The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.

The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.

But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.

“People said he was a fighter, but he wasn’t really. He was a dreamer, always on about the eight-hour day and workers’ rights and utopia. It’s just that dreamers generally wind up fighting.

Uglier and meaner than I thought it would be. But it was grand, too, to be part of something. To find a fight worth having.”

She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?

She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.