This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autofictional seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

Wightsburg, Arkansas
Or, 
You Are a Conjurer of Lost Causes Making Just Des(s)erts For Visiting Yankees

Recipe for Disaster

Yield: 1 wild night in a sundown town

• 1 Cause so far gone as to not be lost, but found, actually, in your heart of hearts
• 21 grams of the blackest soul-essence (yours)
• 3 tablespooks worth of juicy racial animus 
• 1½ teaspoons of grief-tears
• 3 – 5 pieces of strange fruit picked ripe from the tall poplar tree in the center of town
• Several moth-eaten bedsheets
• 1lb of dust taken from graves in or around Wightsburg dated 1861-1865
• 2 or 3 gaggles of Yankees, shot full of Northern aggression and adventurism, seeking you, the Great Witch of the South
• 1 copy of the elusive Negro Motorist Red Book, “a modern Malleus Maleficarum masquerading as nigger empowerment” (your words), torn to shreds

Preparation 

Before the year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Six

1. Bake in Southern heat for two or three decades, mum and mummifying.

2. Stew in your own juices, marinating thoroughly in the gangrenous suffering of Antebellum battlefields, where countrymen, horses and King Cotton were hewn down by cold Northern scythes. 

3. Come the dreary post-war time, place yourself over a fire until boiling.  Sear until hatred makes fond.  Deglaze using a stock of own blood until exsanguinated, expired.

4. Be swept up by Reanimation, joining undeath’s gray ranks, as the formerly-gray blossoms green, or fades yellow, swept up by Reconstruction.

During the afternoon, on the day of the feast

1. Wash bedsheets by hand in lukewarm water until free of blood.  Dry, iron and fold them.

2. Pick, then shuck or vivisect strange fruit.

3. Imbibe racial animus.

Throughout the early evening

1. Heat cauldron, occasionally stoking the flames with your Lost Cause.  

2. Add strong moonshine to a mixture of blood & soil in the cauldron.  Simmer.  

3. Slowly add soul essence to concoction until it becomes reddish-black, viscous.  

4. Sauté strange fruit in a separate (but equal) cauldron, using scant blood sprinkled with brown sugar as a base until the fruit has caramelized.  Simmer.

5. Place bedsheets on a pedestal.  Run fingers through them.  Sob into them.

6. Pour caramelized fruit and base into the main cauldron.  Simmer.

At dusk

1. Paint your face haint blue, warning spooks that they can look but not touch.

2. Pour steaming contents of cauldron onto the ground beneath the pedestal until sheets rise and ambulate and clamor for righteous vengeance.

3. Await the arrival of Yankee witchfinders and their dusky allies.

4. They will be hungry (for conquest, glory and your womanhood).  

5. Serve Hell—hot—in portions according to each Yank’s desire until they are bloated, choked by the noose of indigestion.