Flash Fic Day 2: "Teaching might seem like a strange occupation to choose, for someone who has never been to school.”

Prompt: “Teaching might seem like a strange occupation to choose, for someone who has never been to school.” 

Photo by Hasan Albari on Pexels

Everyone knows at least one witch. Most of the time, people can tell that there is something peculiar about a witch, but they usually attribute it to a funny sense of fashion or a quirky personality. Most witches work in science and engineering if you’d like to spot one. Very few witches work in the teaching profession, unlike our protagonist, Martha. Martha is a quirky witch with a funny sense of fashion, and she is learned in the arts of potion-making and tea-brewing. Most people don’t know this, but if you’re able to brew a perfect cup of tea, you are likely descended from a lineage of witches. Martha was fortunate enough to have acquired all the knowledge a witch needs from her own mother and was ready to pass it on to young witches needing some assistance finding their path. Teaching might seem like a strange occupation to choose, for someone who has never been to school, but Martha was determined to make a positive impact on the next generation of witches. She teaches home economics and occasionally chemistry to the younger students in the hopes of finding one with potential. It was rather easy getting hired as a teacher even without a degree, which she was able to do by way of a simple blurring potion discreetly added to the recruiter’s tea.

Martha has her eye on a few students who might be good candidates for transmitting her knowledge and skills, and they’re all quite similar in terms of tea-brewing capability and curiosity. One of them, however, Martha is unsure about. She is particularly bad at making tea but appears to have all the other qualities she looks for in a good witch. At the moment, the student in question is distracted and burning the icing in the pot on the stove while Martha watches to see what she does. It helps that her home economics students are not a large group and it is one of the reasons she chose to teach this class. As she watches, Amelie shakes her head as if shaking off a daydream and looks down at her pot for the first time in a few minutes. She stopped stirring a while ago and seems to realize what happened. Curiously, she sighs and starts stirring again like she never stopped. Martha tries to appear inconspicuous as she approaches Amelie, “How’s it going with the icing? Need a hand?”

Not looking up, Amelie casually responds, “All good, Miss Seer. Thank you.”

The icing looks perfect. Martha is absolutely certain it was burning a few seconds ago. Could it be?

Amelie turns to face a stunned Martha and states with an innocent smile, “My mother taught me how to do that.”