The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens—how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard

She’s asking: Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns? She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?

Juniper feels like a soldier with a loaded rifle, finally shown something she can shoot. Like a girl with a lit match, finally shown something she can burn.

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

What’s so hard about calling a woman by her full name? Why do men always want to give you some smaller, sweeter name than the one your mama gave you?

If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.

Agnes learned young that you have a family right up until you don’t. You take care of people right up until you can’t, until you have to choose between staying and surviving.

Books and tales are as close as she can come to a place where magic is still real, where women and their words have power.

Agnes wonders who taught her to hold a grudge, to feed and tend it like a wild-caught wolf pup until it grew big and mean enough to swallow a man whole.

power passed in secret from mother to daughter, like swords disguised as sewing needles.

Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women’s dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much.

course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.

She doesn’t know why she did it. Maybe she’s tired of knowing better, of minding her place.

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

Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?