“What do you mean? Of course it does, that’s all witches are.”
“That’s all peoplethinkwitches are. But that is not what your grandmother told me. According to her it can happen just as easily to anyone, as it can to someone who got it from their mom or their auntie or their assortment of weird ancestors. And it’s not always on purpose either. You don’t necessarily have to study great tomes of spellcraft. Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes it’s just an instinct, an accident. You want something enough, and it converges with something you’re most likely messing up, and that’s it. You know how to make magic happen. You feel it, down deep in your bones. You see it, even if you don’t know you do or understand how you’re doing it. Like making out the image in those magic eyepictures, is the way your grandmother described it to me,” he said, all in a rush that should have sounded ridiculous.
But here was the thing: it didn’t.
It sounded perfect.
As soon as he said the words “magic eye,” she felt something inside her click. Like,yes, that is exactly it. That was exactly what it felt like when my grandmother said do you think we should add more of this? Do you think we should do that?
The image just… became clear.
But oh that knowledge only made her feel more desperate to deny it.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this,” she said, frantically.
While he stayed calm. God, it felt like he got calmer by the second.
“Fine, then I’ll prove it to you.”
“Oh, what are you going to do? Shake me until spells fall out?”
“No. I’m going to tell you that what I need is a really good night’s sleep. So I’ve decided to make myself something that will put me out like a light. And I think maybe the best way to do that is to start with some milk, and then I’ll add some cloves, and some nutmeg, and oh, you know what? I bet if I put it all in the microwave for thirteen minutes and—” he said, all nice and slow and easy. Deliberately nice and slow and easy, she felt, until every word built on this feeling inside her, this terrible feeling that she couldn’t stop or shake or do anything about.
And then she just broke.
She had to break. She had to cover her ears and yell.
“Stop stop stop, okay, stop! Oh my god, it’s like I have bees under my skin, it’s like I want to claw my own face off just listening to you get it all wrong. Sleep is well water under the moonlight, you put well water under moonlight for three nights and then stir in a single seed from a dandelion counterclockwise and oh my god, how do I know this? How is this in my brain? Where did it come from?” she cried out, half wanting to know and half not wantingto know and all of her sure he was going to reply with something completely useless.
And then he did, and it was even worse than she had feared.
“I have no fucking clue. I only know that it isdefinitelyin there.”
“So then help me get it back out, Seth. I don’t want to melt in the rain.”
“Witches don’t melt in rain. They don’t melt in anything.”
She put her hands on her hips, fuming for reasons she couldn’t even grasp. “Okay then, maybe I’ll be the one accidentally doing the melting.”
“You won’t. Unless you want to, that is.”
“And how do you know I can just want to and it will happen?” she asked, sure that she had him there. Only now he was looking at her in this steady, soft way. And his voice, when it came, was soft too.
“Because your understanding of what to do and what not to do is so deep in you that your grandmother told you that you should stop baking and cooking. And without even understanding on a conscious level what she meant, you did. You made no mistakes, you had no accidents, you conjured up precisely nothing,” he told her. Then when she offered nothing in reply, when she felt too stupefied to form words, he held her gaze. He said, “Tell me I’m wrong.”
And she just didn’t know how to argue with that.
All she could come up with was something shaky as fuck.
“You’re not wrong. But only because I ate a lot of takeout.”
“Come on. I bet you’ve made at least one sandwich in that time.”
“Well, yeah. Of course. But a sandwich was never going to do anything.”
“Right. Because I’m willing to bet you made sure it didn’t. Like one time you were reaching for something like elderberry jelly, and you stopped with your hand almost on it, and looked down at the ingredients you had already combined, and then for no good reason you could think of, you chose something else instead.”
She went to protest again. Her lips parted, her breath hungat the back of her throat, waiting to push the words out. But the words never arrived. They couldn’t, when her mind was too busy going back, again. And this time, it was over every single little thing that exactly fit what he’d just described.
