Weyward

by Emilia Hart

It’s a feeling she’s had since childhood: that she is somehow separate, closed off from everyone else.

Might it be possible to have both things? Love and insects?

She hadn’t expected love—if this was what she felt—to be so similar to fear.

The valley was always at its most beautiful in the morning. I remember thinking that it was as if it had been made so on purpose, to remind us to keep living.

Man is born of woman. Not the other way round.”

A great many things look different from a distance. Truth is like ugliness: you need to be close to see it.

Things will be different for her daughter. She’ll make sure of it. And that means she has to be brave.

Kate assesses herself. The strong lines of her limbs, the new spread of her hips. Her belly, with its growing curve. Her breasts amaze her—the darkening of the nipples, the veins that glow blue and bright beneath her skin. The mole on her breastbone has darkened, too: ruby deepening to crimson. Even her skin is different—it is smoother, thicker. As if she is armored. Armored and ready, to protect her daughter. The force of it—this love that surges in her veins—shocks her. As does the searing clarity that she will do anything, whatever is necessary, to keep her child safe.

“As we know, our womenfolk in particular are at great risk from the devil’s temptation, being weak in both mind and spirit. We must protect them from this evil influence, and where we find it has already taken root, tear it from the earth.

“Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.”

“All will be well,”

but she had her cottage, her garden. Her career. Now Kate, too, has built her own life. And she won’t let anyone take it away from her.

We did not need stonemasons to carve our names into rock as proof we had existed. All we needed was to be returned to the wild.

Perhaps one day, she said, there would be a safer time. When women could walk the earth, shining bright with power, and yet live. But until then I should keep my gift hidden, move through only the darkest corners of the world, like a beetle through soil.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet. —Adrienne Rich