Fandom for Witches - Fantasy Magazine (original) (raw)
Lara is a summer witch born with fruit rich on her tongue, a monkey god’s chittering beneath her skin, and a full July sun’s worth of love for love. Her ba claims to have read Pasternak, but she knows it was Julie Christie’s face he traced when he named her, Julie’s yellow-gold hair her ma made fun of him for admiring, bright as an August afternoon. She watches it herself, all three and a half hours three and a half times; at eight, her summer fingers melting the ice palace when she touches the screen; at eleven, entranced by Omar’s eyelashes, dark and thick on his cheek; at twelve, caught not by her namesake but by poor Tonya, played by a winter witch’s granddaughter, glorious in brown furs and tragedy; at thirteen, only the half that makes her cry.
Lara loves a tragedy. She dreams of them, rich and strong enough that her ma has to sing protection over her bed to spare their apartment neighbors from Lara’s love for a good, sad story and the sharp grief a witch’s love might bring. She thinks about them between classes at school, murmuring cantrips in two languages beneath her breath so she won’t ensnare her classmates. At fourteen, she finds Sanctuary Road. It’s a sad story to end all sad stories, which is to say, not good, but right. She draws, writes, spends long hours stewing about how someone on the other side of the country is wrong. She loves it in a way that you can only love something that hurts you, a thing that will hold you and knife you in the same breath. Every witch knows to be careful with a story like that, the kind that can turn, spines sprung.
And for a fandom witch, well, there are rules.
• • • •
The mundane, years from now
sanctuarysins21
holy.
fucking. shit.
tenlittlecats
DO MINE EYES DECEIVE ME DID THEY JUST MAKE JAGIEL CANON
astarael_girl
ok but are we gonna talk about how he held his face because I have an ESSAY about this
deaconjane
who the fuck in the writers room is reading fic and where do we send the gift basket
The witches, years from now
justiceformags
all right. fess up. who broke the salt rules? hope your craft is good and your legs are fast
• • • •
Sanctuary Road airs for the first time in September. Fall, especially in New England, is a dangerous time for a summer witch, full of the apple liquor and burnt sharp smell of the season ending, the false promise of just a few more warm days. It will run long past its own death and break a thousand, thousand hearts, but right now, Lara doesn’t know that. She is newly fourteen, drunk on her new inch of height. Her hair falls exactly to the center of her shoulder blades, not an inch longer, chopped blunt and straight across, so it’s uneven when she gathers it up.
Her mother sucks her teeth and calls her yellow-haired, which is to say it’s a black that gleams brown and not blue in the light. There’s a girl in Chinese school—fobby as they come, with her collars buttoned all the way up, clothes both ill-fitting and somehow too neat—who has hair so inky and straight Lara would suspect craft if Shen Jia weren’t as bland and exacting a rule-following witch as any that has ever lived. The type of hair the poet witches of the Northern Wei would have murmured from page to head. Lara’s ma loves above all to talk about how proper Shen Jia’s craft is, how filial the girl herself, how some Chinese girls still remember they’re Chinese. Yes, Ma, Lara says, nodding before her mouth has caught the sound. Yes, niang, she says pointedly when her ma is being pointed herself.
In the first episode she watches, Jack and Neal are trapped in an evil apple orchard. The trees are fed on unsavory things, but she imagines the crispness of a first bite on her tongue. Jack is older, blunt and confident, gray eyes, dark lashes, slow swagger. Neal is the quiet one, a sharp chin, a hunch to his shoulders like he might have ink stains on his fingers. They are both exactly the type of white boys Lara never talks to at school. They ignore her, and she ignores them. A silent agreement that suits all parties. She much prefers to see them on screen.
Jack and Neal drive a loud, unapologetic car—the kind Lara’s parents would never even imagine purchasing (it takes them years in this country to buy a car at all)—they eat junk food whenever they want, wear leather jackets (Jack), too-big Converse (Neal), and drive thousands of miles down American roads in American steel, with vengeance in their hearts and classic rock on their lips. Their America is a few decades and wars short of Lara’s. There are no Laras on the show (though ma will remind her that Qing Dynasty witches helped build the western railroads, that their blood and craft still sing in the iron); it is a world and a time contained and safe. These brothers love each other with a kind of feral, single-minded devotion that is as alien to Lara—the only daughter of an only daughter—as the idea of actual aliens.
They are as exotic as prairie houses, drop biscuits, journeys west with cowboys instead of monkey kings, homesteads, and apple pie. There must be a witch in the writers’ room, because the boys kill ghosts, vampires, revenants, and every other monster liable to walk an American road, but never a witch. It’s the kind of show she’s just a little embarrassed to tell her friends about. Sanctuary Road is clumsy and loudly American; she watches it furtively in the dark, ready to shut it off the moment that someone walks in. There’s an entire episode about their uncle’s cabbage-obsessed ghost. The jokes don’t always land. The special effects often involve an extra in a suit waving their arms around. It’s just not good.
She watches twenty episodes in two weeks, and writes her first fic in four.
• • • •
In the old days, it was harder to be caught. Meng Jiang Nu sang down a ten-thousand-li wall in all her rage—now they call it sorrow—and it took a thousand imperial witches to undo her working. The emperor buried the witches on top of those who built the wall, so their craft simmered still beneath the stones. Cleopatra and her sister had craft unparalleled, unraveling the narratives of men like badly woven carpet, and they went to their doom on their own terms. Esther wore the working of her courage like the steel that it was. Scheherazade was born an autumn witch and died a story witch of unimaginable power.
Some days, Lara burns with the salt of being born at the end of things, when all the great workings are already done. She knows Cleopatra probably sighed, imagining the days of wild Eleusis and dances in the deep wood, just as Lara sits at her window and traces patterns in the frost, dreaming of Wu Zetian, an empress winter-bred and winter-doomed. Now, kitchen witches still brew, but glamorists account for their spells lasting through every reproduction, and plenty of craft is worked online. Singing down a wall is a myth even to witches, too much effort with the workings in place to hold them all in line. All the fun—the kind of rule breaking that makes new rules—is happening in fandom.
There are different breeds of rules, and any good witch learns them alongside her craft. A wood rule is meant to be tested head on, splintered and seasoned in fire. A grass rule to be bent to give it strength. An iron rule to be laughed at, because iron rules are what those who hunt witches think govern the world, and when they are broken, those hunters will always say it was the witches who hunted them. The oldest rules are salt rules, the ones meant to survive sea voyages and flame and long years hidden in the dark.
Here are the salt rules of fandom: You will love without craft. You will bring no coven politics into fandom circles. You will reveal no true names when reading the work of a fandom witch. You will love without craft. You will love without craft. You will love without craft.
What this meant: Witch, you cannot fuck with canon.
• • • •
There are the Jack girls, the Neal girls, the ones who are hot for the dad, the ones who write endless fix-its about the sister (killed in the pilot), the mother (killed in the pilot), Neal’s girlfriend (killed in the pilot), Jack’s girlfriend (killed in the season one finale), or their grizzled monster-hunting ally who runs a garage the boys stop at from time to time (killed in the season two opener.) Lara buys a too-big leather jacket and starts clamoring for a driver’s license before her parents even own a car. She starts eight fics and finishes one, writes dreamy, distracted posts and messages about the America of it all.
She loves the vignette writers, the longfic writers who seem to generate epic AUs in mere weeks, the wholesome gen writers focused on the boys’ childhood, the lightning episode tag writers with their posts up by early light the night after the show airs, before the second round of better-quality downloads have even gone up, the filth writers she reads in a late-night blue glow, listening for the sound of her parents turning over in bed, the creak of a step, her cheeks hot.
Lara’s favorite is mantouhead, whose journaling posts make it sound like they work for a church or maybe a very, very conservative school. Their porn is unrivaled. There is no place they won’t go, no pairing they won’t write, and they are precise. They write one fic, barely a thousand words, that opens so boldly she closes the window on reflex. It’s disgusting. It ought to be reported. She loves it. Lara rereads it every day thirteen days in a row after it first posts, like a sacred rite. She feels like mantouhead has excavated the parts of her brain she doesn’t even want to examine, the dreams she would prefer to forget. Their username is sublimely stupid, and Lara spends her lit candles and ungoverned thoughts hoping it means they’re Chinese too. Every piece takes her apart at the seams in a way that feels like craft, one mind to another, but it’s impossible that it is. You will love without craft.
It’s not hard to get a feel for who’s a witch in fandom. Plenty of Sanctuary Road fans feel like Midwestern witches, a touch of real winter in their love, leavened by plates full of food warm and heavy with obligation; there are the Southern ones who think the show handles race just fine, calm down, and then the Southern ones who will fire back, sweet as honey, old moss and rich earth all wound up even in their shitposts. There are the stray West Coasters, all ocean and open skies, and she can always tell what side of the mountains they’re from. The New Englanders whose craft she can sense better: tree rot or rich salt in the Maine ones, sweetness and pine and mud from Vermont, the other Massachusetts ones either bound up in the oldest American craft there is—brittle and pressed deep, or immigrants like her. The immigrant fans are the hardest to pin by feel, the paths impossible to trace, some chosen and some chosen for them. Sometimes they’re untouched by the places they inhabit, and their craft feels like a familiar meal, flashes of Old World fire and long journeys across the sea, sometimes diluted by generations, but still there, rooted and waiting. Lara wonders what she feels like, filtered through an anonymous name and a screen.
She can hardly get a feel for mantouhead at all, just a vague coldness, the slightest breath of winter—more than a New England winter—in their innocuous posts, at odds with what they write. Lara loves mantouhead’s filth because mantouhead understands how good sadness can feel, writes with a knife pressed to the reader’s throat.
In one fic, deep into the sex scene, which Lara reads feeling her own blush all the way down to her chest, mantouhead writes Jack looking up in wonder at the demon Agiel, who is tall and beautiful and cool-eyed and steady, who once moved over dark waters with ancient wings, who fell so that one day he could aid Jack and Neal, betray them, aid them again.
She reads, and Jack looks, and Agiel looks back, his hands on Jack’s face, and he says, You have been loved, you are loved, you will have been loved. In all the days that have been spent and all the days to come, that will be true. Lara reads, and she can’t help it, the sudden heat of tears in her eyes, the press of her heart in the dark of night. It doesn’t have to be good; it only has to be true.
It’s a line that makes her think of long nights spent sleepless when they first came, aliens and witches slipping across an ocean in the dark, when she was small and afraid of what America could be, the coolness of her mother’s lips brushing her forehead, a fond, muttered chiding, a murmur of xiao shazi, why don’t you go to sleep? It will be better in the morning. Her ma sending her off to her first day of high school, looking thin and small and somehow Lara’s own height already. You don’t need those white people to like you. You just need to be better than them at their own games. Mind your dao. The terrifying trust in that, that Lara was a witch born to witches, that she could do it. With the next line, Jack does something so filthy Lara’s tears feel impossibly silly. But the words linger like good craft, carefully worked.
• • • •
She spends long days at weekend Chinese school doodling fic ideas in her notebooks, her character practice trailing off into messes that set her teachers clucking. Lara is fundamentally lazy. Her Mandarin is at its best when her grandfather stays with them for a year and they watch five full dramas together, end to end. 千岁千岁万万岁, she’ll announce, grandly walking into a room like she’s working craft—she’s never quite gotten the hang of it in hanyu, but immigrant witches have always found ways around and not through.
In Chinese class, they have assigned seats. Lara is always to the left of Shen Jia, the stuck-up, quiet girl who holds herself like she’s still got one foot in the motherland. Shen Jia will sometimes wear, of all things, a baseball jersey over her buttoned-up shirts. It’s secondhand and too big, and trails to her thighs. She keeps scorecards in a binder, neatly hole-punched and arranged by date, her handwriting so squared off and distinct the numbers look like calligraphy.
“How do you afford the tickets?” Lara’s never sure what to make of Shen Jia’s clothes or Shen Jia’s attitude. In New England, even the Chinese kids—and especially the witches—know when baseball will eat up all the love and anger and sadness in the air, and that craft is best worked during seventh inning stretches or on travel days.
“I don’t,” says Shen Jia, her face blank. Her right sleeve is just a tiny bit too short, and the bone of her wrist pokes out, a curve against the straight slash of the table. “I listen on the radio.” She gestures to her bag, and inside there’s the scratched gray surface of a Walkman. Holy shit, thinks Lara, is Shen Jia for real?
“Holy shit,” says Lara, “are you for real?”
Shen Jia prefers scorecards to baseball cards, peanuts to popcorn, offspeed experts to fastball pitchers. (That sounds dirty, says Lara. It’s not, says Shen Jia.) Singles to homeruns, spring baseball to the late summer slog, catchers who paint their nails to catchers who tape their fingers. Lara drifts in and out of her explanations, but the sound of her even voice, with its occasional lapses in accent, is soothing.
“But _why,_” asks Lara. It isn’t that she’s never watched. It’s hard to avoid.
“I thought it would make it easier to fit with the meiguoren,” says Shen Jia without expression. Meiguoren. Americans. But what she means—and what Lara hears, true as a well-crafted working—is white people. She must stare for longer than she notices, because Shen Jia, who hardly likes to comment on anything, looks up. There’s a mole just at the corner of her jaw, and when she smiles, very slightly, it shifts.
“It worked,” she says dryly, and then nods to Lara’s notebook, full of half-written fic ideas and misshapen sketches of Jack and Agiel doing things Shen Jia has probably never even conceived of. The leaves are turning, which means the end of baseball and season two of Sanctuary Road getting into full swing. “You should watch more baseball, read a little less.”
• • • •
The winter of the show’s third season comes long and mild and gray, backyard craft getting worked into December, the first real snow held like a breath until February. The actor playing Agiel had got into some kind of messy contract dispute with the producers, and there’s a new face on their screens halfway through the season. The fandom is in uproar, long screeds dedicated to the eye color of the new actor (repulsive, weird, mesmerizing), the specific way the old one sighed (perfect, boring, piglike), the way the new one wears his rings (it’s hot, it’s tacky, why does anyone even care Jesus let’s find a new ship). Every time the new actor reports so much as a hangnail, the fandom witches bristle with suspicion and mutual accusations.
Nothing feels right. Lara gets taller, and her mother gets thinner. Ma’s craft falters, and she goes to bed earlier, gets up later. Ba’s cooking is more routine, less careful, but they both watch every bite ma manages to keep down. They call the local medicine witch, a white American woman with a brusque accent and brutally direct craft, then the nearest Chinese one, a two-hour drive away, and finally the mundane doctors, who give them information and time, like Lara’s ma is only a complicated working to be undone with patience.
Ba worries like thunder, and Lara reads fic every waking hour. Humiliatingly, she doesn’t dream of her own mother, but Jack’s and Neal’s, dead after thirty-one minutes and forty seconds of screen time, doomed to cry out and fall and bloom dead and beautiful as cause for vengeance from the second she stepped into the frame. On the show, she’s frail even before her death scene, stronger as a dead thing to drive her sons to their work than as a living woman. Lara dreams of her, yellow-gold hair bright as an August afternoon, in her own ma’s bedclothes, familiar and careworn.
• • • •
One day, Lara looks up, and Shen Jia is a beauty. This is a thing that happens to witches, all of it coming to you at once, a thousand little details and the wishes of others all drawing together in sudden alignment, so that what was once awkward or unfinished has sudden luster. It’s a Wednesday in late winter—when Lara’s love is usually hidden and sleepy, waiting for the blush of warmer months—but it doesn’t matter on this Wednesday, a gray New England day, fuzzy with old slush and slow to start. Lara’s doodles in class are long, graceful lines of nonsense crossing her notebook as the teacher talks about owls going extinct. She raises her eyes, and Shen Jia is carefully bent over her own desk, taking notes in her serial killer-neat handwriting.
Lara’s eyes catch for no reason on the knobs of her knuckles, the graceful fingers, and her eyes run up Shen Jia’s arm, to her shoulders, sharp under her sweater, the curve of her ear softened by the fall of her hair. At the end of class, when Shen Jia stands, she realizes that all of Shen Jia’s gawkiness has become a sort of suspended grace. Like water shifting in a glass, her clothes hang on her differently, elegant even though she still buttons every button of her hand-me-downs, her stride measured instead of awkward.
Lara thinks about her collarbones that Wednesday, the way she holds a pen every Thursday after, the dip of soft flesh on the inside of her elbow on Fridays when she can’t concentrate. When she helps her ma wash, she thinks of how Shen Jia might wash her hair. She burns the rice imagining the way Shen Jia might make it, measuring the water by knuckle, gently stirring the grains with her fingers; starts and restarts four different fics thinking of Shen Jia’s squared-off handwriting. Mind your dao, her ma always says, but it’s hard to mind anything at all. For three weeks, she rewrites herself to look at Shen Jia, who now makes the American school boys pause and the Chinese school boys swallow their words.
Shen Jia watches her back. She never asks, but she seems to know, and she’ll sit with Lara for hours explaining the infield fly rule or her filing system for old scorecards. They rarely talk about craft. Lara’s is lazy, and Shen Jia’s is not. Lara can’t imagine Shen Jia watching an episode of Sanctuary Road, but she’s patient enough when Lara explains the plot or gets into a tangent, a curve to her mouth that transforms every disdainful look from their childhood into something warmer in turn. Lara confesses that she likes the new actor playing Agiel, the vulnerability in his voice. What she doesn’t say: He has a rasp in his voice she has always imagined when reading Agiel’s lines in mantouhead’s fic, as if mantouhead had somehow invited him in before he was ever on the show.
Shen Jia’s face is unreadable on the subject, but she doesn’t ask why Lara sometimes misses school, or smells of a mundane hospital. She doesn’t, like a hundred well-meaning aunties, suggest old craft un-found, as if Lara and ba haven’t lit incense, fed their altars, sung every desperation to the moon. She’s not a nervous talker, like Lara’s American friends, or full of pity like the other Chinese school girls. She’s quiet, a better listener than Lara would have guessed, because she always has the right episode number, agrees that Jack would throw a wicked curveball, the kind of 12-to-6 drop to break a fragile heart, that Neal would be the stats guy, all research and clumsy feet.
“_Shen Jia,_” Lara will say some days, teasing, “are you watching the show?”
And Shen Jia will smile her winter smile, slow to come, honeyed at the corners, just a little prim.
• • • •
A summer witch can smell a New England spring the first time the rain loses its bite. A green witch would know even earlier, a touch of fingers on cold soil enough to summon a vision of weak sunshine, fragile blooms. Lara, born on a July day fit to steam an egg custard firm in open air, misses it entirely. She sits exams that she forgets the moment she steps out of the room, waiting for the next appointment, for the next episode. Soon, they’ll be hearing from the hospital. Soon, she’ll have to decide what kind of witch she’ll be, what contracts she’ll sign, and which she’ll forsake. A witch comes of age when a witch comes of age. Lara feels it, pressure like a storm in the distance.
There are days where she doesn’t want to do anything but read mantouhead’s old fic, like picking at the edges of a wound. Mantouhead has been posting again, but not as often, the time stamps later and later, always a wintry touch to even their filthiest stuff. She stays up reading about Jack’s grief instead of her own, trails hollow-eyed to shop behind Shen Jia, whose reading Chinese has always been better than hers, who always knows what flour to buy, what cuts of meat to charm out of the butcher witches at the ghost market behind the 888, which bones to save for questions.
They stand side by side in Lara’s kitchen, making thumbprint tangyuan for her ma just as her ma likes them. Shen Jia’s are lined up like soldiers, neatly stacked, the same amount of filling in each, black sesame, peanut butter, cemetery honey, a touch of salt grief. Her fingers brush Lara’s wrist when they gather them up for the pot. It makes her think of Agiel learning to love human food for Jack, and she blushes to think of Shen Jia knowing she’s thinking about the stupid show, even now.
Later, when her ma carefully eats the tangyuan in their sweet broth, somehow knowing to pick out Lara’s misshapen ones first to relish—Lara’s eyes burn hot to see it—she runs her thumb over Lara’s brow. They talk, and she picks up the pieces, as she always has.
“Nothing is certain,” she says in dialect, soft and tired. “In love, there is always craft.”
• • • •
One Thursday, Shen Jia, Shen Jia, shows up with whiskey, cheap, exactly the brand that Jack favors on the show. She blushes, just the lightest rose across the top of her cheeks, when Lara says, unthinking, “I could kiss you, Shen Jia,” putting effort into her Mandarin for the first time in months.
They drink, and as all witches do, they eventually talk about mothers, lying on the floor, fingertips tangled. Shen Jia’s mother approves of her baseball project because a Chinese girl loving baseball startles a certain kind of white person, precisely the type of white person who deserves to be startled, and because she thinks it’ll help with Shen Jia’s math. They both roll their eyes at that, and sit up enough to take another sip. Shen Jia loves baseball because she loves a tragedy. Enough control to be certain, and enough uncertainty to feel in control. Drunk, her tongue is loose and she slips between languages, her accent bobbing up and down. She loves pitchers because the moment the ball leaves their hands, the game is for the witches and not the mundanes. When it finds a mitt, a corner, a rail it’s not supposed to hit, it returns to the world of the ordinary, but Shen Jia lives for the gap, the unknowing. You could be a young god with a golden arm and unerring aim, but sometimes your skill might vanish, the way that craft does, and you will never know why, you are never meant to know. Baseball, she says with ridiculous seriousness, is about how to be American, is a marriage of what’s ordinary and what’s beyond. Baseball, she says, before taking a full gulp, is about fucking.
The word coming out of Shen Jia’s mouth startles a laugh out of Lara. It shouldn’t belong, but it slips out as easily as the whiskey down their throats. There are rules for witches who love games too, she explains gravely, betting rules and craft rules, and rules about love. In love, Lara thinks, looking at Shen Jia’s closed lashes on her cheeks, smelling the whiskey on her breath, there is always craft.
• • • •
When spring deepens into near-summer, Lara’s craft simmers at the tips of her lashes, the baby hairs that escape her ponytail. They’ve heard from the mundane doctors, the aunties, the witches, their chances dwindling like outs, time stretching like niangao that won’t settle. She dreams of witches whose names have been burned from even their descendants’ long memories. Mind your dao, her ma mouths at her, because she has her voice only on good days, and days are things that must be counted now. Lara can see her mother’s veins at her eyelids, the tender skin of her wrists. Her craft has never been careful, but she learns to make it careful, nothing too tedious if it saves her ma a little pain. But they all know, all they’re saving is a little pain—time has already run ahead of them.
She can’t bear to read or watch anything new. Season three is going to wind to a close soon, and everyone is worried about what will happen to Jack and Neal and Agiel in the finale, if they’ll make choices they can’t come back from, born of dead mothers. She turns on the TV, waits.
Right now, in this moment, she has one up on these white boys. Her own mother is still alive. But Lara is a witch born to witches. She knows when the game is played with Death. Right now, she chooses her herbs, fingertips numb, lights the altar with rage as she’s been taught to never do, lets her fear move the brush so the ink spills deep and sharp. Mind your dao, she hears in her ma’s voice, faint, like she’s already nothing more than a name carved on a tablet. Lara thinks of yellow-haired mothers and her own, with time counted in smaller and smaller sips, her mind a storm. She loves, craft that strikes like a butcher’s knife in her ribs, scarring the bone for her daughters and her daughters’ daughters to read one day, loves what she dreams of and what she cannot hold on to. The anger doesn’t kill the fear, so she holds the fear tight in her chest, like a coal.
• • • •
After, a salt rule shattered in her wake, her body hardly her own, she goes to Shen Jia, who closes a notebook so quickly the cover slaps down when Lara walks into the room.
“I’m scared,” says Lara. She is, all the time. She usually doesn’t say it out loud.
A witch is born into fear, and to speak it would be to spend all your life talking. She has loved with craft, and loved not even a good thing. It’s a rambling, mother-killing, painfully white thing that has never loved her back, so why should she have cared about a rule, even a salt one?
Shen Jia is close enough that Lara can feel the warmth of her skin through her shirt, but she doesn’t touch her.
“You’ll live through this,” she says in her crisp Mandarin, eyes taking Lara in. “You’ll be OK.” She doesn’t ask what happened.
“Lara,” says Shen Jia again, this time in English. She takes a breath, another. The candles she’s lit breathe with her, a small craft, but a precise one, not easy, and she does it as easily as pouring water. “Lara.” The rise of flame. “Lara.” Breath against her cheek. “Lara, you have been loved, you are loved, you will always have been loved. In all the days that have been spent and all the days to come”—Lara’s own breath is stopped—“this is true.”
Oh.
Right now, Lara can’t think. Her ma is alive and Shen Jia is—
Years from now, she’ll never be able to say if it was her rule-breaking, craft-drowned love that made the season three finale the one every witch remembered—when Agiel put his hands to Jack’s face and kissed him deeply, reciting mantouhead’s words, Shen Jia’s words, to his face in that perfect, raspy voice—or this moment, right here, something that was not craft, but magic.
• • • •
Lara is a summer witch, born to love a sad story, to swell with joy in the heat of love or passion, and to shrivel when the winter comes, but she is a witch born to witches, a working of her own, the hope of two people fleeing a motherland in revolt, a foreign movie on their minds and a new country in her eyes. She was not born to love a winter witch, but it’s a winter witch she kisses with all the fruit on her tongue, all the craft in her blood. One day, she will mourn her mother, as all witches do, but today, she is loved.
Enjoyed this story? Consider supporting us via one of the following methods: