The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

by Sangu Mandanna

“The thing is, being a witch is extraordinary,” she said. “It might seem sometimes that all we are is odd and different, but the truth is, we’re amazing. We’re part of the earth below us and the sky above us. Our veins echo the patterns of rivers and roots. There’s sunlight and moonlight in our bones.”

Niceness is all about what we do when other people are looking. Kindness, on the other hand, runs deep. Kindness is what happens when no one’s looking.”

“Mika has been so deeply hurt that she has taught herself to run before she can lay down roots, but the thing you have to remember, Jamie, is that when someone leaves, all you can do is leave a window open for them so that one day, if they choose, they can come back.”

People are usually like the sea, a constant, unerasable part of something bigger, but I’m more like a single wave that washes over the shore, ebbs away, and doesn’t leave a trace behind.”

“I don’t think there’s been a single moment since the day you told me we’re all made up of stardust that I haven’t wanted you.”

“It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong,” Jamie said, his eyes on the house ahead. “Sometimes we need to make that place.”

In a month or three months or six, who was to say they wouldn’t decide, like everyone else she’d tried to love before, that she was simply not worthy of being loved in return?

Mika had no difficulty with the loving part. She loved him, loved all of them, with a ferocity that hurt. She had known that for some time. But to allow herself to be loved? That was so much harder.

Danger rarely wore a monstrous face and a wielded a pitchfork. No, danger came most often in the form of people like Edward, the nice people whose niceness only went so deep, who saved their niceness for people exactly like them, who believed they were more deserving of power and respect than anyone who was a little bit different.

Jamie had said it was a leap of faith to love people and to let yourself be loved. It was closing your eyes and stepping off a ledge into nothing and trusting that you’d fly instead of plummet to your tragic and poetic demise.