The Honey Witch

by Sydney J. Shields

“One day, I will be a rose. And I will plant myself somewhere so beautiful that I will never want to leave.” Her mother laughed. “And what if someone wants to pluck you?” “That is what the thorns are for,” she said. Since then, she has bloomed, she has thorned, and now she is happily withered.

Call it intuition, call it hope, or delusion, but Marigold knows she is not meant to live a life like that of her mother.

She and everyone else know that she is not a normal woman. She sometimes wonders if she is even human, often feeling a stronger kinship with mud and rain and roots. Every day, she does her absolute best to play a part—a loving daughter, a supportive sister, a lady of marital quality. But in her heart, she is a creature hidden beneath soft skin and pretty ribbons, and she knows that her grandmother is, too. These are the wild women who run barefoot through the meadow, who teach new songs to the birds, who howl at the moon together. Wild women are their own kind of magic.

It would be like painting the walls of her life beige. It would be a safe choice, a comfortable choice that no one could fault her for, but it does mean that every day she would have to sit in her room and look at her beige walls and wonder what could have been if she had painted them bright yellow or pink. What if she had forgone paint entirely? Or better yet, what if there were no walls at all? Only sky, sunlight, salty water, fresh rain, and spring flowers and no one else around to comment on the paint color of the walls. That would be perfect, and that is why it is only a dream.

“I am not married because I have yet to find someone who makes me feel seen.” He steadies himself on his throbbing toes. “You don’t believe that I could see you?” “No. You see only springtime. What happens when I am winter? I will tell you, Mr. Notley. When winter comes”—she leans in close so their noses are almost touching—“you will freeze.”

Her mother loves to remind her of her age, as if it is a reason to stop believing in magic. She rolls her eyes at the thought—yes, she is a grown woman, and is that not magical in itself? To have survived this long, despite the world’s penchant for beautiful dead girls?

But what happens when the girl keeps living, when she ages proudly and defiantly, without abandoning imagination, or stories, or that secret wish to find magic wherever it hides?

Well, then the poets would call her a witch.

It is better to be lost in a beautiful daydream than trappe...

But this is precisely why she prefers to be alone now. No one would ever understand that the wilder world speaks to her, or how she sees visions in the ripples of the sea, or how she always knows when it is going to storm, days before it happens.