Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

by Jessica Spotswood

Maybe we were just two people chasing numbness because we didn’t know what the stardust inside us was for.

Poor Mamí, doomed to love two girls who followed their magic down the wrong roads.

She can’t possibly know that I’m scared too; it’ll only make it worse. She doesn’t know how I feel that cold against my back, spreading through my body as the sky faded in and out. The rough arms that lifted me. The way the pickup bounced with me in the back on the way to the hospital.

But how long, m’ija, until you find the new overdose?”

one piece

“I like who I am.” She opens her mouth, but I’m not done. “...I just wish you did, too.”

Bette, huh? Not Betty? The first words her soul mate will speak to her.

She came back. Her father didn’t.

She had hissed and screamed and spat at them while her mother made sounds Bette had never heard a human make, and it was the first time she’d looked at her and actually hated someone.

Her magic, a dark green twist, was like springtime, and roots thrusting through the soil, and the soft brush of a girl’s hand against her own.

Except she had birthed a daughter who had her Hands, but not her temperament.

They are sisters, but they seem to have lost grip on that in the space between them that holds their grief and Brenna’s regret and Bette’s secrets and all of Lady Fate’s choices for them both.

This is the thing about falling: It’s tricky. Sometimes you’re tumbling down into love before you realize your feet have left the ground. But it’s a choice, too.

Then Bette sees a terrible kind of hope spring up in Auggie’s blue eyes, and it’s like a broken bone that didn’t heal right, the ache that fills her.

Bette’s never felt like any of her was missing, let alone half. She certainly wasn’t made complete when Grayson’s eyes met hers. He can’t fill the empty spaces in her because there are none. There is no emptiness in a devoted heart.

It’s a spell, the purest kind of magic. Born from love and truth and unshakable belief.

“I’m scared,” she whispers. “Sweets, we can be scared together,”

Before, her magic had been bright, rushing through her like dawn racing across a field at daybreak. It had been tough and always trying to climb free, like wild grapevines twining up trees in the deep, cool parts of the forest. But now, her power is not bright. There’s a slick bubble of heat rising in her where light and forest should be. It is gummy and too hot, sticking to her bones like scorched jam, and her skin burns as blisters spread up her arm, swelling by the second.

“If you take from Fate, She takes from you.”

straw hat

being able to create stories was magical,