#bindama

[sixminutestoriesblog]

witch balls

When I was a child visiting little tiny New England towns was different than it is today. These days when I walk down a carefully curated Main Street in some wind swept, coastal town you can barely smell the salt in the air anymore and every shop you step into is pristine air-conditioned and smells like a department store used to, all faint traces of new plastic and underlying pungent scent of whatever it is they paint large shipments of clothes with to keep them during shipping. Most of them are still set up to look old, in fact many of them are in old buildings, but the weight of all those years isn't really allowed to show through. It's all ocean cottage core now, neat and white painted and artistic sea glass and sandpipers in simplified wooden statues, wire legs frozen instead of blurring with motion. Don't get me wrong. I love ocean cottagecore. I would decorate my whole house in it if I had the money. And the little shops, pristine and pretty, absolutely have a sweet appeal to them, not willing to give up their personality for the sterilization of 'Big City' box stores. I do miss however, what tourist shops in those same little towns used to be. Less plastic magnets for the refrigerator shaped like whales and sweatshirts of labrador retrievers declaring them a specific colored Dog and more -

half forgotten not-quite-antique shop, hidden down some narrow salt smelling alley where the stones that make up the road are uneven and there's a dusty smell to the cracks of the wood floors that never goes away. As a child going to a 'tourist shop' in one of these towns was like walking into a magic shop, a true magic shop, with books of breathtakingly beautiful paper dolls as detailed as any old fairy book illustration, imitation scrimshawed whale teeth, old time candy, books about lady pirates and clever glass marbles full of painted fish. The things those old shops offered felt local, magical, impossible to find in any other town in the entire world. Childhood colors everything more vivid than it probably was but I still think of longing and a child's minor spending money in a world of treasures when I remember those shops.

In one of those shops, as a child, I saw my first glass fishing float.

At the time it was being sold as a Portuguese fishing ball, a better buoyant for nets and lines than cork or wood. I remember, distinctly, the surprising weight of it when I picked it up. I was used to glass being fragile, light, airy. The fishing ball was none of those. It had a weight to it and a solid feel to it that said it was fit to ride the choppy waters of the icy Atlantic and do its duty, tide in and tide out. Storms weren't going to break and drown this glass. It would ride the waves forever and when it finally broke free of its net, it would find the shore, in itself or in pieces as polished sea glass. These balls were sturdy and I fell in love with them. The first time I could finally afford one was a triumph and the rare times I managed to find them in shops, as the years and the advance of more proper 'souvenirs' advances, I snatched them up even if it meant my spending money for the rest of the trip would be lean. Finally, eventually, the balls disappeared from the last shop and I thought my meager hoard was all I'd ever see of them again, an old relic that was already being phased out before I'd even discovered them as a child.

Imagine my surprise when, years and years later, a friend, helping me fix my bathroom from some water damage, saw one of them where I had it hanging in the window and seemed surprised to recognize it. He called it a 'witch ball'. I corrected him but he was adamant. And so, thanks to the internet, I rediscovered my glass fishing floats - with a new name and a new story to go with it.

Witch balls are hollow glass balls. They can range in size, I've seen some as small as rounded shot glasses and the older ones seem to be about as large as my fishing balls, which is about the size of a cantaloupe. Like fishing balls, they're not made for perfection, in fact, the bubbles and imperfections in the glass blowing process are considered part of their selling points. They tend to range in colors, with modern day witch balls being an absolute riot of colors or a beautiful gradual shift from one color to the next. They've been around for quite a long time as well. There are accounts of witch balls hanging in English houses, especially sea-faring ones, as far back as the 17th and 18th century, though they were often known as 'watch balls' back then and not quite as riotously colorful as modern ones, tending to be more often made of green or blue glass. Sometimes they would have salt or herbs put in them before they were sealed but the main thing witch balls needed were stands. In fact, something I just learned, the way to tell a kugel (friendship) ball and a witch ball apart is to look for the glass strands inside the ball. Witch balls need those strands to be effect. Witch balls are, after all, created to be traps.

The idea was that you hung your ball inside your house, often in an eastern window but sometimes from the rafters or set on top of a stand. Than, when evil things tried to enter the house in the night, they would be distracted and then captivated by the way the light of the moon played against the glass of the ball. Sometimes, the evil had to touch the glass, sometimes being ensnared simply happened automatically once their gaze was fixed on it. Either way, the evil would find itself pulled into the glass, trapped in the maze of the strands inside and unable to escape. There it would remain either until the morning sunrise burned it away or until the glass ball was broken, freeing it to continue its harm. Not all witch balls worked that way. In some cases, the glass was made to be more reflective with the idea that evil things, as we've already read, didn't have reflections and couldn't bear the reminder or that the glass would turn aside the evil gaze and reflect it back on its creator.

There is some speculation that glass Christmas ornaments may be tied into something similar as well, although, humans also simply like hanging sparking objects up for no reason but 'pretty' as well.

Bottle Trees serve the same general purpose and can still be found in parts of the Southern US, a tradition brought over from the Congo during slavery times. The belief is that blue bottles hung on tree branches will entrance and capture evil spirits inside their depths and hold them there where they can't cause any harm until the morning sun burns them away with its rising.

As a last note, I should point out that calling my collection 'fishing balls' wasn't necessarily wrong. While some of my later purchases did have strands in them, my early ones from childhood didn't. Apparently there's a very invested set of people who collect Japanese fishing floats on the West Coast of the US and Canada as well.

[vibrantstillness]

Prompt #6: First Steps

The swarthy Roegadyn stood hands on his hips, casting a dubious look down at the little Raen before him. The Ruby Sea sun glared down on him in turn, its rays locked in a losing struggle against the early spring nip in the breeze that wafted over the dock. The comically outsized shadow of Heaven-on-High cut a dark line squarely through the Confederate camp, neatly bisecting the island with a band of shade that sprawled clear out into the late morning waters. That same shade meant the squint Hikinami trained on the odd girl had nothing to do with the sun.

"Can't get you to the Price, lass," he rumbled. "Kugane ain't too fond of our sort. Best I can do is Sakazuki."

He took her thoughtful pause as an opportunity to give her another once-over. Her deep blue clothes were a cut too fine for smallfolk, and her accent wasn't quite anything he'd heard before. It was close to Doman, but not quite.

"Sakazuki? Pray forgive, this humble servant is unaware of environs beyond Doma. If it trouble not the good sir, might he be persuaded to relate whither lieth Sakazuki?"

Hikinami squinted harder. 'Lieth'? Did this girl crawl out of a historical drama? How old was she, anyway? He was always so bad at gauging Au Ra. Seemed like they stayed sixteen for half their lives until one day, suddenly, they were forty summers old.

"S'right across the way. Swimmin' distance if you don't mind a dip. Can manage a boat if you wait 'til nightfall and flash some coin."

"I see," came the measured reply. "Then, were this humble woman to beg boon of passage, what might the honored purveyor desire as his fee?"

"Twelve monme." Hikinami wasn't sure if it was sarcasm, opportunism, or a twisted sense of humor that led him to cite the figure, but there it was out in the open. A dozen silver coin wasn't exorbitant, but it was also several hells of a lot more than a simple ferry ride was worth.

"We have an agreement," said the girl after only a half second's frown.

What. She didn't even try to haggle. She seemed confident enough for a lone lass in a pirate outpost, though there wasn't a hint of the swaggering false bravado most outsiders adopted in hopes of warding off the brand of an easy mark. Not that the Confederacy was a den of thieves, they did have their own brand of law and order here, but... neither did they have an issue taking what they deemed theirs by right. So what of this girl, then? A simple, if presentable enough overcoat and a pair of mid-calf trousers weren't any sort of standard attire he knew of.

"Where you from, lass?" he asked on sudden impulse.

"Bindama."

Bindama? Nowhere he'd ever heard of, though he'd bet his right arm it was a fishing village - towns inland didn't name themselves after fishing net buoys. The girl had to be lying, there was no way some poor coastal village lass would show up dressed like that and not blink twice at such an inflated fare. Even if she did have the scratch, she'd have balked at paying it. Who then, and why the lie? Couldn't be a noblewoman, heaven forbid they ventured anywhere without at least one shepherd to insulate them from the worst of the outside world. Unless...

Ah. That had to be it. Some samurai's favorite serving-girl, sent away for her own safety 'cause he'd gotten too into his cups and said something the Garleans might conceivably take as criticism. T'was the only answer that made sense to him, anyway. His hard incredulity melted into grudging sympathy. Poor lass had no idea what she was out for, and was lucky she'd run into a softy like ol' Hikinami.

"Listen lass," he said much more gently. "The trip ain't worth twelve. Toss me four an' I'll get you to the Sakazuki outlook. When you get there, you look for a gent named Umidari. Tell 'im Hikinami's gonna owe him a drink and you need a skip over to the Ruby Price quiet-like. That'll sort you."

The graceful bow of thanks that answered him was definitely no fisher-girl's.

"The honored sir has this humble servant's most profond thanks."

"Oh, don't thank me yet, lass... You've still Kugane to tackle." With that, he stepped aside and gestured to his boat.

[lenamolfesi]

Japan started using the glass floats as early as 1910. In Japanese, the floats are variably known as ukidama (浮き玉, boy balls) or bindama (ビン玉, glass balls).  

[aleatorybrain]

Fishing glass spheres. In Japanese, the floats are variably known as ukidama (浮き玉, buoy balls) or bindama (ビン玉, glass balls).