The Change

by Kirsten Miller

“But one day your life will grow quiet, and that’s when you’ll be able to hear them again. Like my auntie used to say, the gift arrives after the curse ends.”

But the problem wasn’t her body. The problem was the companies that sold shitty sanitary pads. Otherwise reasonable adults who believed tampons stole a girl’s virginity. Doctors who didn’t bother to solve common problems. Birth control that could kill you. Boys who were told that they couldn’t control themselves. A society that couldn’t handle the fact that roughly half of all humans menstruate at some point in their lives.

“Nothing ages a person like poverty and misery,” Harriett said. “Despite what all the ads claim, it’s not skin cream that helps some women keep their glow. The only true youth serum has two ingredients—luck and money.”

‘Witch’ is the label society slaps on women it can’t understand or control.

Be careful what you let others have,” Nessa’s mother had advised her the day she graduated from nursing school. “Everyone you help’s gonna want a piece of you. Give what you can, but you’ll be worthless to all of them unless you stay whole.”

“Anyone who needs a reward to be good isn’t good. They just like rewards. Good people do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”

But it didn’t seem to matter where a woman was—there was always someone waiting to shove her out of the spotlight and into a steaming pile of shit.

No one teaches girls how to take care of themselves. We train them to be pretty and kind and polite right before we set them loose in a world filled with wolves. Then we act surprised and horrified when some of them get eaten.

Harriett knew she would never convince him of her sanity, so she found herself faced with a choice. She could either believe her own eyes—or she could see what the man told her to see.

“This is what you were made for,” she told her. “Why do you think women are designed to outlive men? Why do we keep going for thirty years after our bodies can no longer reproduce? Do you think nature meant for those years to be useless? No, of course not. Our lives our designed to have three parts. The first is education. The second, creation. And in part three, we put our experience to use and protect those who are weaker. This third stage, which you have entered, can be one of incredible power.”