by Cray L Brown
I must’ve been only 13 years old the time I first heard of her. The Witch of Roswell Road, my mom called her. This had been the first time my mother had seen her. She was walking northward towards the waffle house back behind the CVS, presumably after taking a well-known shortcut from out behind the woods. This enormous black woman holding a garbage bag stuffed full of clothes and clipped chip bags. However, the woman was talking. She was far away from my mother, so my mother tried to see if she was talking into a phone.
Of course, when it comes to my little neck of the woods nothing is ever so simple. This woman was now practically screaming, shouting as she waved her finger in one particular direction, as if scolding Satan himself. If Satan was there, she couldn’t see him.
My mother, as much as she would like to uncover what this woman was saying, had just finished getting Patty Melts from Waffle House, and had to hurry home. After relaying the story to me, and in turn me relaying the story to my father, we had come a bit closer to deciphering her identity. Now, this started as just another story about schizophrenic hobo crackheads, of which we are never short on. However, this woman had proved herself to be especially dedicated and calculated for some old washed out fiend.
She had been at the MARTA bus station on Roswell Road next to the Waffle House for fifteen years! Consecutively. She had put office hours into this bus station every single day for thirty years, always scolding some unseen entity just beyond what my earthbound eyes could perceive. Come rain, shine, snow, hellfire and brimstone itself raining upon the earth, this woman would be there. My dad had never seen her absent from her post, and it explained why the station’s paint had rusted off, and why the broken roof had a sleeping back held spread out over it bound by rolls upon rolls of duct tape. This was this woman’s home… Or so I had thought.
Upon hearing of this legend, I had decided to try and find her myself. How had I not noticed her before? Maybe I did, but just didn’t recognize the consistency, or how loud she was preaching, barring this ethereal evil from breaching the veil and bringing about whatever evil deeds it was trying to. Or, at least, that’s what I, always superstitious, liked to think she was doing. No, this wasn’t her home, I soon realized. The clothes in her bag were actually from Goodwill. She had bought them with money, and the clothes she had on now, a few days after my mother’s encounter, were clean. She clearly had money. Maybe she was a beggar? No hat, or bin to hold various quarters from charitable passers-by.
Taking out a dollar I intended to use to buy a cheap can of juice with, I walked out from behind the bush I was using to stalk the bus stop, and offered it to her. She stopped scolding as soon as I walked out, looked me dead in the eyes when I was in front of her, she only shook her head and stuck her palm up at my dollar. That was strange. She was not a beggar, she had clean clothes, and yet… She was out here, sitting at this bus stop, and had been for thirty years. Who had the love and devotion to dress her, feed her, care for her? Clearly not some institution like a nursing home, they’d never let her out of the damn room in the state she was in. This was an anomaly to me, it puzzled me so thoroughly and profoundly, to use Occam’s razor would be to delve into the Occult. So I did.
Now, I am not a religious man. I don’t hear the Good Word on Sundays, or cram down communion wafers with a bottle of Barefoot from Publix. But the only logical explanation I had was that this woman was locked in an eternal dualistic self-destructive battle for the inner reaches of her mind not unlike some sort of depraved horny eagle death spiral. Whoever she was scolding, they could NOT be allowed to gain a vessel. Pretty far out, I thought, smirking at this little mythos I had made. It was just a quirky little thought then, I have several of those, everyone does. But the more and more I saw her there, every single day, at this bus stop like some sort of attentive monk, the more I became convinced that she was fighting a demon.
Now, my community is interesting in the regards that in spite of how absolutely ratchet and awful, it’s still extremely closely-knit. Some jerk was complaining on Nextdoor about how he couldn’t walk through the trash-filled, worn down streets without this woman scaring his precious little snot. The entire neighborhood took to him. “Who is she hurting?” Became the rallying cry in which we defended our witch, showing our gratitude for holding this unspeakable evil back. However, like all glimmering spots of interest, she too faded into obscurity. We hadn’t heard much more from her, until the winter of 2020, in which I had noticed she hadn’t been at the bus stop for a couple of weeks. This was unnerving. I wanted closure, but… Maybe sometimes we should be careful what we wish for.
I saw her face one last time, on a missing poster on the Waffle House bulletin board. “Dear family member” it read. It would appear I was right. She did have a home, and her home missed her… I haven’t checked recently, as I got into a fight with the Waffle House staff over whether or not they were closed at 11:14PM (they’re not closed, and I’m going to call corporate), but I suspect her poster still hangs there, reminding Sandy Springs of the bus-stop shizo shaped hole in its heart. If you know the current whereabouts or any information whatsoever on the conclusion of her story, I, would very much appreciate it if you could share.
