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Witches Racing Cars

by Nadav Schul-Kutas

A small crew is waiting at the starting line. They’re all buzzing around the car, poking and prodding and talking amongst themselves. It won’t start, which is unsurprising. The car never starts on its own, but the young men with big ideas want to know why and the thrill-seekers are worried their team will get disqualified if this goes on any longer. A woman named after a forgotten god points towards a ruined gas station. A figure draped in feathers and marked with machine grease appears from behind the ARCO’s crumbling walls.

Finally, the witch is here.

The crew parts just enough for her to reach the car. She runs a hand along the hood, right above the empty socket where the right headlight used to be. It’s rough as anything, but that’s not what she’s looking for. She can still feel the ghost of the paint, burnt red like the sunset. Worn and muddy in life, picked apart by the elements in death, there’s nothing she can do to give it a proper re-birth. No matter. A car is not made by its paint.

She gives a belated greeting to her crewmates, walks the long way around the car, and gets into the driver’s seat. Hermes Clyde sits next to her. Hermes can’t drive, but she can navigate the race’s dirt roads and unmarked streets. The men start talking with one of the race officials, going back and forth about a specific rule while the witch runs her hand along the dashboard. She can feel a dozen things that seeped into the plastic long ago, although she isn’t quite sure what any of them are. No matter. Everything will come in due time. For now, she fiddles with the tab of scrap metal jammed into the ignition. The steering wheel, weathered by time and gnawed by animals, has become a circle of cracked plastic held together by string. She lays her hands on it. There was a time when the witch told others about the rivers of cars, of the blacktop planes and painted ground she senses whenever she attunes herself to the wheel and soaks in the memories left by long-dead hands. But people would frown or cry or call her a liar. She never knew why they cared. A car’s memories, to her, were as meaningless as a dream.

She turns the metal tab and gives a mystic shout. The car does not start. Again she tries. She can feel the engine’s spirit drawing closer, rising from a deep slumber. One more time and the car jolts with old fervor. A spectator jumps out of the way as what remains of the front bumper creeps towards the two piles of bricks that form the starting line.

Hermes and the witch put their helmets on.

A race official hands Hermes five point-trackers — one for the starting line, three for the checkpoints they have to pass, and one for the finish line. Unassuming, meter-long sticks; witches organizing the race will use their magic to determine each racer’s time. Every scratch and impact will be a mark of history, a memory stored in wood. Any witch who sees those memories would know exactly when it happened. Even if the cars race one at a time, the point-trackers will show who was fastest. Hermes’ hands are sweating as she moves four point-trackers to the backseat. This is it. This is what they’d trained for.

The official steps away from the car, waves the spectators away. “Alright, you can go whenever you’re ready.”

Hermes holds the stick out of the open window, pushing the tip into one of the bricks. “Are you–”

“Yeah.” There’s a deep breath, and even the car seems to steady itself.

The sun’s rising behind them. A few clouds drift lazily in the sky. The Machine Rally always happens during the year’s best weather. It’s too important to get canceled for rain.

The gas pedal buckles. A cloud of dust rises, engulfs the car and the spectators. The car shoots across the dirt and the first point-tracker cuts against the starting line.

---

Most people never get to see true old-world technology. They find rusted cans and trampled bottle caps, but it’s a miracle to come across anything functional. Every piece of the old world holds priceless knowledge. Witches make that knowledge much easier to grasp.

The car barrels towards the first checkpoint. The clutch snaps into a different gear with every breath from first to fifth. The clutch and gas pedals dance while the brake waits anxiously. The numbers on the speedometer had worn off long ago, but the team feels their speed through the car’s shuddering frame. A thistle plant reclaiming the asphalt becomes a sickly streak on the car’s rusted shell.

A tail of crimson fabric beckons up ahead, hanging from what was once a billboard but is now a home for vines, birds, and innumerable species of spider. Hermes sticks a point-tracker out the window as they drive past and braces herself. The tracker snaps in two like a gunshot, splinters pattering the car’s right side.

The witch is unfazed. The car keeps moving. If they can keep up their pace, they’re sure to make the top 10.

The ruins get denser, the abandoned highway quickly morphing into city-turned-back-country. The car rips through the maze of crumbled buildings. It skids around one corner, then another. A bush growing around a transformer box claws the car, but its once glossy finish is already long gone. The car cuts through a sun-cooked parking lot, dashing over the sidewalk to reunite with the road. The officials made sure that the fastest path was never a straight line, but most teams weren’t crazy enough to actually try and drive it.

The second checkpoint is down the road, a red knot tied next to a stoplight. The team doesn’t have time to wonder how the officials got it up there.

“The base of the light is on the left side!” Hermes yells over the car’s reanimated motor. There’s no way she can hit it with a point tracker from the passenger seat. Did she mess up? Teams never got the exact route between checkpoints, so maybe she hadn’t navigated properly, and they were meant to approach from a different direction. But she’s a damn good navigator. Off in the distance she can glimpse the third checkpoint, an old tree up the hill adorned with red fabric. Which means they weren’t meant to come from the opposite direction. She looks at the line of ruins leading to the tree and knows that there must be a road coming up from the left. Except every team surveyed the track two weeks before the race, and a tree covered in pink-yellow fungus had fallen down over that road. The only ways they could have approached the checkpoint were from this direction or from the right. The base of the stoplight was on the corner nearest to them, so either way, there was no way to hit it from the passenger side.

Which is a long way to say that Hermes wasn’t wrong — the officials wanted a challenge. They wanted a checkpoint you couldn’t hit. Not going forward, at least.

The checkpoint is two seconds away, and the witch has that look in her eyes that always scared Hermes. She cautiously holds the point tracker out the window as the witch pulls the car to the right side of the road.

“Hold on, my love” the witch says.

She stomps the clutch once and the back wheels skid on the broken pavement. The front wheels turn left as she throws the handbrake back. The car and the world spin in opposite directions. The clutch flies between three different positions. The handbrake comes down and the car is driving backwards. The witch looks over her shoulder and floors it.

The tracker and checkpoint spray splinters onto the dashboard before Hermes can reorient herself. Faster and faster, until the witch throws the car into another spin. Adjusting with the wheel, she eases on the brake and the wheels suddenly stick to the road. They’re going forward again.

Navigators don’t have time to feel carsick. She has to find a way to the next checkpoint. Intuition tells her it isn’t on a main road, but she can do better than that. These roads were planned by people, and although she can’t see the city’s history, she can notice patterns. Navigating means sifting through her memory of every turn they’ve already taken, of all the streets and signs they’ve shot past, and knowing when to trust her gut.

“Take a left at that sign! Then right, then straight!” she yells as the car lurches over another crack in the road. The witch responds by beginning a right turn before throwing her weight and the steering wheel left. Pulling and releasing the handbrake, the car slides sideways around the corner without slowing down. She straightens out the car an instant before throwing everything in the opposite direction for the next turn. Hot against the asphalt, four rubber wheels screech around the corner.

There’s a grizzly bear in the middle of the road.

The witch doesn’t straighten out the car. She tries to swerve again, around the bear. The car leaps the curb, its right fender colliding against the mossy stump of what was once a telephone pole. The car hits the ground spinning, flailing, hemorrhaging scrap metal. No amount of witchcraft can stop it.

The car crashes to a halt. It lets out a final dry heave as its chassis sinks an inch and a half. The engine sputters, then is silent. The bear has run off.

Everything is still beyond the witch’s tearful gasps. Hermes catches her breath with one hand on the dashboard and the other on her helmet.

The witch pounds her hands against the steering wheel. She yells something, but it’s too much of a mess to make out.

“We can fix it.” Hermes looks at the witch instead of the metal gash in the front of the car.

“Fix this?” The witch turns towards Hermes, “The next team is going to be here before dark. Even if you suddenly became a mechanic, they’d pass us before we could fix anything!” She steps out of the car and pushes her helmet off. It clatters to the ground. Hermes gets out onto the pavement. She looks at the damage on the front of the car while the witch paces in the middle of the road. The front-right tire, fully removed, leans on the curb. The car’s warped shell doesn’t leave enough room to put it back on. The hood’s bent in enough directions to see the engine beneath it while also refusing to move. The rusty six-cylinder engine, more dead than it’s ever been, sits eroded among the nests of various animals.

Hermes takes off her helmet and breathes deep. “Tell me again how you start the car.”

“Excuse me?” The witch stops pacing.

“How do you make the car start? How do witches do it?”

The witch folds her arms beneath her feathered cloak, “We feel the memories of what the car used to be. Then, we convince it that it can still be that.”

“Even if it’s impossible.”

“Impossible by your rules. Witchcraft doesn’t fit your–”

“Your laws of science, I know.” Hermes runs her hand along the car’s open wound. “So why can’t you start it again?”

“New life means new memories.” The witch sticks out an arm before wincing. “It won’t forget this.”

“And you can’t convince it again?”

The witch nods, protecting her left arm with her right.

The witch’s grease markings are smudged along her face. Even with her cloak on, she shivers in the sun. A spot of light catches the car’s cracked windshield.

“How do I convince you it’s possible?” Hermes isn’t sure who her question is for.

“Don’t.”

“You still want to win, don’t you? So how do I convince you that we can start this car?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Maybe for you — but we don’t need your rules to–”

“I can’t drive, Hermes!”

There’s a second, truer moment of stillness. The broken witch and the broken car and the broken hope weigh on Hermes, threaten to crush her too. Even if they don’t want to continue, the closest speck of civilization is at the finish line. They could make it for a night in the bush, maybe, but the witch’s arm won’t heal that quickly. They could also abandon their car in the ruins and let the next team rescue them. But of course, coming back without a car would mean that neither of them would be trusted enough to ever race again. Throwing it all away would be their legacy.

“Which arm?” Hermes asks.

“Right.”

“Just right?”

“Think so.”

“What if…” Hermes stares at nothing in particular, “I’ll work the stick. You steer with your left hand. You can tell me when to shift gears.”

The witch stares at her. No one can afford to throw it away. Not here. She looks at the slumped corpse of a car. In the glove compartment is a piece of charcoal nested in plastic bags. She takes it and traces a line along the front of the car, along the doors, around the back, until the whole thing is wrapped in a band of black. She goes back again, carefully picking where to add vertical stripes. She walks behind the car and puts her good hand on the trunk.

“Get in and keep the wheel straight while I push it.”

The witch rubs charcoal on her left hand until it’s the color of soot. She lets out a single, continuous yell and pushes with it. Her shoes slide against the road, her voice starts to die down. And then–

The car roars awake. The witch stumbles as it rolls forward. Hermes stares at her as she climbs into the driver’s seat.

“First gear.”

Hermes fumbles with the stick before shifting into first. The car limps forward.

“Second gear.”

It picks up some speed. The tireless wheel bounces and scratches against the ground. The third checkpoint is still impossibly far away.

Hermes maps out the potential routes again and again, trying to think over the crying metal. “Take a right.”

The missing tire makes climbing the hill harder. The witch pumps the gas and the car rocks back, again and again, climbing the instant the dead wheel leaves the road. The road curves right and she floors it, picking the wheel up for a whole 100 feet. Then it’s back to the dead wheel carving grooves into the asphalt.

“First gear.”

The next team must have started already. The witch wonders if anything like this will happen to them. Probably not. Teams wipe out, sure — they spin off the road and take turns too wide and slam potholes, but no one wrecks this badly. They’re a good team, but this is their problem alone.

The rim of the screeching wheel breaks off, rolling for a moment before falling flat in the shade. The car continues grinding against the road as they approach the third checkpoint. Hermes sticks out a tracker and whacks it against the tree. It leaves a small scrape. The car drags on.

The witch doesn’t have a free hand to hit the steering wheel. This isn’t fast enough. There’s no way it is.

Hermes smacks the side of the car with the last point-tracker. “Come on!” She smacks it again, “Come on you heap of junk!” She’s drowned out by the metal grinding against broken asphalt. She swears again.

Almost imperceptibly, the needle on the speedometer shifts. The witch can’t see it, but the sparks in her fingertips tell her it’s real.

“MOVE!”

The car rises over a tree root. It comes down ever-so-slightly slower, lands ever-so-slightly lighter. Free-spinning back wheels accelerate during milliseconds of airtime, kicking the car forward as soon as they hit the ground.

“DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO RACE?!” Hermes shouts. The car rocks back, lighter than before.

“KEEP GOING!” The witch isn’t sure who the command is for. “SECOND GEAR!”

Shifting gears, the car loses some torque to pick up speed.

“COME ON!” Hermes shouts.

“COME ON!” the witch shouts with her. She kicks the clutch and the wheels get a jolt of power. Whatever mechanical stress it puts on the car doesn’t matter. Witchcraft keeps it moving.

And the witchcraft is flowing.

They’re hollering in the wind, their voices reverberating off the car’s body. The car goes faster. The front of the car crashes down with every bump in the road. They ride over a patch of good asphalt and sparks lick the point-tracker. The sweat on the witch’s face is mixing with her grease and turning into something wicked, but all she cares about is the right turn that’s coming up and the hill starting to flatten off. The finish line’s almost there.

Hermes spits in the wind and pulls up the point-tracker. She hits the car again.

“ALMOST! KEEP GOING!”

The turn is two seconds away.

The witch leans harder on the gas. The car eagerly obliges.

One second.

“FIRST GEAR! GET IN!”

Hermes swings her torso back into the now-lively car. It enters the curve slowly enough to do a turn with four wheels — but only four. The screeching metal rim lifts off the road as the car, lacking the friction it desperately needs, starts to skid.

The witch lifts her foot off the gas and turns the wheel in harder. As long as the wheels are spinning, slowing down gives them traction.

Hermes, not knowing what to do, braces herself.

The finish line, two rusted barrels on either side of the road and a crowd, come into view. They’re watching in horror.

The car turns further in, its rear end flaring out towards the curb. By inches, it misses. It doesn’t stop rotating.

50 feet from the finish line and their car has spun out again. It slides sideways for 10, then backwards for 5. By the time the wheels have grabbed back onto the road, Hermes is facing one of the barrels. The car stops, wheezes, and dies a second time. 20 feet from the finish line.

The dust on the road starts to settle. No one knows what to do.

Hermes cocks her arm back and throws the point-tracker like a javelin. It collides with the barrel. That’s time.

---

They didn’t win, of course. Second-to-last, only beating out a team that got disqualified. And yet, their timing for the first half of the race was almost unmatched.

It takes ages before either of them are trusted to race again. The car had been too priceless to wreck, and it was still their fault to some extent. Hermes could have picked a route with fewer turns and the witch could have taken them more carefully, those cocky fools.

The car, dead and disassembled, is scrapped for its organs. New machine-life springs up in its place. The racers get scattered too, shuffled and reshuffled into different crews in different towns, always on a very short leash. They find each other at the rare rally tournament, but the new world makes it hard to stay in touch. They hand letters to travelers, but most never reach their destination.

And yet, like dust kicked into the air, everything settles back to where it was.

---

A witch is waiting at the starting line. The crew isn’t meant to show up for another half-hour, but she’s here anyways. A car that used to be painted silver inherited the old car’s six-cylinder heart and lies waiting behind her. She won’t start it, which is unsurprising. Racers ride in teams. A woman named after a forgotten god scares the shit out of her by knocking on the car’s hood.

“Good morning, Hermes.”

They shake hands before wordlessly agreeing that what they really need is a hug.

“I think I still owe you a win,” Hermes says.

The witch’s lips crack. She isn’t used to smiling. “I was going to say the same thing.”

The starting line is atop the hill. The ruined city sprawls out below them. The ruined world extends infinitely farther, tranquil beneath the morning sun. Somewhere, cut from the Earth’s ragged cloth, is a track.

“Let’s race.”