by Caoimhe A. Harlock

You prepare the scrying mirror just as Diana's latest article told you to. You steal through the shadows of your parent's living room to your mom's cabinet of curios, the faces of a hundred tiny ceramic cats staring back at you through glass begrimed and sticky. You creak open its door and reach for the framed photo of someone who looks like a distant relative of yours, but who your mom insists is you: a young boy at a county fair, standing next to a tiger's cage in pale blue shorts and cowboy boots. It's nighttime at the fair but he is squinting like he's staring into a bright and painful light. You pull the photo out of the cabinet, careful that your rings and bracelets do not clink against the dusty calicos and Siamese. You open the back of the picture frame, take its old pane of glass for yourself and put everything else back as it was.

            Back in your room you find a box of acrylic paints under your bed, relics of your senior year art class. By candlelight you paint the back of the glass with three layers of mars black. As the paint dries, you pass the glass through the smoke of a cone of incense — THE MOON this scent is called — and you say the words of power. Once this is done you rest the glass on an old black t-shirt in front of your window that it might be charged by the feminine power of the moon.

You crawl out of bed and retrieve the scrying mirror from your dresser. You bring it to the altar you've arranged at your desk. You sit before it and look into its depth.

            Breathing again, you fall into your bed and reach for last September's issue of Teen Witch, still folded open to Diana's column. Diana is the reason you keep stealing this magazine month after month. In the last year, you’ve come to feel your sorcery has outgrown that of the rest of the Teen Witch staff who are still concerned with base things like the energetic correspondences of crystals or charms, spells that seem to have no power beyond nebulous vibes or blessings. "How to Make a Boy Fall in Love with You" they offer, or "How to Win Friends with Three Simple Spells." Diana refuses to indulge in these parlor tricks. She writes about real powers: divination, not just knowing the future but taking control over it, and transmutation, how things might be transformed not only at the level of crude flesh but also the light beneath. "Anyone who is sufficiently patient can read the world," she wrote once in Teen Witch's inaugural issue in words you have since copied in purple sharpie on your bedroom mirror. "Only the sorceress is prepared to write a new one."

            You put on your headphones and doze off to the sounds of your mixtape. “Credit in the Straight World” passes into “Galapogos” and you wake up an hour later when the tape thunks to a stop. It's still dark and the moon shines brighter than ever. You crawl out of bed and retrieve the scrying mirror from your dresser. You bring it to the altar you've arranged at your desk. You sit before it and look into its depth. A featureless shadow of yourself gleams in the glass by the light of your candle and you will yourself to look past it, to see what's beneath it, to see what's coming.

            ***

            You lean against the counter of the Seven Star swirling the remnants of a cherry Slurpee while Briana finishes up with the customer. You love how she can be two places at once. She laughs and nods and the man at the counter feels cared for, even though her hands never stop ringing up his American Spirits and beef jerky, steadily pushing him out the door. Two years ago, when you and Briana were in eleventh grade, you made a pact to save up money and move away together after high school. You came to this store looking for work and you were hired on the same day. Briana had been great from the start. She had an intuitive sense for what other people wanted from her and if she couldn't give it to them, she knew how to make them feel like she had. You were fired after a month. When the manager, Big Brad, told you they had to let you go because several customers complained that you weirded them out, you asked him what exactly you had done wrong. He took a deep breath and turned away from you and stared long at his Snap-on Tools calendar before answering you.

            — It ain't no one thing. Just the way you are.

            Briana hands the man his yellow box and a free book of Seven Star matches. He leaves and she turns to you.

            — What's up?

            You glance down at the glass display cases separating you and Briana. Lottery tickets. A selection of synthetic weed in small foil packages featuring the Joker or x-eyed smilies. Small blown glass animals and an acrylic cube with a coil of fine white lace suspended in its center. If you look at the cube from just the right angle, the texture in the lace spells out MOM.

            — Not much. You ready for tonight?

            — What's tonight?

            — Are you serious?

            Briana looks at you blankly and you sigh.

            — The ritual? You said you'd help me.

            — Oh. I totally forgot about that.

            — It's the Huntress Moon. It's probably the only shot we'll get at it.

            — What are we supposed to be doing again?

            You try not to notice that she's started straightening the display case of lighters next to the register as she talks to you.

            — It's that empowerment ritual for getting us out of this shithole town? The one we've been talking about for a year? Diana’s column in the Spring Equinox issue?

            — Oh, right.

            — You need two witches to do it. So it's kind of perfect for us, you know?

            Briana glances up at you and you suddenly remember a time you were cruel to her. About a week after you’d been fired from the Seven Star, you told her that her ability to know people was actually a fault, that her customer service smile showed only that she was capable of great dishonesty, that she was, perhaps, a fundamentally deceitful soul. You look back now and you try to find ways to believe that you had a good reason for it, that you weren’t just wantonly trying to destroy a thing you loved, but you can never trust yourself about this kind of thing and anyway there is nothing you can do about it now.

            Briana begins sorting the lighters by color.

            — Yeah. So, the thing is like, Trevor had asked if I wanted to hang out with some of his friends tonight?

            — Trevor Bowers? Like, that dumb guy from school?

            — Yeah.

            — You seriously still talk to him?

            — Yeah, like... almost every day.

            — Oh my god! I don't think I've talked to anyone in our class since we graduated, except you.

            Briana looks up at you and you can tell that she thinks that was a sad thing to say.

            — OK, but well... the thing is I sorta wanna hang out with them. You could come along? And then we could do the witch stuff another night?

            — I mean, it's the Huntress Moon. It kinda has to be tonight? I can't believe you don't remember this. You were super into it. Diana says it's the most powerful time for manifesting feminine desires and we were going to get really serious about our work as a coven, you know?

            — Yeah. Jesus. That was a while back, huh? Okay, so why don't you come to the thing with Trevor and his friends and then we'll go do the witch stuff after that. Not super late though. I gotta open the store tomorrow.

            — I mean, I guess that works. You can stay over afterwards and I'll ride with you when you come into work? The new issue comes out tomorrow anyway.

            Briana looks away again and starts adjusting something behind the counter, out of your sight.

            — Yeah. I dunno if I can keep giving you those for free. Brad said he was gonna start cracking down on that stuff?

            — Since when do you give a fuck about Brad?

            — Since I’m trying to get a raise? Anyway, he was also saying how he didn't even want us to have people hanging out, leaning on the counters... and stuff. So maybe I'll just see you tonight?

            — Yeah.

            You leave the Seven Star and get on your bike and pedal hard away from the store. It's sunny and humid but the wind whips your hair into your face and the burning in your cheeks fades away. You steer your bike off the sidewalk and onto the old walking trail through the woods, the one that leads back to the shit part of town and your parent's trailer. Sometimes the woods make you nervous. More than a few times guys have caught you alone back here and said depraved shit to you and even followed you for a while. You desire the witch’s pure and uncomplicated relationship to nature so you try to forget the hellbroth of conflicting emotions those men had boiled up inside you – the opposite of purity, the opposite of uncomplicated. Today the risk of remembering is worth it because you need to be alone.

            Under the shadows of the oaks, you think about the work of your coven.

***

            "As powerful as a sorceress might become," Diana had written, "her power is forever constrained if she works only in isolation. It is through the form of the coven that the power of a witch is really made manifest. This is because collectivity and cooperation — what we might call sisterhood — is the essential quality of womanhood, and womanhood is coterminous with the power of the witch. When sisters come together, whether it's a coven of two or thirteen, their power is magnified a hundredfold, and that's when real change becomes possible."

            You first read those words to Briana in the cemetery behind the Home Depot, at a secret spot near the edge of the woods where you'd been hanging out for a few years. The two of you sat in the shadow of a tall angelic statue, like something from a Dead Can Dance album cover. The statue is an anomaly among the newer graves that are just rusted tin plates with sliding plastic letters, worn illegible after just a few years, and the two of you love it because it suggests that even this uninspiring place is connected to something greater and older than you can see. When you showed up at your spot, Briana was crying, and you knew from long experience that bad things were happening at her house and it would be a while before she could go home again. You had taken the magazine out of your backpack and she cried harder when you read to her and you could feel yourself almost vibrating with the power of discovery as you explained to her how there was really a way out, from all of it.

            One thing you love about Briana is that when you suggested the two of you form a coven, a sisterhood, she never really questioned how such a thing could be possible. She took to calling you by the new numerologically-sanctioned name that you chose, and she kept hanging out with you when the thrift store dresses you wore during your shared magical ceremonies started showing up at school and Trevor and the other chucklefucks turned on you. When your father burnt those dresses in your backyard, she had even gone with you to buy new ones.

            It is true that certain things were beyond her power. Her mom had driven the two of you to school for years and when she started refusing to let you into the car, Briana had not gotten out and stood with you as some selfish part of you had thought she might. When you asked her if you could keep the new dresses at her house, she had good reasons for why this wouldn't work. And sometimes if she were talking to an adult who had some kind of (crude, false) power over her, she might slip up and refer to you as something other than a sister.

            But the two of you did good magic together. You wanted to change so much. Not just things about yourself, but the way people were around here: the way they didn't want you to be interested in things, the way they all seemed to relish any shred of power they could gain over another person, the way the two of you sometimes had to hide both bruises and blame, the way they tried to hide from you that this all was called patriarchy (a secret Diana let you in on in the Winter Solstice 1998 back issue). You took a chain of buses one Saturday to the nearest place that could be called a city, and used Briana's paycheck to buy tarot cards, candles, and all the old issues of Teen Witch you could find. You quickly outgrew Daphne and the other staff writers because even then, at the beginning, the work of charms was simple for you: good grades on tests, making boys like Briana, it all came so easily. Diana's articles always pushed you towards bigger things, and even if you doubted at first, bigger things really did seem possible when you gathered in the cemetery and chanted together. Like how her father had left and this time, so far, had not come back. Or when she really needed just a few hundred more to get the junky car she still drove today, and the two of you had found all that cash in an envelope taped inside the door of an armoire at the Goodwill. 

            But to you the results of your magic were almost irrelevant. The small things themselves became animated. The two of you together had re-enchanted the fallen world and soon watching old tapes on your bed late at night or going on 3AM Taco Bell drive-thru runs began to give you that same feeling of vibration, the visceral bone-deep realization that the things that made you up were free in their becoming, that you were mostly empty space and that empty space allowed for movement – allowed for transmutation. You knew this feeling was the sign of the witch.

***

            — I just don't know why you had to bring the robe, she says.

            You don't say anything. The day has given way to a cold night, one of the only you'll get all year. The heat in Briana’s car is blasting, drying the air around you, making your nose burn. She turns into the parking lot of a Food Lion and pulls up alongside an old red truck. There is a shotgun in the back window of the truck, and three guys lean against the side of it. You recognize one of them as Trevor. He looks the same as he always has. You start to pull one of the voluminous black sleeves over your arm.

            — Look, just leave it in the car, okay? It's fucking weird.

            You hesitate.

            — I mean... it's kinda cold.

            — We're only gonna be here a second, then we're going to his place for a bonfire so you can be warm then, okay? Come on, I just don't want to have to answer any questions.

            So don’t, you think.

            But you say nothing, just shrug out of the robe and turn to yank on Briana's door handle, lifting it up as you do, trying to find the precise angle that the old ruined lock demands. By the time you get the door open, Briana is already hugging Trevor. He waves and addresses you by a name you no longer recognize.

            — What's up?

            — Not much.

            You slump against the hood of Briana's car while Trevor explains that someone named Steve has gone inside to buy beer and he'll be out in just a second. Oh by the way do you have a cigarette he can bum? You pull a crushed packet of cloves out of your pocket and pass them to him and he looks at them mystified. No, the opposite of that, you realize: he looks at them with no mystical register whatsoever, with a look of glossy mundanity.

            — The fuck are these?

            Briana nods towards you.

            — They're cloves. You know she's gotta be an original.

            — They any good?

            — I hate them.

            He tosses the pack back to you, an easy underhand pitch that you fumble anyway. You fish them up from off the damp pavement and light one, blowing blue smoke in their direction. There's a silence and then Trevor, Briana, and the other two guys go back to talking to one another. You lean back against the hood, cold metal against your bare shoulders, and smoke while looking at the stars. You always wanted to be the kind of girl who knows all the constellations and the mythology attached to them, but the charts never seem to match what's there in real life. Even when you were a kid and your father would point to a diagram in a book and then to the place in the sky that supposedly corresponded to that diagram, you couldn't see anything. Orion's belt was the only thing to ever reveal itself to you. Somewhere else, Trevor is talking about how he can probably make enough landscaping with his uncle to put the down payment on a doublewide in the new development near the strip mall. Briana says she'll never make enough at Seven Star to do something like that. Trevor tells her you can't rent forever. That's how they get you, he says. Sometimes people say you can see planets in the night sky during certain times of the year but these have always eluded you as well.

            You hear Trevor’s voice.

            — What about you? I thought you’d be rich by now, workin for some damn computer company or somethin.

            One of the other men snorts.

            — Shit. He orta be able to retire with all I paid him to do my trig homework back in the day.

            You realize they're talking to you, about you. You sit up on the hood and look at them. You catch Briana's eyes. She looks nervous.

            — I'm not really interested in math anymore, you say.

            Trevor tilts his head.

            — Why not?

            — It's boring to me now, I guess.

            — That's fuckin stupid. Who cares if it's boring when you can get paid for it?

            — I guess I'm more into spiritual stuff now.

            There's another silence and you're determined not to be the one to break it. You sit there smoking and shivering and staring at them. Finally, Briana speaks:

            — Do you want my jacket?

            You hate saying yes. You hate that you hate it.

            — Sure.

            She walks over to you and shrugs out of her leather jacket. It's covered in band patches the two of you safety-pinned to it, and you know that somewhere in the tight scrawl of paint running down one sleeve, woven into line after line of lyrics, is your name. She eases the jacket around your shoulders and when you look up at her, you see her wince from the clove smoke. You drop the cigarette to the pavement.

            Two of Trevor’s goons start laughing.

            — That's the gayest fuckin thing I've ever seen.

            — It's kinda hot. Girl on girl shit.

            Trevor smacks the side of his pickup truck and they go quiet.

            — Shut the fuck up. Y’all some kind of simpletons or somethin? Y'all embarrass me. Ignorant as the day is long.

            He spits on the ground. It's quiet for a little and then Briana mutters:

            — We're not together.

            Trevor wipes his mouth with the cuff of his flannel shirt.

            — Even if you was you'd be straight anyway.

            He apologizes to you. He tells you that these bumpkins don't understand anything. You don't really hear him. You're looking off towards the street, where a traffic light is swaying in the wind. You pull Briana's jacket tight around your shoulders. A van idles at the light and for just one second you notice that the driver, a girl not much older than you, has been staring at you, and then the light changes and she drives on.

            The others suddenly start whooping and you turn back and see that Steve has arrived, shopping cart filled with 24-can cases of Natural Ice. One of the goons begins hefting them into the back of the truck and says:

            — I like that one cause it turns blue when it's cold.

            Trevor, exhausted by the charge of his station, sighs.

            — That's Coors, dumbass.

***

            — Look, I'm just saying you didn't seem like you were having fun. Like at all. So maybe you'd just rather go home?

            You're leaning against the uncertain door of Briana's car as she follows Trevor’s red truck to his parent's house. The window glass is cool against your forehead even though you're starting to sweat with the jacket on and the heat turned to max. You imagine the fucking gear or spring or whatever it is that holds the door shut finally giving way and spilling you out onto the pavement. You wonder if this is a spiritual thought or a calculation.

            — So what do you want me to do? I could take you home?

            She's not even wrong. The last thing you want to do is go hang out at this bonfire and talk to people from high school while your friend gets drunk with Trevor. But that's not even the point, and she knows it. Part of her really does care about you and knows you're going to be miserable. But also she’s the one who insisted on doing this. Why won’t she admit that she doesn’t want you there? She's embarrassed of you, you think. But no, she really does care about you or she wouldn't have given you the jacket, right? She's your best friend. She really does care.

            You decide that for once you feel safe enough to say the thing.

            — I think you want me to go home. I think you kinda didn't want me to come out at all.

            — That's not true.

            — Well, I can't leave regardless.

            — Of course you can. It's a free country.

            — I gotta wait for you to get done with these creeps so we can do the ritual.

            She takes a deep breath, lets it out slow and loud so you can hear.

            — Are you really serious about that? We haven't done any witch stuff since like, high school. A whole year.

            — I know. That's how long we've been planning this.

            — That's how long you've been planning it. I would have totally forgotten if you hadn't said something.

            — Haven’t you been practicing still? You know, on your own?

            — Not really. I mean I guess I light a candle now and then? But come on, like, I think you're supposed to grow out of this at some point, right? And do adult things?

            — Like drinking Natty Ice and waiting for someone to break out the acoustic and bumblefuck their way through “Freebird”?

            — I'm just saying. It's kinda weird that you're still into all this. It's like... a bit scary, actually. Do you still believe in spells and everything?

            — I do.

            The two of you ride in silence for a while. When the cassette fades out — one day I am gonna grow wings, it sings, a chemical reaction — neither of you bothers to turn it over.

            — I made a scrying mirror the other day.

            — What the fuck is that?

            — You know what a scrying mirror is. I made it from the glass on this one old portrait of me as a kid. Or that's what my mom says it is, anyway. I wouldn't really know.

            She doesn't respond to that, and you go on.

            — I stared into it for three or four hours, until I fell asleep at my altar. You know what I saw?

            — What did you see?

            — Nothing.

            — Yeah. Cause magic ain't fucking real.

            — No. It worked. It's just that that's what it had to show me. Nothing.

            She doesn't say anything for a while, but eventually she reaches over and puts her hand on yours and squeezes it, and you let her do it.

            — Can I have one of those cloves?

            You light one and pass it to her while she struggles to crank down the window and keep her eyes on the road. She hands it back to you after a couple of puffs.

            You look at her and you shake your head because you will always love her. Even if you told her to fuck off, there would be threads you couldn’t ever really sever. It feels good, like the kind of thing Diana says you’re supposed to feel about your sister. It also feels like being cursed. Your anger is hollowed out and you feel vacuous and childish and shameful and happy. Inside of it all you doubt that there is a way out without her. You kind of want to die.

            Then she says:

            — I really admire you, you know.

            — For what?

            — You're... who you are, you know? You're really brave. And you still really believe in all that stuff we used to talk about. Burning down the patriarchy and revolutionizing our souls and sisterhood and stuff. I think you're great.

            — And brave, right?

            — Listen. I just think it's great. For you. But for me, I'm kinda... tired. I think the only thing I really want in the world right now is a job where I can sit down. Does that make sense?

            — There are a lot of those.

            — Do you get it, though? I mean, I want you to not be mad at me anymore. Can you not be mad at me? I feel like I deserve some credit. I went along with the you being a girl stuff, but like, I can't do this faerie shit anymore.

            You start yanking hard on the handle and throwing your weight against the door.

            She starts to cry almost immediately.

            — What are you doing? Stop!

            — You should probably slow down unless you want me to die.

            And she slows the car to a stop on the shoulder of the winding country road and you can see real terror in her face. Her lips are shaking and her hands are opening and closing on the wheel like they don’t know what to do and you catch snippets of what she's saying — how you can't walk out here all on your own, how she'll drive you home, how that's what she wanted to do in the first place, how she doesn't know what she said to make you so angry.

            At last the handle comes off in your hand and there's a clang from inside the hollow steel of the door panel and the door falls open and lets the night in. You step out onto the shoulder and pass through the plume of exhaust made opaque by the cold and begin walking back to where you came from.

***

            The next morning when you wade through the humidity and your Docs crunch against the gravel of the parking lot and you push open the door of the Seven Star and the sound of the electronic bell chirps overhead, she's already looking up at you from behind the counter. She looks as if she hasn't slept at all, which makes you happy, because so do you. You lock eyes with her and neither of you blinks as you walk towards the magazine stand. You reach for the new issue of Teen Witch and as your hand comes to rest on it, she sighs and her eyes ask you really, are you really going to do this to me? You pick up the magazine and tuck it inside her jacket, which you're still wearing. You begin to back out of the store, still staring at her, and she shakes her head. You're really doing it. When you reach the door, she finally breaks off and moves around the counter to come after you, calling out your name. You reach out with your free hand and grab one of the boxes of dusty green wine bottles stacked near the door, probably long turned to vinegar. She freezes in place, her face like a disappointed teacher.

            — C'mon man, Brad will never let me —

            You push the bottles to the floor where they shatter and spread in a pungent ruby puddle across the scuffed up tile.

            She yells after you.

            — You’re a fucking bitch!

            But you're already gone.

***

            Before you even make it to the end of the block, you agree with her.

***

            From this month's issue of Teen Witch:

            What's up, spooky babes! This is your spiritual guide and resident cat mom, Lady Daphne! I don't need to tell you loyal readers this, but we've all been through a lot here at Teen Witch. Our sisterhood has weathered many storms and changes and we've always come out stronger on the other side. I want you all to keep that in mind when I tell you that this is a very important issue of our little magazine.

            Why's that, you ask? Well, because this month we're saying goodbye to a dear friend of ours who's been here since the very beginning! That's right — our queen of divination, and the only woman I know who can match me at Prosecco Night, Lady Diana, has left Teen Witch!

            But fear not, ladies of the occult persuasion! This is not a time for sadness, but to rejoice, for Diana is going forth on one of the wildest witch adventures there is: MARRIAGE! That's right, her beau Randy finally popped the question, so the whole crew is packing it up and moving back to his hometown of Halifax! She wanted us to let all her loyal readers know that she's going to be living the dream: spending her days looking after Randy, their new daughter Raven, and their two huskies Bobo and Winston. She promises to send pix of her new witchy herb garden, so stay tuned! We'll miss you, girl!

            XX & some O's too,

- DAPHNE

***

            It is nighttime and you're by yourself in the cemetery, sitting naked under the Dead Can Dance statue. The marble is cold against your flesh. In your backpack is Diana's scrying mirror. You take it out and place it on your lap and the stars above you seem to burn deep within the void of your own shadowy face in the glass. And your gaze softens. And you try to look past her. You try to see what’s coming.

Caoimhe Harlock (pronounced “Keeva”) is a trans girl from the Gothic South who writes stories and trashy comix, mostly about sad and depraved trans women. Her work has previously appeared in Evergreen Review and Superfroot Magazine. She’s a grad student and teacher working on gender and the grotesque in 20th century American fiction, and she sometimes gets up to witchy things. The best way to keep up with her work is by following her on Instagram, Twitter, or her website. She currently lives in Durham, NC with her partner, some dogs and cats, and an altar to the Goddess Hecate.