Girls Against God

and use twigs to rub ourselves with black henbane.
Someone has smeared blood over her thighs, and one of us gets it on her face. We begin applying makeup around the bloodstains, adding more colours, initially just on her face, then on everyone’s. One of us is painted in a black-metal style, but using green instead of black, and adding glitter. Puberty is painted across Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait on the Glass Veranda, blood all over the face with thick aquamarine lines. That seems appropriate, says Terese.
Black henbane doesn’t burn the skin, on the inside or outside; it just warms, rubs, accentuates the shapes of our orifices like glowing rings. Behind us our shadows are long, moving in increasingly dark circles, like our own feedback loop. The dimensions open up, more rings slide up inside our bodies, through the uterus. We’re no longer Scandinavian reproduction blueprints. The rings twist around the bones in our spines, until we exhale them like smoke rings, respire them. Then they rise, across town, ring 1, ring 2, ring 3, ring on into the cosmos.
Maybe we rise, too. Maybe we half carry each other, half float?
Maybe we sit on the twigs and use them to float, like brooms.
Or wait, maybe the twigs are brushes and we use them to paint the floor and the walls, or ourselves. Maybe the twigs are instruments, or microphones that we attach to ourselves.
Being a witch doesn’t need to be more difficult than that. Just look: Venke lifts her hair with one hand, holding two twigs in the other. She uses the twigs to cut off a big lock of hair, as if they transformed into scissors on their way to her head, turning back into twigs afterwards. As Venke cuts, the clipped hairs are immediately transformed into spaghetti. Where the hair was cut it grows out again; the spaghetti dangles from her fist. I grab a strand, place one end on my lips and slurp it toward me.
Above us we see glowing circles, overlapping to make a chain. Terese twirls a spaghetti string around her finger. It glows, too. As we speak we see the outline of our voices, or the shape of the tones, the ring of the frequencies, or, wait, we see our intestines circle above us, we see fragments up there, from our bodies. Our inner instruments have begun an unexpected band practice, ringing from the bedroom and outside the bedroom, from the plants in the backyard and in the botanical garden and from the shadow figures of the museum. Everything hums. All of Oslo’s components float like a deck of tarot cards, sprinkling and flaking fragments that we can reassemble like a mandala, a whole, flaming from our own brew.
An episode:
A group of experienced witches and one apprentice hike into a field in Austre Moland on the midsummer solstice. They mow a circle of the Southern grass short using a pole made out of holly, dig a hole in the ground right in the middle of the circle and murmur a few words from a tablet with a black metallic finish.
A huge black ram appears. He has bloody horns and a wax candle strapped to his back.
The ram commands them all to greet him by kissing his behind, below the tail. The kiss immediately sends them into a trance, and they begin to dance around in circles, back to back, as the ram pisses into the hole they have dug, filling it with bright yellow urine. This is the witches’ holy water.
The witches add herbs to the water, drink the holy water urine from little black goblets, and as they drink, the wax candle on the ram’s mane is lit and ‘Happy Birthday’ begins to play.
The witches continue to dance until they pass out and slump to the ground. The ram stands quietly. Perhaps he will, in short spurts, change into a girl on all fours, dressed in black, with black hair.
‘Happy Birthday’ continues playing until the candle has burnt down.
The Sabbath
Let’s zoom out for a moment.
The pleasant Southern cobblestone streets in the centres of Lillesand, Grimstad, Arendal, Tvedestrand and Risør lie deserted. They’re easily recognised; it’s not permitted to paint the listed wooden houses here any colour but white. It’s completely quiet, until you gradually hear the distant sound of an engine, and then another one, and then another one; now the entire crew of furious and disruptive car cruisers are approaching. Sunday school children peek out the window of the evangelist church and see the cruisers drive back and forth, back and forth, new variations all the time. Occasionally the gang skid across a patch of lawn, a little too close to a pavement edge or a walkway. Back and forth, engines hissing as loudly as possible, squeezing out as much sound as they can.
I see them drive past, honking, from the room where I practice with my metal band in 1998. I’m standing by the window with the black microphone, in black clothes and with black hair, and for a moment I’m drawn to the cars, the drifting, rootlessness out there. The cruisers yank me out of the process I’m in, the process of creating a direction for my hatred. The music and the metal community can receive some of my hatred, and the rest has to glow undisturbed inside the music, far away from the world. But the moment the cruisers honk, we all feel, everyone in the band, that we’re not far from the world after all; we’re just another one of the street racers’ targets. Together, we’re just any other Southern congregation that can be disrupted.
Note the cruisers’ routes. Draw up a map, imagine that we mark it using a running app, and see how they use their old, worn-out cars