Chapter 5: Chapter Four

"No, no, wait, hold on," Moonsilver says. Ah. Now we're getting to the part where she recognizes all the consequences she hadn't accounted for because they're consequences of failure, and "I can fail" is an intolerable idea to girls like her. Fuck. No wonder she can act so confident. "I'm sorry, okay? I meant it when I said that! We can work through this together, like," she motions between us, "we both have things to work on. I'm not saying I'm perfect either. You do have a place here, it's just…" she trails off.

Yeah. Sure thing, Moonsilver. You're not saying you're perfect. You're just completely unwilling to talk about yourself as flawed unless someone else shares the burden with you. That's kind of the whole problem, kid. If I'm always working on my stuff, but you only work on yours when I'm holding you to it… sounds like I'm just going to die of exhaustion while you barely move.

This sucks. This sucks so much. I can see so much of myself in her, but the whole problem is that the parts of me that are most like her, they're closest to the parts of her she's trying her hardest to stamp out of existence with denial. What does that mean for how she'll treat me, if I open up to her the way she's trying to tell me I should?

"So, I'd stay here, and do what?" I ask. "You just told me you don't think witchcraft is meant for any of the things I'm carrying. What is it for, then? What is it supposed to do?"

"Well…" Moonsilver says, finally thinking to start putting her clothes back on while she talks, "it's… it's for helping people. Contributing to one's community. Witches are normal people. We have to eat, have to pay our bills and our taxes, have to make money."

"Yeah, that's sort of our whole disconnect, isn't it?" I say. "I question those ideas, and you just don't. I mean… 'normal people'. What does that mean, and why are you saying it like it's always a good thing?" I nod to her wand. "Is that from your family shop?"

"It is," Moonsilver says, plucking it up and cradling it defensively. "There's no shame in profiting from our craft. Who does it help if we have to live on charity, if we can't pay for basic needs?" She gives me a very overdone look of hurt. "Is that what you want?"

"No," I say. "And… look… the reason all the money stuff makes me uncomfortable isn't because I don't like the idea of getting paid to do witchcraft. Witches have always tried to sell their services. But…" I look around. "I guess I just don't like the whole idea of changing what witchcraft is to make it easier to sell. If a witch's practice happens to line up with profit, okay, but, like… I'm not in economics or business or anything. But you can't build an industry on random chance, right? You need something that sells consistently."

"I don't know what you want from me," she says. "I'm sorry that we don't fit the pop culture stereotype? I truly don't know what else to say. If you came looking for something that just isn't here… I can understand your disappointment, Carrie, I really can, but--"

"Okay, no," I say, "I'm not accepting that one. Witches like me aren't the pop culture stereotype. We never have been, and we definitely aren't now." I nod to Moonsilver. "You are. I'm not going to let you both preen about how socially acceptable you are and how much money you make, and try to tell me that I'm the one catering to public image. Which, let me be clear," I hold up a hand, "take care of yourself first. I get that. But, like… earlier, with devil worship and all…"

A deep breath. This is dangerous ground. I can feel that it is.

"You don't know," I say carefully, "what the devil or demons or, yeah, fine, cards on the table, what succubi mean to me. You do not know what I've read, what I've written or thought about or dreamed. You don't know what those entities mean to me as a witch, and you definitely don't know how I relate to them in my spellcasting. And since, to be frank, you have a major problem of projecting your own preconceptions onto the people around you?" I pause.

Another deep breath.

"I can't help but wonder if the only reason you assume that I haven't innovated on the most basic versions of my ideas is because that's how you approach yours," I say. "I mean, come the fuck on, Moonsilver. A wand? You and I both know you're holding that because J.K Rowling, a massive, raging transphobe and also multiple kinds of racist, popularized the idea that witches use wands. Before that, it was more of a magician thing."

"You're being unfair," Moonsilver says.

"You've been thoughtless," I shoot back. "If by 'unfair' you mean 'this is more than I wanted to deal with in one night,' well… you've had your whole life to train up for this moment. Not my fault you threw your broomstick and cauldron in the dump. You want to be a witch, honey? Well this is what the true art looks like. These are the things you should've been thinking about in between all the spreadsheets and sex. Like… you do realize that just riding off the momentum a bigot created still feeds back to her, right? I don't see a whole lot of trans witches asking us to fight High Queen TERF for her mediocre lore, so it can't be about reclamation."

She's just staring now, stony silent.

"Does your family shop sell those home exorcism kits?" I ask. "The ones with an incantation and some incense?" I pull my spellbook out of my club bag. Thumb through it idly for effect. "Did you ever stop to consider whether the spirits have a right to be in those spaces? Whether the first step in the ritual should be to seek reconciliation, not to violently drive them out of a place that might be as much or more their home as it is a mortal's?"

I don't wait for an answer. "Of course not. You don't sell to ghosts. You sell to the living. It sure fucking seems," I press on, with a rictus grin fit for any psychological horror scene, "like you're the one whose witchcraft is only a single layer deep. Like there's just a pretty shiny surface, and nothing else, so you assume everyone else's ideas are the same way. Hell, your entire interpretation of Wiccan cosmology is just a metaphor for your unsorted feelings about the gender binary--one which conveniently absolves you of considering your own relationship to your womanhood, and any of the pitfalls your expression might have."

"How dare you--" Moonsilver says. I want to say, Hey, dumbass. That's my line. You're not dressed for it, and you sure as hell don't have the stage presence.

"Because I'm a fucking witch!" I scream. Her flinch, like she can't believe anyone would yell at her, is the most delicious thing I've ever seen in my life. "Because I didn't have a choice! Unlike you stuck-up, franchised, sheltered absolute pricks, I wasn't lucky enough to be born in a tidy progressive setting with squeaky-clean leftist parents."

Anyway, yeah, that's predictable. "I support rape survivors" usually means "I support the saintly, beautifully-suffering false idol of a rape survivor in my head," not "I support the real, messy, frequently vicious creatures real rape survivors can become, because survival isn't always pretty."

For a lot of people, trauma is only sympathetic when you're crying and letting them feel like an everyday hero for giving you a shoulder to dry your eyes on. They drop the act pretty quick when you tell them they're complicit.

I'm not going to back down. They made me show them the real me. Took every new and bright and hopeful thing I tried to offer them and told me none of it is good enough, that I'll never be anything to them unless I'm a victim, and in that case I'll never be more to them than the wreckage my abusers made of me. Fine. So be it. It's the Hour of the Witch-Queen now. Carcass Carrie on the prowl. I'm not putting her back in the box.

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"Not that it seems to have helped you much," I say. "God, Moonsilver, like… what is being a woman to you, anyway, except the things you're not? I swear I only hear you talking about witchcraft and womanhood when you're tearing down something old. And I get it, okay? I get being scared of picking something and saying 'this is who I am, this is the thing I am adding to the world by being alive.' You're right to be afraid. Once you pick that something, once you have to stand by it because you know who you are now and you can't run away without dying inside, people always know how to hit you where it hurts. But this?"

I gesture at the campsite. "This isn't helping. You do get more done than me, okay? I'm not going to pretend otherwise, or pretend that part of my anger isn't coming from my own insecurity. From feeling useless. No matter what I feel about it, the reality is that the modern, mortal, mundane world is investing you with its power. You're already reaching a point where you need to stop psyching yourself up, and start thinking about how big you already are. I really hope you do that before you step on anyone else."

"It's good to hear you show some humility, Carrie," Moonsilver says. "If you are aware of those things, then you must be aware that I can't just be whoever I want. My womanhood isn't just about me. I mean to run for office one day. I have to be prepared to represent not just myself, but all women, so--"

"There is no 'all women!'" I interrupt, losing my cool again. I really thought maybe I had something that time. Those felt like words that should reach her, but… well, I'll just add that to my thousand-page list of spells that didn't work.

"That's the whole problem! We all come from very different lives. We think and feel and need or need to avoid very different things. Like…" I wave my hand at the circle of un-witches. "Kind of the whole problem, here--" Fuck, I think. I already said "the whole problem." Whatever. Keep going, Carebear, you're way past the point of no return--"is that you're all pretending to be exactly alike and you're not. The beauty of being people is that we don't have to be precisely the same, think the same stuff all the time, in order to love and learn from each other."

"Carrie, I don't disagree with any of those things," Moonsilver says, giving me her hurt look again. "But I need you to understand that we can't just live our lives, taking the things we want, without putting the work in to earn them."

"Why not? Did 'all women' ask you to run for office someday," I ask quietly, "or are you just doing it because you don't feel like you're doing enough, either, but saying 'I'm doing this for me' sounds too selfish, so you have to pretend there's a higher purpose? Do you actually even want to be a politician, or are you just planning on it because you're afraid that people will call you greedy for chasing your bliss?"

I can't hide the pain in my head at the next thought. It comes out in a grimace, in the fold of my brows, the creases around my eyes.

"You're not going to be the one female politician everyone respects," I say. "You're going to get called a sell-out and a liar and a bitch. The power won't protect you from any of that. You're just feeding the idea that women have to behave a certain way to earn basic human decency, and as long as that idea exists, as long as other people think they have the right to dehumanize us based on their value judgments…"

I flop my arm up and let it drop. "They can always just change the rules again when we get too close, Moonsilver. You can't win a fair fight against enemies who don't fight fairly."

Maybe it all would have gone differently if I'd been brave enough to say all this at the start. They're all really quiet right now. They're listening, at least for now. I don't know. Is it fair to me to think I should've been some kind of heroine? Seen the right thing to do and done it instantly? Is it my fault, or Moonsilver's, or society's, or everyone's, or no one's? God, I'm way too dumb for this.

I don't know. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do.

I fiddle with my pendant. Daddy gave this to me. We found it on a hike together in the woods and hills behind our house. He's the one who put it on a necklace for me. A messy, imperfect man who didn't always give me the right ideals, who yelled sometimes when he should've listened, but he never intentionally used or abused me.

He tries. He learns.

"I was raised by a pair of wishy-washy moderates who avoided way too many hard conversations with me until the first time they caught me in their bed with a boy--and of course, by then, I just felt like they hated me for trying to be my own person, so I did the opposite of everything they said." I rub my arms. "The worst part is… my parents didn't know shit about politics, but they knew a lot about being human. So their advice on that was usually right, and… that meant the choices I made instead were usually wrong."

The fire, at least, still seems friendly. It's as crackling and bright and warm as ever. I'm perversely tempted to throw myself into it. I settle for staring while I ramble on. "Sometimes I feel like every man who's ever been inside me just poured out all the worst parts of himself into me--like some fucked-up kind of sex alchemy. They walked on happier than ever, and I'm just carrying more and more filth inside."

They're all staring at me like I'm some kind of chimera. A creature that shouldn't exist.

"So, yeah," I say, "of course I've got a lot of evil in me. I know that. Don't you think I know that? I wanted to be better, I wanted to grow past it, but I really don't think you want me to. I think the idea of anyone moving on any moral spectrum is terrifying to you. If evil people can become more good, then that means good people can become more evil. Suddenly you're living in a world where fallibility is possible. And since, in your own heads, you're already as good as you can possibly be, the only place for you to go is--"

"Okay, Barbie, if you want to go, let's fucking go--" Morrigu says, bolting upright.

I don't know where it comes from. This doesn't feel like me. At least… not any me I've ever known. Every so often things fall into place and I fall into them. I can never tap it later. I can never make it happen for anything important, only these stupid moments of drama that I start because I'm such an unstable bitch. And after a week or two of being Carrie Rider, town bicycle, C student, A+ idiot, I'll stop believing it ever happened.

But when I'm there, in the moment, I'll just say things, and people who I know are full of stuff they want to scream back will just… not. Like they're afraid of what will happen if they interrupt me. And so, when I feel this moment coming, all I can do is reach out to meet it.

I flick my veil over my eyes. Rise slowly in an oily unfolding from the feet to the knees to the hips, dragging my left foot in to stand flush with my right while my hands fall into folded poise in front of me. I can still see these college brats, these Gold Star girls with their shameless Sapphic attendance sheets, with the fire's light pouring through the dark fabric.

But I bet they can't see my eyes anymore. My face will be a pale mottling against the silk--good, thick, sturdy silk arranged by a real seamstress, not the cheap imitations they wear. If they see my mouth at all, it'll be little more than suggestive shapes and moving void. My voice is the only thing that comes through clearly. And when it does…

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