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.

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.

what is so wrong about being a bitch? It is the closest a girl can be to a wolf.

“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.”

“You are a wild creature, Miss Claude. I hope to see you again,” he calls after her. She waves goodbye and then takes off in a run, knowing that she will not allow herself to be tamed.

This feels like home—the wet ground her bed, the breeze her blanket.

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 trapped in a dim reality.

“I have been dying here. I have felt completely alone, hopelessly waiting for anyone to make me feel normal. Nothing that you have kept from me could be worse than this.”

‘When I saw him for the first time, it was as if I recognized him from another life. Every other life, in fact. He was beside me through them all.

when I am gone, look for me in the yellow flowers. I’ll be there for you, always.”

A Honey Witch provides women with choice—something they are all too often denied.

Time seems to pass differently here—it is not a line or a circle. It moves like a memory, a mirror, a door.

“What any woman wants for herself is not for you to decide. You would do well to remember that.”

Marigold’s grief moves with the seasons. It blooms and rots and shrinks and grows, and just like the winter, it cannot last forever.

Marigold once thought that all she would ever require for happiness would be to fit in somewhere, to be part of something bigger and better than herself. But now that she has that, it is not enough. It may be the case that all she needs—perhaps all she ever needed—are a few good people who will not leave. That will be enough. It has to be enough.

“Well, that’s how all love works,” August says. “You can’t love anyone without the fear of losing them, without the forethought of grief. There is an inherent loss in love, but that does not mean that love is not worth it.”

Althea’s passing was peaceful, but Marigold’s grief was not. It never is.

“I don’t have any preference when it comes to gender. I love whom I love, without question, and sometimes without logic.”

it was clear from the beginning that we were meant to be more like siblings and the truest kind of friends. The ones who never leave,”

She admires both the tattoos and the scars, as they both tell the story of this impossible girl.

“Think of all the bad in the world, all the horrible things you’ve endured, all the things you know you deserve but do not have. Breathe all of that in, and then scream it out,”

“Fuck civility. Fuck whoever invented it,” Lottie says, sliding her hand down Marigold’s arm and taking her wrist, raising both of their arms toward the sky in triumph. “Tonight, we are shameless.

If Marigold did not know better, she would lean in farther and let their lips meet just to see what freedom tastes like.

A witch knows to never answer the darkness when it calls.

“I would tell him that the world is quite nice, but only if you know where to look. Friendships are harder to break than you think, and you will not outgrow the ones that are the most important. Heartbreak is inevitable, but so is healing,

Those people, their skepticism is born out of the fear that something could be more powerful than what they can create.

“Grief is often too strange and too vast to fit into words.”

“She said we were made of bad blood, and we could only outrun it if we never looked back,”

But that’s the beautiful thing about family. No matter how far you go, they are still with you. And when you see them again, it will feel as though you never left.

For better or worse!

Then Lottie kisses her. It’s delicate, desperate, it’s the universe meeting itself for the first time. It is everything and still not enough.

She wants to bite her, swallow her, keep her hidden behind her heart so no one else can touch her.

For Lottie’s kiss, she would forsake all else. For her love, she would undo legacies.

sometimes being still can feel worse than death.

I knew that she was my soulmate. Always, but not forever. I know now that those are two different things.”

All of my wants fall into the shape of you.

People do not often dream of dying, but they should. They should dream of a warm supper at a big table where every seat is full, then lying in their bed made of fresh linens, and the final page of a book that they will read before blowing out a candle for the last time. They should dream of being old and soft and blissfully tired, of having made so many memories that their heart cannot hold any more, of being ready to walk away from their body and into a world of stars. That is what death should be

We can’t outrun death, but we can rewrite it.