A Resistance of Witches

by Morgan Ryan

In hindsight, she would think that perhaps it was because in all the stories, passing through a magical door was a rite of passage—the black-and-white partition where one’s old life ends, and a newer, stranger one begins.

“You have no talent for diplomacy. Your teachers tell me you are hardheaded, and honest to a fault. You bow to no one when you know you’re right, not even when doing so would save you pain and trouble. And when you have decided upon a thing, you will see it through to the end, even if it costs you dearly.”

“Does it ever stop?” Lydia gasped. “No.” Sibyl looked down at her hands. “It comes and goes. Eventually it will begin to feel less unbearable. Maybe it will come over you only once a day, and then once a week. One day you’ll even think you’re free of it, but then you’ll see some…” She sighed, gesturing toward nothing in particular. “Some face that looks like hers, or you’ll smell her perfume, and then…” Sybil’s eyes shimmered slightly. “I couldn’t bear the smell of rosemary for a year after my grandmother died. One moment I’d be fine, and then…” She took a shaking breath and smiled weakly.

“Show me a world that does not hate a powerful woman, and I’ll show you a world without men.”

Men have power the moment they enter the world. Women have to make their own.

She wanted to tell him she understood what it was to lose someone, how it feels like you’re the one who’s dying, even when you keep on living, day after day.

“In America, when you’re a Black man, you’re a boy. It doesn’t matter how old, or how educated. You’re a boy until the day you die. ‘Watch your mouth, boy. Don’t get smart, boy.’ ” He shrugged. “In France I’m a man.” “The Nazis don’t see you as a man.” “There are Nazis everywhere. They just go by different names.”

We shared a body once before, she heard her mother say. I loved you then, long before we’d even met. I will always love you.

There, in the dark and the quiet, Lydia held herself against the cold, and tried to envision a world without her mother in it. The universe seemed more enormous in that moment than it ever had before. The sky above her looked like an endless sea of stars, and Lydia was a boat, suddenly unmoored for the very first time, in a vast and terrifying ocean.

We don’t die, my love, Evelyn had told her, though Lydia remembered her mother’s eyes were red and rimmed with tears. Not really. We change, yes. We become other things—the grass and flowers, trees and wind and stars. We rejoin the Great Mother, and our souls disperse into the universe, and become a part of a hundred million other living things, forever and ever.