Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

274 Pages·2018·2.64 MB·English

by  Tess Sharpe

Scorn the witch. Fear the witch. Burn the witch.
History is filled with stories of women accused of witchcraft, of fearsome girls
with arcane knowledge. Toil & Trouble features sixteen stories of girls
embracing their power, reclaiming their destinies and using their magic to create,
to curse, to cure—and to kill.
A young witch uses social media to connect with her astrology clients—and with
a NASA-loving girl as cute as she is skeptical. A priestess of death investigates a
ritualized murder. A bruja who cures lovesickness might need the remedy herself
when she falls in love with an altar boy. A theater production is turned upside
down by a visiting churel. In Reconstruction-era Texas, a water witch uses her
magic to survive the soldiers who have invaded her desert oasis. And in the near
future, a group of girls accused of witchcraft must find their collective power in
order to destroy their captors.
This collection reveals a universal truth: there’s
nothing more powerful than a teenage girl who believes
in herself.
TOIL & TROUBLE
15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft
Edited by Jessica Spotswood & Tess Sharpe
For all the troublemakers and everyone who needs a little magic
Contents
STARSONG
AFTERBIRTH
THE HEART IN HER HANDS
DEATH IN THE SAWTOOTHS
THE TRUTH ABOUT QUEENIE
THE MOONAPPLE MENAGERIE
THE LEGEND OF STONE MARY
THE ONE WHO STAYED
DIVINE ARE THE STARS
DAUGHTERS OF BABA YAGA
THE WELL WITCH
BEWARE OF GIRLS WITH CROOKED MOUTHS
LOVE SPELL
THE GHERIN GIRLS
WHY THEY WATCH US BURN
AUTHOR BIOS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
STARSONG
by Tehlor Kay Mejia
THERE’S A CALM that comes over me when I’m painting. The same one the
stars bring out.
During the day, I’m high-maintenance like my mamí says. Face contoured and
flawless, brows fierce, lips popping. My nails are perfection in whatever shade
my tía whispers from her photo on the top of my bookshelf. Amethyst, for
emotional balance. Rose, for an open heart. Obsidian to ward against people who
look at me with envy—and trust me, there are plenty of them.
Last week, when the comments got too petty, I painted a red-and-yellow eye
in the center of each middle finger and posted it on my Instagram account—
@delasEstrellas.
I see you, said the caption. And you can’t touch me.
That one got 38k likes. It’s still being reblogged on Tumblr hundreds of times
a day.
People call me magic in the comments, but that’s not magic, and I should
know.
Because when I sacrifice my custom ringtone to the vibration gods and sit
down at my desk, the scent of the stars blowing across the Santa Anas and into
my open window, I feel it wake up. The real magic. The kind that’s bound to
blood and culture. To history. To violence I say a thousand thanks a day for
never knowing.
It’s a hum, and a whisper; it’s a guiding hand. At least, that’s what my mom
always used to say when I was a little girl, still clean-faced and wide-eyed.
Before Tía went through a guardrail in a rock band’s tour bus on a dark, winding
highway. Before I was admitted to the West Hills Hospital last year, full of
vodka and pills and the strange ramblings of the boy who fed them to me. Before
I knew I was born to hear the song of the stars.
Tonight, the moon is just visible beyond the waving palm trees, and I can hear
the ocean. My mamí is long asleep, a brown seed planted in that big bed in this
giant house beside Bruce-the-life-coach, who says she has the purest soul of
anyone he’s ever known.
He says it like I should be so lucky, and he’s probably right. But let’s face it,
purity isn’t really my aesthetic. At least, it didn’t used to be.
I pad over to my altar, eggplant toenails almost disappearing in the plush of
my rug. Pink. A little girl’s dream. I’m sixteen now, not that little girl anymore.
But she missed out on a lot. I try to throw her a bone every once in a while.
Mamí and I have come a long way since the trailer I grew up in with the
Mamí and I have come a long way since the trailer I grew up in with the
peeling paint. The closeness and the noise. The neighbors fighting. The thuds
against the walls that I hid from in the little closet where we kept the recycling,
counting my fingers and toes again and again until it went quiet.
I’m not there anymore, I tell myself now. The waves crash outside, the only
sound apart from the stars.
Inhale. Exhale.
It’s more important than ever that I stay grounded.
I light one candle, holding my intentions clear. A bubble of white light around
my body. Around the house. Around Mamí and sure, even Bruce. Keep me safe.
Keep us all safe. From what’s out there. From ourselves.
The next candle is for Tía Jasmin. She’s back with the source now. The place
our magic comes from.
Inhale. Exhale.
Mamí says I’m just like her. My tía. That our magic is restless and wild and
trouble-bound. But I don’t know if I agree. Maybe we were just two people
chasing numbness because we didn’t know what the stardust inside us was for.
Maybe Tía Jasmin got on that bus the same way I went to that party. Maybe
she was tired of feeling different. Tired of the magic and the way it made
everything seem so significant. Tired of the way someone was always watching,
waiting to see what we would become.
My fingers shake around the last match. This one, I close my eyes for. When
the wick catches, I picture the open sky above my second-story room, the clear
darkness that gets even clearer as I project myself above the haze of LA smog.
I shake, because the first time it happened was that night, my back against the
cold desert ground, the oil-can fire so far away. I was just looking for a little
oblivion. A little normal. A little of the dead-eyed shimmer the girls at school
wore through the cafeteria after a night in the desert—the kind that made people
look at them like they were women.
But in that moment, the distance expanding and contracting before my hazy
eyes, I found something so much more. Despite the spinning that had sent me to
the ground in search of something that wouldn’t give way, I’d never been as
sober as I was when the pinpricks of the stars grew larger, taking on color
spectrums I’d never seen.
That’s when a voice somewhere deep down whispered that I belonged. And
not among the scattered crowds clutching red Solo cups and scuffing their shoes
in the sand. I, Luna Mendoza, was part of the swirling color and dancing light of
a sky that had never seemed so close.
After they pumped my stomach, the hospital shrink said those hallucinations
would fade, but I just smiled. Even the emptiness in my veins couldn’t take away
what I knew.
what I knew.
Back home, I finally approached the altar Mamí set up for me on my fifteenth
birthday, the one that had done nothing but gather dust while I tried and failed to
forget it. To fit in. That day, I lit the candles, and sober as I was from forty-eight
hours in the hospital and a tube down my throat, the path to the skies was wide
open, like I’d only needed to find my way once.
*
That’s the journey I take tonight, through the mistakes and the heartache and the
new circles beneath Mamí’s eyes. The ones that have a hint of Tía Jasmin in
them. Poor Mamí, doomed to love two girls who followed their magic down the
wrong roads. But at least I have a chance to make it right.
I’m alive, I remind myself. Alive. I drift up to the stars, repeating it until the
magic is tingling in my palms and I can’t feel the rug beneath my feet anymore.
Until the Instagram haters, the wannabes, and my mom’s disapproving clucks
when I wear NYX Pin-Up Pout in Rebel Soul are all thirty light-years below me
and falling.
The match still in my hand, I clear the path between my grounded body and
the unbound stars. I whisper to Tía Jasmin, and the Water Bearer of Aquarius,
and the moon’s pale-faced diosa to send their own inspiration down.
By the time I open my eyes, I’m not Esperanza Luna Mendoza Stevens
anymore. I’m a star-child. A bruja with magic sparking from my perfect
pedicure to my massive barrel curls and everywhere in between.
I haven’t taken a drink or a pill since I came home from the hospital. Why
would I? I know exactly what I was looking for in those bottles, and that it can’t
be found there.
But now, I know where it can.
Tonight’s chart is a tricky one. Jonah and Jess and Bree, a poly trio new to
each other and madly in love. Jess sent the email, sugar sweet. She knows
they’re soul mates, she just wants proof for the living room wall of their first
apartment together.
It’s not the first three-way I’ve done. Sometimes it’s other poly kids,
sometimes new parents and a baby. In one very strange case a single woman and
her dog and cat. It’s not my place to judge, but on the low I bet that Leo dog was
the absolute worst.
People find me when they need to see the beauty they feel. They find me
when they want to be sure, and when they can’t be. They want a little star magic
to tell them it’s gonna be okay. What they get is something so far removed from
the newspaper horoscopes they’re barely even related. And after all the ugliness