Weyward

by Emilia Hart

His need to possess her had grown so insatiable that it was no longer enough to mark her body on the outside. Swelling her womb with his seed would be the ultimate form of dominance. The ultimate control.

It was hard to tell if Father loved her. Often, it seemed that all he cared about was whether or not he could mold her into something pretty and agreeable, a present to be given away to some other man.

Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.

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

They’re not like other women. Living without a man—it’s unnatural. I wager that the mother took the devil for a lover, to beget a child … and now that child has done his will. You must cut her out, like bad flesh from meat! You must hang her!”

Dude, chill.

Only now does she truly understand her favorite passage, memorized since childhood: “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.”

The paper—it isn’t paper, she sees now, but parchment—is delicate. Diaphanous, like an insect’s wings.

I like the thought of that: a long line of Weyward women, stretching after me. For the first child born to a Weyward is always female, my mother told me. That is why she only had me, just as her mother only had her. There are enough men in the world already, she used to say.

All we needed was to be returned to the wild. This wildness inside gives us our name. It was men who marked us so, in the time when language was but a shoot curling from the earth. Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.

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