was too emotionally fragile to survive the inquisition that state would put her through. “You’d stand a better chance with water dunking,” he said, referring to the practice of swimming a witch. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find another physician willing to testify to the science behind Abby’s treatment plan for Erika (either the fear of reprisal was too great or the expert witness fee was prohibitive). Nick tried to go after Henry, the state’s main witness, on cross, repeating Minnie’s accusation that he had molested his own daughter and thus had an axe to grind. The tactic blew up in the public defender’s face when Henry’s ex took the stand.

“It was all a big lie,” Minnie said. A sob caught in her throat, and she turned her eyes away from the jury. “I just made it up,” she said to the hands in her lap. “I wanted custody of my daughter, and I thought, we thought,” she said, raising her gaze and looking straight at Abby. “We thought,” she said again, before breaking off eye contact. 

The sentence hung there, and Abby wasn’t sure if Minnie finished it or had just left it hanging. Abby’s attention had been diverted by a falsetto voice in her head, Alvin, Simon, or Theodore, she wasn’t sure whose, singing the lyrics of the David Simon song, “My friend the witch doctor he told me what to say/My friend the witch doctor he told me what to do/I know you’ll be mine when I say this to you: Oh eh oh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang. . . .”

Abby shushed the voice, ordering it to stop. By the time she refocused her attention on the witness stand, Minnie had finished talking and was sharing glances with the prosecutor, who was nodding his approval. It occurred to Abby that Minnie had been coached to say it was all her doctor’s fault, the scheme to gain custody, the accusation against Henry that Minnie now claimed was a lie, and, of course the puberty blockers, too, and everything that implied.

My friend the witch doctor SHE told me what to say, SHE said Oh eh oh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang. . . .

It didn’t matter, nothing mattered: Nick’s aggressive defense only served to reinforce the jurors’ preexisting perception that Abigail Alden was a busybody who had stuck her crooked nose into other people’s business.

I’ll show them, Abby thought when the jury returned to deliver their verdict. I’ll show them what a witchy woman I really am. I’ll give them the old evil eye. Then I’ll hop on my broomstick and fly away.

Of course, she did nothing of the kind; she was too stunned to show any emotion at all when the verdict was read in open court.

After her conviction, Abigail was transported to a state prison. It was very different from county. It was bigger. It had more layers. It was scarier, although being in county had been scary enough.

For the first couple of days at state, they put her on suicide watch. This was after she was stripped, disinfected, and subjected to a body search. She was given a sleeveless dress to wear, a so-called “anti-suicide smock” that was made from material that couldn’t be shredded or torn into strips to make a noose. The cell they put her in didn’t have a bed, just a thin mat on the floor. When she woke up, she saw someone staring at her through the screen in the door.

Later, they moved her to another cell that had a bed, a sink, and a toilet. There was a metal stand by the foot of the bed that was large enough to hold a food tray but not much else, and there was a neon light in the ceiling above the head of the bed that stayed on constantly. It was on day and night, or so she supposed, because she didn’t have a window and couldn’t see the sun or the moon.

At night (she assumed it was night), Abby heard movement in the hall outside her door. It was hard to hear anything over the cries of the women in general population, but she was sure she heard something; she wasn’t entirely certain, but it sounded like footsteps that stopped outside her door before continuing on again. 

Between the light that never dimmed and the suspicion she was under observation (not to mention the nearly constant noise), Abby found it difficult to sleep.  

And when she did doze off, she had bad dreams.

She felt like the woman in Fuseli’s famous painting, one of her favorites, the one that depicts a sleeping woman in the grips of a demonic nightmare. The painting hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts, a two-hour drive from her childhood home in London, Ontario, and her father had taken her to see it when she in high school. Abby had always been interested in art history, an interest Alec Alden encouraged. For reasons that only became clear to Abby after her father misdiagnosed that girl, Alec never wanted her to become a doctor. He wanted her to become something else, anything else, and the Detroit trip was his way to nudge her down a different career path.

If only she had taken the hint.

In Fuseli’s painting, an apelike mara—the name means a goblin or a witch—sits on the chest of the sleeping woman while a horse with glowing eyes and flared nostrils looks on from the shadows. The woman is illuminated by a single light source, and Fuseli used chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of light and shadow, to heighten the drama of the scene.

That’s me, Abby said to herself, remembering the painting, but uncertain whether she was the mara or the woman.

In July, Nick visited her in prison. He told her he was working on her appeal, and was optimistic about their chances, but Abby told him she didn’t want to hear it. “Talk about something else,” she asked him.

So they talked about Kepler and astronomy and Nick told her that a total solar eclipse was expected to occur Saturday next. The central line of the path of the eclipse was expected to cross the Australian continent, and would be visible from Sydney for a duration of about three minutes. 

“Not here though,” Abby said. “We won’t be able to see it from here.”

“No we won’t,” Nick conceded. 

Of course, Abby wouldn’t be able to see it even if it occurred in this hemisphere and was visible across North America. She wouldn’t be able to see it anyway, not from her windowless prison cell.

* * *

After Nick left, she thought about Kepler some more and the shadow bridge in his sci-fi story. She wished she had the power to conjure up something like it. She imagined that living on the moon, even on its dark side, couldn’t be worse than where she was.

A few months later, Nick sent word that her appeal had been denied. She slept badly after she heard that. She dreamed she was in Fuseli’s painting again, and the dream, a genuine nightmare, startled her awake. She awoke to the glare from the bulb in the fluorescent fixture above her, and, after she stopped palpitating and calmed down a bit, she thought about how Fuseli and other 18^th century painters used light in their compositions. She thought about Joseph Wright, one of Fuseli’s precursors, and his painting of a philosopher lecturing on the orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. Unlike Fuseli’s painting, she hadn’t seen it in person. It was one of two Wright reproductions she had seen in a book. In the painting, the one about the orrery, a lamp substitutes for the sun; it lights up the faces of four students listening to the philosopher’s lecture on the model. Each of their faces are lit like one of the phases of the moon—new moon, full, half moon, and gibbous. Kepler would have loved that.

Abby didn’t know how he would have felt about the other one, which illustrated an air- pump experiment by Robert Boyle, a chemist known today for his law about the relationship between pressure and the volume of a gas. In the painting, a bird is placed inside a vacuum chamber and deprived of air before a group of onlookers. Most of them look away, like the ploughman in Auden’s poem about Icarus, but one, a child, stares at the bird while it is slowly asphyxiated. The girl’s upturned face is illuminated by light from a window, where a full moon shines in the night sky.

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