A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

“Marvellous work,” Clemmie said to Sera. “I was just thinking this morning that what we really needed in our lives was not a new fireplace or a nice car but, in fact, a resurrected fucking rooster.”

“There’s a time and a place for minding your own business, but the sight of cabbages and peppers planted side by side isn’t it!”

Theo wouldn’t let himself be led astray. He’s an angel.” “So was Lucifer,”

Meanwhile, across the country, a certain innkeeper was about to discover that when you hold tight to the little magic you find, when years go by and the world loses much of its colour and still you refuse to forget the magic, magic will go out of its way to show you that it remembers you too.

Sera had never seen anyone look more appalled than Luke did in that moment. “Not. Concerned. With. Historical. Accuracy?”

Did it hurt? When you fell out of whichever Norse myth you came from?”

Then he tried to demand a cuddle from me, so I decapitated him.

It seemed at first glance like ridiculous theatre, unnecessary and a bit silly, but at the heart of it, weren’t they just a handful of people trying to be good to one another?

Your magic knew exactly who you were. That’s why your spell was a shield, not a sword.”

Like his lonely and her lonely fit perfectly into the empty spaces at the other’s side, saying nothing, asking nothing, just keeping each other company.

That, Luke could understand. History was how he made sense of the world, after all, and what was history if not a collection of stories to make the incomprehensible comprehensible?

And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying. I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.

“I’m not an axe murderer,” Matilda said soothingly. “For one thing, I don’t have an axe.”

“If I wasn’t gay and your grandma, I’d be very attracted to you right about now.”

This is the life I wanted. This life of contentment and unexpected excitement, of little everyday joys, where I don’t just get to be myself but also get to be embraced as myself. It’s miraculous.”

“I have a sizeable pumpkin that would make an excellent projectile!”