We Were Witches by Ariel Gore

Author:Ariel Gore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936932023
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2017-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

This is the stylistic center of my book.

If we invert Freytag’s pyramid,

what belongs at the center of a book?

Perhaps not a culminating climax

so much as potential space.

BOOK 3

Resistance

A Closet with a Window in It

From Experimental Magick:

The Secret Lives of Witches:

When we talk about magick, we do not mean to suggest that anything is easy. You cast your spell like you cast a fishing line. Fishing is work. Fishing is invocation. Fishing is calling the fish to us. Not every line cast will reel something in.

Magick isn’t the absence of obstacles or hard work or even wrong-direction hopes. Magick is the steady development of personal power in the pursuit of a world beyond the white-supremacist, capitalist war machine that depends on misogyny as its helix foundation.

*

The portal to Jamie’s Mission-district apartment was just a dirty white metal door staring blankly out from between a taqueria and a botanica candle shop that advertised no-fee check cashing.

I pressed the buzzer, then felt awkward standing there with Maia on my hip as Jamie opened the door in her baggy jeans and tight tank top. I tried to swallow the embarrassed feeling, said, “Hey, um, so we just need a place to crash for maybe a month?” I bit my lip hard until I tasted blood. “I mean, a month maximum.”

Jamie laughed, resigned to us, and I appreciated that, but her girlfriend glared at us from the top of the red carpeted stairs. The girlfriend looked kind of like me, with curly and disheveled hair, but she was maybe thirty pounds heavier and had a dramatic line of bruised and bloody needle holes that ran along the vein-line of her arm.

“It’s just a walk-in closet,” Jamie was saying as we followed her up the stairs and down a creaking hallway.

The girlfriend kept glaring at me. Her face was the face anyone would make if their lover’s incredibly sexy ex showed up unannounced and all fertile with a baby on her hip and said, “A month maximum,” and kind of pouted her lips when she said it, and that made me feel important in an unfamiliar and competitive kind of way. I knew it was wrong to bask in Jamie’s girlfriend’s jealousy, but I’d never been anything like that woman before and the small power of it suited me.

It also suited me that Jamie’s walk-in closet had a little window in it.

A closet with a window in it, I decided right there, is a workable thing.

I dragged our garbage bags of clothes and toys and books up the stairs.

Maia carried her witch doll. She said, “Up, up, up.”

I winked at her.

And she winked back the witchiest wink I’d ever seen a baby wink and I felt suddenly unsettled—like she wasn’t just my doll. She was a girl-child separate from me. And she would someday become more powerful.

“Up, up, up,” I whispered back.

That first afternoon arranging our things, I felt like a traveler and I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling anymore. It had held me comfortably alone before the baby, but as a mother I wondered if a closet could really be enough.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.