therealljidol week 27: be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you
In all the stories, it's the stepmother that's wicked, not the mother.
The stepmother is the one who is jealous of her daughter; who banishes her or forces her to eat the poison apple, who casts her out of the house or uses her as a servant in her own home.
The father is clueless, or else complicit, but only in a small way -- cowed, as he is, by his wife. He is innocent. Even in tales where he is the villain, there is an underlying cause: he is driven mad by grief; he is not aware of his own actions; in possession of his own faculties.
We excuse fathers. We vilify stepmothers.
We don't have stories about mothers.
My mom was the one that taught me about magic.
Not the slight-of-hand, stage magic that David Blaine and his ilk performed for anyone who would watch -- the kind of magic that you felt, deep in your bones. The subtle kind of shift that you wouldn't notice unless you were paying close attention. Not three wishes and fairy godmothers; not stuff on stage -- something weird and dark and primal, not friendly or benign but terrifying. The subtle twist of the knife that you didn't notice until it was too late -- the warp and weft of the universe changing to match your own desires.
"I wish I was talented," said friends, when the topic came up at school. "All my family can do is...", and I wanted to scream at them: no, you don't!
Their mothers were soft and ordinary. They had friendly faces, ordinary concerns. They wanted their daughters to like them. I could read that, written in the lines by their mouths, their anxious smiles, plain as day. I want...
A good life. One where they didn't have to worry about money, or about their job, whether they got the promotion or not. They wanted security, stability, love. They wanted ordinary things, those mothers. They weren't concerned with magic, because it was beyond their purview. It was their daughters that wanted it. "I wish my mother..."
No, I wanted to say, though I knew that their wishing was harmless; their wishing carried no real magic behind it. You don't.
I used to think, growing up, that my mother was under a curse.
Half the month, my mother was, if not loving, at least attentive. I had clean clothes; there was food on the table, and her moods, while difficult, were easy to predict.
This was the mother I didn't have to care for.
The other half of the month, I didn't know what to expect. Dad made dinner, peeling potatoes in silence over the kitchen sink. "It's my turn to cook tonight," he'd say, in his halting way, and I didn't know what this meant, only that it was nothing good.
She did things then, out in the garden, in the shed my dad had built for gardening. I didn't ask questions, because I didn't want answers. I saw the snares she laid, what she caught. Birds, sometimes; sometimes rabbits. Once, one horrifying time, the neighbor's cat, Barney, though I managed to convince her to let him go. "They'll notice, Mom, they'll see, and then what will they do?"
"Nothing," she said grimly, holding up Barney by the scruff of his neck. "They haven't burned anyone at the stake in a hundred years" -- but there were still penalties, things she respected, fines she would have to pay, to the local handler's guild, and we didn't have the money for them, and so she let him go. "Next time, though..."
She let the word hang in the air, like a promise, and I shivered when she said it.
That half of the month, I avoided her if I could. It was easier that way. So did Dad. I did our laundry, mixing his in with mine, his filthy workman's clothes going in with my dresses, all of it thrown into the machine and washed on warm, because his was supposed to be done in hot water and mine in cold. None of my clothes came out clean, that way, streaked instead with clay and mud, but they smelled better.
Dad made dinner, when he remembered. Mostly, with both of us skulking about the house, he didn't. We both avoided the kitchen, anyway, because of the chance that she was in there, doing God only knew what. The kitchen was her territory, too, where she used when she was doing something that required making what she called a "brew". I ate a lot of cereal, straight out of the box, during that part of the month.
"Magic," said Dad, and shook his head. "If I'd known..."
He never finished that sentence. He didn't have to. In some ways, I recognized the sentiment, too.
I didn't ask what she used the magic for. Different people came to the door; made requests of her, and were given slips of paper or packets of powder in return for their money. She only took cash, hand to hand.
"Are you sure this what you want?" she'd ask them, leaning against the doorframe. "Do you know what you're asking?"
"Yes," was always the answer, whispered hurriedly, as though she might change her mind.
"Fine," she'd say, and slide their money into her apron pocket. "Two weeks, maybe three, and it'll be done."
I didn't ask, because I didn't have to ask.
The first time I watched the news and spotted one of her clients, I was eight.
I recognized the woman because of the ugly knit hat she wore.
"It's just -- you don't know what's going to happen next," she said. "We were driving, and the other car came out of nowhere..."
Her husband had been killed in an accident. She had survived, albeit with a broken leg.
I remembered what she'd said to my mother, at the doorway. I need him gone; the twist of my mother's mouth, as she explained who and how and why.
I remembered. I knew.
I didn't watch the news, after that.
Half the month, I loved my mother. I was afraid of her, terrified by her -- but I still loved her. She told me, often, that she loved me, and that was a spell in and of itself.
The other half of the month, I avoided her. I still loved her -- she would have it no other way -- but she frightened me.
The first half of the month, she'd be fine -- more likely to pick me up bodily and ask if I loved her, than anything else, to beam at me when I said I did.
The second half of the month, she'd ask the same question, but there was something wrong about her when she asked it. Her eyes were too wide, too bright; the words came out a little too quickly. I knew to say yes, because she compelled me to, but she scared me.
I didn't say yes because I loved her, the second half of the month. I said yes because I had to; because if I didn't, something terrible would happen.
I tried to track her moods, once, see if there was a certain time that she shifted, became the mother I didn't recognize. Did it align with the phases of the moon? The tides? Sports schedules? I thought of everything, anything cyclical, but there was no pattern to it. It changed, from month to month. One month she would be fine, just fine, the first until the fifteenth; the next, she'd shift on the thirteenth, and everything would go to Hell then. There was no rhythm to it, no rhyme nor reason. We lurched from date to date, never quite sure what we'd wake up to, which version of Mom we'd find downstairs when we woke up -- because she always woke up before we did.
I tried to enlist Dad's help, in tracking things. He played along for a month or two, then broke down and told me that there was no pattern.
"I tried," he said. "After we were married, when she changed..."
The old story: she'd hidden it from him, before they were married. She'd been normal, loving, attentive. She'd won him over with her own natural charms, not the work of magic but of simple chemistry, compatibility.
"It wasn't until we'd been married a year that she changed."
There had been no reason for it, according to Dad. Nothing had happened. No one had died, nothing had shifted. She hadn't been cursed, as far as he knew, though as someone without talent, he admitted that he wouldn't know what a curse looked like. "There wasn't anything, Gabbie. She was normal, and then she...wasn't. Give it up."
I asked Dad once, why he hadn't left.
"Because," he said, and hesitated. "She -- she said if I ever left, that she would..."
"Never mind," I said, too quickly. "I don't need to know."
I could fill in the blanks. I didn't need to know, was it him or was it me?
I was happier not knowing, being unsure as to which one of us she'd threatened.
She used magic for everything.
I knew we owned our house outright, unlike the others on the street, who had to make payments, because of the work she'd done. I'd heard the story, something about a spell, though she didn't give me details of how or why.
There were other things, too. When Dad had gotten sick -- abnormal test results, the specter of cancer lingering over us -- she'd done something, one of her weird, dark rituals, and we'd gotten a call a few days later that it was a lab error. "No idea what happened," said the woman on the phone, "but everything looks fine. We'll have you back next year for another physical, but you've got the all-clear from us."
No one in our immediate family got ill. No one that she liked got sick, or lost their job, or had anything terrible happen to them.
"Protections," she said. "Things I've put in place."
I got good grades in school. I wasn't bullied. I was terrified of her, of what she could do, but mostly we avoided each other. She knew I was afraid, just what I was afraid of, and she didn't press.
If I didn't have the mother I wanted, at least I had a mother. It was something.
I used to think Mom was under a curse, because if she was under a curse, I could break it.
If she was under a curse, it wasn't her fault. She didn't choose to act the way she did.
If she was under a curse, it meant that I wouldn't grow up to become her.
On my thirteenth birthday, she hauled me out to her garden shed and said she was going to test me, "for any ability."
She was in one of her moods, when she did it, or I would never have agreed to it. As it was, I thought about fighting her -- wriggling away; hiding somewhere.
"What's this going to involve?" I asked, as I watched her pull a knife down off a high shelf.
The blade of it was made of obsidian, a glossy black, chipped here and there, but still ground to a razor's edge.
"Sacrifice," said my mother quietly. "Patience. Be quiet, Gabrielle. This won't take long."
I shut up.
I kept my hair long, then, wore it in two braids that hung down my back, streamed out behind me when I ran. I wasn't vain about much -- I didn't have much to be vain about -- but I loved my hair. Dark and soft, it was the only thing about me anyone noticed, when they noticed me at all.
I watched her take the knife, and a wooden bowl.
"Hold out your hands," she said, and I squeezed my eyes shut and obeyed her.
I felt the gentlest prick of the knife at my right index fingertip, her hands massaging my finger to force out a drop of blood, into the bowl. It didn't hurt, or not as much as I thought it would.
"Now the other hand," said my mother, and she repeated what she'd done: pricking my finger, forcing the blood into the bowl.
"Is that it?" I asked, my eyes still shut.
"Almost," she said. "Now..."
I felt her lift my hair, off my back.
"Mom," I started.
"Be quiet, Gabrielle."
"Mom, please," I said, as I felt her lift the knife.
There was the sound of something soft landing in the dirt of the shed floor, and my head felt lighter on one side. I wanted to cry.
"Just one more thing," she murmured, and I felt her do the other side, as well, the soft sound of hair landing on the floor.
I did start to cry, then -- tears running silently down my face.
"Hush," she said, but she sounded almost guilty. "Just one last thing..."
I heard her bend and pick up my braids off the floor; drop them into the bowl, mutter over them. "Now -- Gabrielle, think hard: what do you want now, more than anything? Make a wish."
I should have wished for a normal mother. I should have wished for an end to the magic, a system that didn't ask as much of its adherents as it did. I should have wished for anything, anything except what I did:
I want my hair back, I thought, irreverently, because it was all I could think to wish for.
"My first wish was wasted too," said my mother, quietly, as I felt the sudden weight of my braids returned, as though she had not cut them. "You have the talent."
That was my introduction to magic.
I swore, running my fingers over my braids, tears still running down my face, that I'd never use it.
She started easing me into it, then -- into casting. The rules: what had to be done; what couldn't be done.
"Everything demands a sacrifice," she said, her face contorted in pain. She used her own blood, more often than not, I learned, because it didn't take much -- not for the small charms she performed. "The larger the sacrifice, the more powerful the result."
I didn't ask about the birds, the rabbits. I didn't remind her about the neighbor's cat.
"It drives you half-mad," she said. "Performing. There are reasons -- "
Reasons why she was the way she was. "It builds, Gabrielle," she said, by way of explanation. "Until you feel as though you will die, if you don't give in and channel it into something."
"But you don't have to do big work," I said. It was one of our first lessons. "You can do small, simple stuff..."
"It contorts the way you see reality," said my mother. "Until it's all you can see. You don't realize what you're doing until it's already done."
She looked pained, as she said it. "You don't control it," she said. "It controls you."
Mom taught me about safeguards. There were charms -- painful ones, requiring self-sacrifice, a grim sort of ritual, to prevent any harm to yourself, those that you loved.
"Eventually," she said, "you'll be performing these to keep me in check, the way I took care of your grandmother."
My grandmother had died before I was born. "In a car accident," I'd been told. I'd never questioned that.
Now, I did.
The more I learned about magic, the less I liked it. It was grim, dark and primitive. The rituals didn't make sense, and it was easy to get caught up in them, though not to the extent that Mom did. I was still myself, when I did things.
"Your talent isn't as great as mine," said my mother, and I should have been offended, maybe, but it was easier just to shrug. If it meant I was spared, I'd take it.
She tried to press me to learn anyway, saying that it was important; that I had to know, so I could take it up, too -- but I refused.
"Leave her alone," Dad said. "She obviously doesn't have the talent for it, Meredith."
Eventually, she gave up.
When I realized -- that she wasn't cursed, or not the way that I thought she was, I started looking for other things that had made her into the woman I feared.
Magic was at the heart of it. I did a lot of reading, in those months, all the theory about it, how it affected those that practiced it.
"The human mind was not meant to channel unknown power," said a book I found, dating back to the 1930s.
It went on to talk about how it fundamentally changed the structure of the brain, until it was difficult to tell what was real and what was not, discussed the compulsion to use it.
"The safest decision is not to engage in any magical activity, regardless of the level of talent," said an academic paper I found, from the 1970s.
So I didn't use my own talent. I felt the pull of it, every now and then, but I didn't use it. It wasn't as great as hers, my mother had said, and I thought that meant I would escape.
Somewhere in there, it shifted again. It was no longer two weeks out of the month, she was my mom, and the rest of the time she was a force of nature, something to be avoided. The older I got, and the more I refused to engage with magic at all, the worse she got. We started adding days to the bad periods, going from two weeks to fifteen days, then eighteen, until finally, my senior year of high school, we were at three weeks out of the month where being in the same room as my mother was enough to make my skin crawl.
I wet out a lot, then. I spent a lot of time in the library, filling out college applications on their computers, trying desperately to pretend that everything was normal, never getting home until well past dark.
She tried to curse me, the first time, when I was still living at home. It was a month before high school graduation, during what was supposed to be a good week. She'd spent the day whistling, telling me how proud she was of me, since I'd finished and would be going off to college.
We didn't talk about magic, that day, about the people that came to the door now -- no longer anyone in search of small magic, but one or two a month, seeking big, dark spells.
We didn't talk about blood, or sacrifice, or wishes. We didn't talk about much at all. I avoided her even during the good weeks, if I could help it. I wasn't sure what to say to her anymore, how to talk to her. She'd been a terrifying presence during my adolescence, and I wasn't sure what to make of her now, now that I was finally an adult, in the eyes of the state if not in the eyes of my mother. I was still afraid of what she might do.
I said something about being hungry. She was still normal, then, my mother. She beamed at me, said she would bring me a snack. "I haven't done that since you were a little girl, and..."
She brought me an apple, on a plate. Peanut butter in a little dish beside it -- "for dipping," she said.
I wanted to say something about fairy tales. I could still joke with her, then, about magic and how it was so rarely what we expected, except...
I touched the apple.
I could feel the undercurrent of magic, under the skin -- something bad. Something that would harm me. Some lurking jealousy, the kind of thing that no mother should wish on her daughter.
I shoved the plate away. "Actually, um," I said. "I just remembered. I need to go to Annie's house -- I forgot to write down today's math assignment, and she said she'd let me copy her notes."
"Don't you want your snack?" asked my mother. There was magic, behind how she said it -- it wasn't a command, so I could throw it off, but it was a compulsion.
"No," I said. "I have to hurry over there -- she has piano lessons at 5."
I fled the house without stopping to think, what was that about, and I never let myself be alone with my mother again.
I graduated high school and went to college. With a little help from Dad, I managed to convince her to let me go to school outside of the state. I lived in the dorms, my first year, and found a work-study position. I used it as an excuse -- why I couldn't go home for the winter break. "Sorry -- I have to work in the library."
We weren't supposed to stay over the break -- the dorm was going to be shut down -- so I begged a friend to stay with her family, citing the weird atmosphere I knew I'd find at home. "My parents are getting divorced, and..."
They weren't -- not yet -- but Dad wasn't living in the house anymore.
"I don't have to protect you," he said -- and I took that as a good sign.
Sophomore year, I lived in co-op housing off campus, and I didn't invent a reason I couldn't go home.
Junior year, I got emails from her, then physical letters, when her emails went unanswered. I could feel, without having to open the envelopes, the powder radiating off of them.
Cursed, I thought, or some kind of spell to pull me back home, and I threw them in the garbage, buried them under coffee grounds and banana peels, felt the magic surrounding them drain into the earth.
Senior year, my last semester, I got a call from Dad.
"I need your help," he said. He sounded as though he was having a hard time breathing; the words came out almost compressed, distorted. "Your mother..."
I knew, without being told, what it must have been. "You served her with papers, didn't you? During one of the good parts of the month?"
"Gabbie," he rasped. "There are no good parts of the month left anymore."
I froze, and wondered just what it was I had to do.
In fairy tales, with their wicked stepmothers, there is always a clear path forward: the heroine must leave home, find the secret to her stepmother's power, and through her own virtue, thwart her evil schemes.
Life was not quite so simple.
I knew the secret to my mother's magic, how much of it was rooted in pain.
I knew that I had the same power myself, if I wanted to use it -- but that to do so would likely drive me even madder than it had made her.
The way I took care of your grandmother rattled around in my head -- the story about the car accident, what I wasn't sure she hadn't caused.
"Fuck," I muttered, into the phone. "Dad? I'm -- I'm getting in the car now. I'll be back by..."
I checked the clock. It was 1PM. "I'll be back by dinner time, OK? I..."
"Drive safe," he managed, and the line went dead.
I drove.
The stories left me with no clear path forward. I had to stop my mother, somehow, but I knew how her magic worked, and I knew I didn't have it in me, to do the things she did.
Sacrifice, her voice whispered through me. Pain.
I'd seen the snares she set, for birds and rabbits and God knew what else. She'd tried to teach me those parts of what she did, those parts of her magic -- but they weren't anything I wanted, and so I'd refuted them. I refused to kill anything, to harm anything beside myself, and even then, only the pricking of my fingers.
I knew how her magic worked. I knew how other magic systems worked, too -- I'd done enough reading about them.
"Unpleasant, but necessary" was how even the books on benevolent spells discussed the "blood price".
"Here the authors discuss the most humane way to slaughter a rabbit..." was a sentence I'd found in another, one about guaranteeing good health for you and all those under your protection.
The authors of the books talked about it calmly, as though it were no different than preparing something for dinner. Flesh and blood and bone, the line went. These are the foundations of all magic, good and bad.
I didn't know how you could call anything good that required the death of something else to make it work, but then again, I'd shied away from it, hadn't I?
I thought long and hard, what I wanted to do, what the right answer was.
Five and a half hours, to their house. I pulled into the driveway around 6:30.
All the lights were off. No one answered when I knocked at the door, so I let myself in. The spare key was still under the flower pot on the porch.
Inside was dim. Dad was sitting in an armchair in the living room.
"Hey," I said.
His eyes moved, but he didn't say anything.
"She got to you, didn't she?" I asked. I touched his arm. Still warm, but bound -- I could feel the curse, humming angrily along his skin. "I'm sorry. I think..."
In fairy tales, it was borne out of jealousy. The stepmother afraid of losing her own youth and beauty, her own power.
I didn't think that was what drove my mother. I was afraid it was something darker, something worse.
"I think..." I started, and I didn't know how to end that sentence.
I think your wife has slipped a little too far under the influence, I thought. I think that there's no real way to save her now, except maybe the one thing I don't want to do. I think that there's no real answers anymore, just a desperate hope that this is not as bad as it seems.
"I'll figure something out," I told Dad. "Pretend like I'm not here, if she comes back."
The shed was where it had all started.
The shed was where it had to end.
The door was latched. I knew she was inside.
I knew what would come next, or I had some idea.
I unlatched it and walked into the dark interior.
The bowl was where I knew it would be, on the shelf. So was the knife, its black blade still glossy and razor-sharp after all these years. I could just make them out in the gloom of the unlit shed.
I gathered both of them, and centered myself.
"I knew you'd come back," said my mother's voice, out of the dark. It was the voice she used during her moods, the parts of the month where she was consumed by raw magic, not herself.
I shut my eyes. I knew what I had to do next.
"You've come to do what you must, of course," she said, and she seemed almost amused by it. "Well then. What will you sacrifice, to end me? You know this is where it starts, don't you? Your grandmother..."
"I know," I said, though I'd never connected the dots before. "You refuted it too. You had to muddle through, in those early years, and figure it out for yourself, but it took you too quickly, because you hadn't been brought up in the tradition. Now you're in too deep, and you want me to fix everything."
I dangled one of my braids over the bowl. I still kept my hair long; had ever since it had grown back, when she tested me for my talent.
"It's not something to be trifled with," said my mother, and she made a sound that might have been a laugh, but struck me as the cry of someone in pain.
"No," I agreed, as I sawed at my hair. "It's not."
"If I'd known..." she began. "I might have done it differently. I didn't know, though, the way it takes you..."
I placed my other braid over the bowl, hacked it off with the knife. "I don't think most people do. I've been reading about it."
"Gabbie?" she asked.
"Yeah?"
"Is this going to hurt?"
"No," I said, and I drew the knife down hard, over the palm of my hand, and said the words she'd taught me.
I'd loved her.
She was my mother.
I couldn't hurt her, and I couldn't hurt anyone to hurt her.
I felt the ritual rip through me, the magic coiled in the back of my mind, waiting for me to tell it what I wanted, silently or not, direct it to its end, release it into the world, to use it without shaping it, let it use me as a vessel, and do some of my own bidding in the mix.
Not this time, I told it, and I made my wish.
There are drawbacks to wishes, in almost every story. Outcomes that haven't been thought through thoroughly; unintended side-effects.
I thought, long and hard, about what it was I wanted the magic to do. I focused on the pain in my hand, the dull ache of the cut I'd made, the sticky mess of blood, and wished:
for magic that didn't require harming anyone, but that did not always work, either, and could not be used to any ill end; that did not harm the caster, and did not require more and more of those that would use it, eventually leaving them without their mind intact.
I sacrificed. Blood and braids, and something else, too.
I shut my eyes, and I wished.
"Gabbie?" said my mother. "What are you doing in the shed? What did you do to your hand?"
I opened my eyes.
The bowl and the knife were gone. My hair was still raggedy, cut short.
The shed was brightly lit, full of the clutter that was expected in a garden shed. The lawn mower was parked against the back wall, and various pots and potting soil were on the table.
The pain of the last few years had not been undone, not quite. I had the memories, my mother and what she had put me through, the curses in the mail -- but they were fading, slowly, being overwritten by something else.
My mother, I recalled suddenly, worked as a nurse. She was a passionate gardener, and spent almost every day in her shed. I'd come out to see her, because...
"Kitchen accident," I said, tiredly. "I was cutting an avocado, and the knife slipped. It's not deep, I don't think. I shouldn't need stitches. Just can't use my left hand for a while."
"Jesus," said my mom. "Let me look at it."
I let her.
I knew she wouldn't try to hurt me again.
Fiction, if that wasn't obvious.
Thank you for reading. :)
The stepmother is the one who is jealous of her daughter; who banishes her or forces her to eat the poison apple, who casts her out of the house or uses her as a servant in her own home.
The father is clueless, or else complicit, but only in a small way -- cowed, as he is, by his wife. He is innocent. Even in tales where he is the villain, there is an underlying cause: he is driven mad by grief; he is not aware of his own actions; in possession of his own faculties.
We excuse fathers. We vilify stepmothers.
We don't have stories about mothers.
My mom was the one that taught me about magic.
Not the slight-of-hand, stage magic that David Blaine and his ilk performed for anyone who would watch -- the kind of magic that you felt, deep in your bones. The subtle kind of shift that you wouldn't notice unless you were paying close attention. Not three wishes and fairy godmothers; not stuff on stage -- something weird and dark and primal, not friendly or benign but terrifying. The subtle twist of the knife that you didn't notice until it was too late -- the warp and weft of the universe changing to match your own desires.
"I wish I was talented," said friends, when the topic came up at school. "All my family can do is...", and I wanted to scream at them: no, you don't!
Their mothers were soft and ordinary. They had friendly faces, ordinary concerns. They wanted their daughters to like them. I could read that, written in the lines by their mouths, their anxious smiles, plain as day. I want...
A good life. One where they didn't have to worry about money, or about their job, whether they got the promotion or not. They wanted security, stability, love. They wanted ordinary things, those mothers. They weren't concerned with magic, because it was beyond their purview. It was their daughters that wanted it. "I wish my mother..."
No, I wanted to say, though I knew that their wishing was harmless; their wishing carried no real magic behind it. You don't.
I used to think, growing up, that my mother was under a curse.
Half the month, my mother was, if not loving, at least attentive. I had clean clothes; there was food on the table, and her moods, while difficult, were easy to predict.
This was the mother I didn't have to care for.
The other half of the month, I didn't know what to expect. Dad made dinner, peeling potatoes in silence over the kitchen sink. "It's my turn to cook tonight," he'd say, in his halting way, and I didn't know what this meant, only that it was nothing good.
She did things then, out in the garden, in the shed my dad had built for gardening. I didn't ask questions, because I didn't want answers. I saw the snares she laid, what she caught. Birds, sometimes; sometimes rabbits. Once, one horrifying time, the neighbor's cat, Barney, though I managed to convince her to let him go. "They'll notice, Mom, they'll see, and then what will they do?"
"Nothing," she said grimly, holding up Barney by the scruff of his neck. "They haven't burned anyone at the stake in a hundred years" -- but there were still penalties, things she respected, fines she would have to pay, to the local handler's guild, and we didn't have the money for them, and so she let him go. "Next time, though..."
She let the word hang in the air, like a promise, and I shivered when she said it.
That half of the month, I avoided her if I could. It was easier that way. So did Dad. I did our laundry, mixing his in with mine, his filthy workman's clothes going in with my dresses, all of it thrown into the machine and washed on warm, because his was supposed to be done in hot water and mine in cold. None of my clothes came out clean, that way, streaked instead with clay and mud, but they smelled better.
Dad made dinner, when he remembered. Mostly, with both of us skulking about the house, he didn't. We both avoided the kitchen, anyway, because of the chance that she was in there, doing God only knew what. The kitchen was her territory, too, where she used when she was doing something that required making what she called a "brew". I ate a lot of cereal, straight out of the box, during that part of the month.
"Magic," said Dad, and shook his head. "If I'd known..."
He never finished that sentence. He didn't have to. In some ways, I recognized the sentiment, too.
I didn't ask what she used the magic for. Different people came to the door; made requests of her, and were given slips of paper or packets of powder in return for their money. She only took cash, hand to hand.
"Are you sure this what you want?" she'd ask them, leaning against the doorframe. "Do you know what you're asking?"
"Yes," was always the answer, whispered hurriedly, as though she might change her mind.
"Fine," she'd say, and slide their money into her apron pocket. "Two weeks, maybe three, and it'll be done."
I didn't ask, because I didn't have to ask.
The first time I watched the news and spotted one of her clients, I was eight.
I recognized the woman because of the ugly knit hat she wore.
"It's just -- you don't know what's going to happen next," she said. "We were driving, and the other car came out of nowhere..."
Her husband had been killed in an accident. She had survived, albeit with a broken leg.
I remembered what she'd said to my mother, at the doorway. I need him gone; the twist of my mother's mouth, as she explained who and how and why.
I remembered. I knew.
I didn't watch the news, after that.
Half the month, I loved my mother. I was afraid of her, terrified by her -- but I still loved her. She told me, often, that she loved me, and that was a spell in and of itself.
The other half of the month, I avoided her. I still loved her -- she would have it no other way -- but she frightened me.
The first half of the month, she'd be fine -- more likely to pick me up bodily and ask if I loved her, than anything else, to beam at me when I said I did.
The second half of the month, she'd ask the same question, but there was something wrong about her when she asked it. Her eyes were too wide, too bright; the words came out a little too quickly. I knew to say yes, because she compelled me to, but she scared me.
I didn't say yes because I loved her, the second half of the month. I said yes because I had to; because if I didn't, something terrible would happen.
I tried to track her moods, once, see if there was a certain time that she shifted, became the mother I didn't recognize. Did it align with the phases of the moon? The tides? Sports schedules? I thought of everything, anything cyclical, but there was no pattern to it. It changed, from month to month. One month she would be fine, just fine, the first until the fifteenth; the next, she'd shift on the thirteenth, and everything would go to Hell then. There was no rhythm to it, no rhyme nor reason. We lurched from date to date, never quite sure what we'd wake up to, which version of Mom we'd find downstairs when we woke up -- because she always woke up before we did.
I tried to enlist Dad's help, in tracking things. He played along for a month or two, then broke down and told me that there was no pattern.
"I tried," he said. "After we were married, when she changed..."
The old story: she'd hidden it from him, before they were married. She'd been normal, loving, attentive. She'd won him over with her own natural charms, not the work of magic but of simple chemistry, compatibility.
"It wasn't until we'd been married a year that she changed."
There had been no reason for it, according to Dad. Nothing had happened. No one had died, nothing had shifted. She hadn't been cursed, as far as he knew, though as someone without talent, he admitted that he wouldn't know what a curse looked like. "There wasn't anything, Gabbie. She was normal, and then she...wasn't. Give it up."
I asked Dad once, why he hadn't left.
"Because," he said, and hesitated. "She -- she said if I ever left, that she would..."
"Never mind," I said, too quickly. "I don't need to know."
I could fill in the blanks. I didn't need to know, was it him or was it me?
I was happier not knowing, being unsure as to which one of us she'd threatened.
She used magic for everything.
I knew we owned our house outright, unlike the others on the street, who had to make payments, because of the work she'd done. I'd heard the story, something about a spell, though she didn't give me details of how or why.
There were other things, too. When Dad had gotten sick -- abnormal test results, the specter of cancer lingering over us -- she'd done something, one of her weird, dark rituals, and we'd gotten a call a few days later that it was a lab error. "No idea what happened," said the woman on the phone, "but everything looks fine. We'll have you back next year for another physical, but you've got the all-clear from us."
No one in our immediate family got ill. No one that she liked got sick, or lost their job, or had anything terrible happen to them.
"Protections," she said. "Things I've put in place."
I got good grades in school. I wasn't bullied. I was terrified of her, of what she could do, but mostly we avoided each other. She knew I was afraid, just what I was afraid of, and she didn't press.
If I didn't have the mother I wanted, at least I had a mother. It was something.
I used to think Mom was under a curse, because if she was under a curse, I could break it.
If she was under a curse, it wasn't her fault. She didn't choose to act the way she did.
If she was under a curse, it meant that I wouldn't grow up to become her.
On my thirteenth birthday, she hauled me out to her garden shed and said she was going to test me, "for any ability."
She was in one of her moods, when she did it, or I would never have agreed to it. As it was, I thought about fighting her -- wriggling away; hiding somewhere.
"What's this going to involve?" I asked, as I watched her pull a knife down off a high shelf.
The blade of it was made of obsidian, a glossy black, chipped here and there, but still ground to a razor's edge.
"Sacrifice," said my mother quietly. "Patience. Be quiet, Gabrielle. This won't take long."
I shut up.
I kept my hair long, then, wore it in two braids that hung down my back, streamed out behind me when I ran. I wasn't vain about much -- I didn't have much to be vain about -- but I loved my hair. Dark and soft, it was the only thing about me anyone noticed, when they noticed me at all.
I watched her take the knife, and a wooden bowl.
"Hold out your hands," she said, and I squeezed my eyes shut and obeyed her.
I felt the gentlest prick of the knife at my right index fingertip, her hands massaging my finger to force out a drop of blood, into the bowl. It didn't hurt, or not as much as I thought it would.
"Now the other hand," said my mother, and she repeated what she'd done: pricking my finger, forcing the blood into the bowl.
"Is that it?" I asked, my eyes still shut.
"Almost," she said. "Now..."
I felt her lift my hair, off my back.
"Mom," I started.
"Be quiet, Gabrielle."
"Mom, please," I said, as I felt her lift the knife.
There was the sound of something soft landing in the dirt of the shed floor, and my head felt lighter on one side. I wanted to cry.
"Just one more thing," she murmured, and I felt her do the other side, as well, the soft sound of hair landing on the floor.
I did start to cry, then -- tears running silently down my face.
"Hush," she said, but she sounded almost guilty. "Just one last thing..."
I heard her bend and pick up my braids off the floor; drop them into the bowl, mutter over them. "Now -- Gabrielle, think hard: what do you want now, more than anything? Make a wish."
I should have wished for a normal mother. I should have wished for an end to the magic, a system that didn't ask as much of its adherents as it did. I should have wished for anything, anything except what I did:
I want my hair back, I thought, irreverently, because it was all I could think to wish for.
"My first wish was wasted too," said my mother, quietly, as I felt the sudden weight of my braids returned, as though she had not cut them. "You have the talent."
That was my introduction to magic.
I swore, running my fingers over my braids, tears still running down my face, that I'd never use it.
She started easing me into it, then -- into casting. The rules: what had to be done; what couldn't be done.
"Everything demands a sacrifice," she said, her face contorted in pain. She used her own blood, more often than not, I learned, because it didn't take much -- not for the small charms she performed. "The larger the sacrifice, the more powerful the result."
I didn't ask about the birds, the rabbits. I didn't remind her about the neighbor's cat.
"It drives you half-mad," she said. "Performing. There are reasons -- "
Reasons why she was the way she was. "It builds, Gabrielle," she said, by way of explanation. "Until you feel as though you will die, if you don't give in and channel it into something."
"But you don't have to do big work," I said. It was one of our first lessons. "You can do small, simple stuff..."
"It contorts the way you see reality," said my mother. "Until it's all you can see. You don't realize what you're doing until it's already done."
She looked pained, as she said it. "You don't control it," she said. "It controls you."
Mom taught me about safeguards. There were charms -- painful ones, requiring self-sacrifice, a grim sort of ritual, to prevent any harm to yourself, those that you loved.
"Eventually," she said, "you'll be performing these to keep me in check, the way I took care of your grandmother."
My grandmother had died before I was born. "In a car accident," I'd been told. I'd never questioned that.
Now, I did.
The more I learned about magic, the less I liked it. It was grim, dark and primitive. The rituals didn't make sense, and it was easy to get caught up in them, though not to the extent that Mom did. I was still myself, when I did things.
"Your talent isn't as great as mine," said my mother, and I should have been offended, maybe, but it was easier just to shrug. If it meant I was spared, I'd take it.
She tried to press me to learn anyway, saying that it was important; that I had to know, so I could take it up, too -- but I refused.
"Leave her alone," Dad said. "She obviously doesn't have the talent for it, Meredith."
Eventually, she gave up.
When I realized -- that she wasn't cursed, or not the way that I thought she was, I started looking for other things that had made her into the woman I feared.
Magic was at the heart of it. I did a lot of reading, in those months, all the theory about it, how it affected those that practiced it.
"The human mind was not meant to channel unknown power," said a book I found, dating back to the 1930s.
It went on to talk about how it fundamentally changed the structure of the brain, until it was difficult to tell what was real and what was not, discussed the compulsion to use it.
"The safest decision is not to engage in any magical activity, regardless of the level of talent," said an academic paper I found, from the 1970s.
So I didn't use my own talent. I felt the pull of it, every now and then, but I didn't use it. It wasn't as great as hers, my mother had said, and I thought that meant I would escape.
Somewhere in there, it shifted again. It was no longer two weeks out of the month, she was my mom, and the rest of the time she was a force of nature, something to be avoided. The older I got, and the more I refused to engage with magic at all, the worse she got. We started adding days to the bad periods, going from two weeks to fifteen days, then eighteen, until finally, my senior year of high school, we were at three weeks out of the month where being in the same room as my mother was enough to make my skin crawl.
I wet out a lot, then. I spent a lot of time in the library, filling out college applications on their computers, trying desperately to pretend that everything was normal, never getting home until well past dark.
She tried to curse me, the first time, when I was still living at home. It was a month before high school graduation, during what was supposed to be a good week. She'd spent the day whistling, telling me how proud she was of me, since I'd finished and would be going off to college.
We didn't talk about magic, that day, about the people that came to the door now -- no longer anyone in search of small magic, but one or two a month, seeking big, dark spells.
We didn't talk about blood, or sacrifice, or wishes. We didn't talk about much at all. I avoided her even during the good weeks, if I could help it. I wasn't sure what to say to her anymore, how to talk to her. She'd been a terrifying presence during my adolescence, and I wasn't sure what to make of her now, now that I was finally an adult, in the eyes of the state if not in the eyes of my mother. I was still afraid of what she might do.
I said something about being hungry. She was still normal, then, my mother. She beamed at me, said she would bring me a snack. "I haven't done that since you were a little girl, and..."
She brought me an apple, on a plate. Peanut butter in a little dish beside it -- "for dipping," she said.
I wanted to say something about fairy tales. I could still joke with her, then, about magic and how it was so rarely what we expected, except...
I touched the apple.
I could feel the undercurrent of magic, under the skin -- something bad. Something that would harm me. Some lurking jealousy, the kind of thing that no mother should wish on her daughter.
I shoved the plate away. "Actually, um," I said. "I just remembered. I need to go to Annie's house -- I forgot to write down today's math assignment, and she said she'd let me copy her notes."
"Don't you want your snack?" asked my mother. There was magic, behind how she said it -- it wasn't a command, so I could throw it off, but it was a compulsion.
"No," I said. "I have to hurry over there -- she has piano lessons at 5."
I fled the house without stopping to think, what was that about, and I never let myself be alone with my mother again.
I graduated high school and went to college. With a little help from Dad, I managed to convince her to let me go to school outside of the state. I lived in the dorms, my first year, and found a work-study position. I used it as an excuse -- why I couldn't go home for the winter break. "Sorry -- I have to work in the library."
We weren't supposed to stay over the break -- the dorm was going to be shut down -- so I begged a friend to stay with her family, citing the weird atmosphere I knew I'd find at home. "My parents are getting divorced, and..."
They weren't -- not yet -- but Dad wasn't living in the house anymore.
"I don't have to protect you," he said -- and I took that as a good sign.
Sophomore year, I lived in co-op housing off campus, and I didn't invent a reason I couldn't go home.
Junior year, I got emails from her, then physical letters, when her emails went unanswered. I could feel, without having to open the envelopes, the powder radiating off of them.
Cursed, I thought, or some kind of spell to pull me back home, and I threw them in the garbage, buried them under coffee grounds and banana peels, felt the magic surrounding them drain into the earth.
Senior year, my last semester, I got a call from Dad.
"I need your help," he said. He sounded as though he was having a hard time breathing; the words came out almost compressed, distorted. "Your mother..."
I knew, without being told, what it must have been. "You served her with papers, didn't you? During one of the good parts of the month?"
"Gabbie," he rasped. "There are no good parts of the month left anymore."
I froze, and wondered just what it was I had to do.
In fairy tales, with their wicked stepmothers, there is always a clear path forward: the heroine must leave home, find the secret to her stepmother's power, and through her own virtue, thwart her evil schemes.
Life was not quite so simple.
I knew the secret to my mother's magic, how much of it was rooted in pain.
I knew that I had the same power myself, if I wanted to use it -- but that to do so would likely drive me even madder than it had made her.
The way I took care of your grandmother rattled around in my head -- the story about the car accident, what I wasn't sure she hadn't caused.
"Fuck," I muttered, into the phone. "Dad? I'm -- I'm getting in the car now. I'll be back by..."
I checked the clock. It was 1PM. "I'll be back by dinner time, OK? I..."
"Drive safe," he managed, and the line went dead.
I drove.
The stories left me with no clear path forward. I had to stop my mother, somehow, but I knew how her magic worked, and I knew I didn't have it in me, to do the things she did.
Sacrifice, her voice whispered through me. Pain.
I'd seen the snares she set, for birds and rabbits and God knew what else. She'd tried to teach me those parts of what she did, those parts of her magic -- but they weren't anything I wanted, and so I'd refuted them. I refused to kill anything, to harm anything beside myself, and even then, only the pricking of my fingers.
I knew how her magic worked. I knew how other magic systems worked, too -- I'd done enough reading about them.
"Unpleasant, but necessary" was how even the books on benevolent spells discussed the "blood price".
"Here the authors discuss the most humane way to slaughter a rabbit..." was a sentence I'd found in another, one about guaranteeing good health for you and all those under your protection.
The authors of the books talked about it calmly, as though it were no different than preparing something for dinner. Flesh and blood and bone, the line went. These are the foundations of all magic, good and bad.
I didn't know how you could call anything good that required the death of something else to make it work, but then again, I'd shied away from it, hadn't I?
I thought long and hard, what I wanted to do, what the right answer was.
Five and a half hours, to their house. I pulled into the driveway around 6:30.
All the lights were off. No one answered when I knocked at the door, so I let myself in. The spare key was still under the flower pot on the porch.
Inside was dim. Dad was sitting in an armchair in the living room.
"Hey," I said.
His eyes moved, but he didn't say anything.
"She got to you, didn't she?" I asked. I touched his arm. Still warm, but bound -- I could feel the curse, humming angrily along his skin. "I'm sorry. I think..."
In fairy tales, it was borne out of jealousy. The stepmother afraid of losing her own youth and beauty, her own power.
I didn't think that was what drove my mother. I was afraid it was something darker, something worse.
"I think..." I started, and I didn't know how to end that sentence.
I think your wife has slipped a little too far under the influence, I thought. I think that there's no real way to save her now, except maybe the one thing I don't want to do. I think that there's no real answers anymore, just a desperate hope that this is not as bad as it seems.
"I'll figure something out," I told Dad. "Pretend like I'm not here, if she comes back."
The shed was where it had all started.
The shed was where it had to end.
The door was latched. I knew she was inside.
I knew what would come next, or I had some idea.
I unlatched it and walked into the dark interior.
The bowl was where I knew it would be, on the shelf. So was the knife, its black blade still glossy and razor-sharp after all these years. I could just make them out in the gloom of the unlit shed.
I gathered both of them, and centered myself.
"I knew you'd come back," said my mother's voice, out of the dark. It was the voice she used during her moods, the parts of the month where she was consumed by raw magic, not herself.
I shut my eyes. I knew what I had to do next.
"You've come to do what you must, of course," she said, and she seemed almost amused by it. "Well then. What will you sacrifice, to end me? You know this is where it starts, don't you? Your grandmother..."
"I know," I said, though I'd never connected the dots before. "You refuted it too. You had to muddle through, in those early years, and figure it out for yourself, but it took you too quickly, because you hadn't been brought up in the tradition. Now you're in too deep, and you want me to fix everything."
I dangled one of my braids over the bowl. I still kept my hair long; had ever since it had grown back, when she tested me for my talent.
"It's not something to be trifled with," said my mother, and she made a sound that might have been a laugh, but struck me as the cry of someone in pain.
"No," I agreed, as I sawed at my hair. "It's not."
"If I'd known..." she began. "I might have done it differently. I didn't know, though, the way it takes you..."
I placed my other braid over the bowl, hacked it off with the knife. "I don't think most people do. I've been reading about it."
"Gabbie?" she asked.
"Yeah?"
"Is this going to hurt?"
"No," I said, and I drew the knife down hard, over the palm of my hand, and said the words she'd taught me.
I'd loved her.
She was my mother.
I couldn't hurt her, and I couldn't hurt anyone to hurt her.
I felt the ritual rip through me, the magic coiled in the back of my mind, waiting for me to tell it what I wanted, silently or not, direct it to its end, release it into the world, to use it without shaping it, let it use me as a vessel, and do some of my own bidding in the mix.
Not this time, I told it, and I made my wish.
There are drawbacks to wishes, in almost every story. Outcomes that haven't been thought through thoroughly; unintended side-effects.
I thought, long and hard, about what it was I wanted the magic to do. I focused on the pain in my hand, the dull ache of the cut I'd made, the sticky mess of blood, and wished:
for magic that didn't require harming anyone, but that did not always work, either, and could not be used to any ill end; that did not harm the caster, and did not require more and more of those that would use it, eventually leaving them without their mind intact.
I sacrificed. Blood and braids, and something else, too.
I shut my eyes, and I wished.
"Gabbie?" said my mother. "What are you doing in the shed? What did you do to your hand?"
I opened my eyes.
The bowl and the knife were gone. My hair was still raggedy, cut short.
The shed was brightly lit, full of the clutter that was expected in a garden shed. The lawn mower was parked against the back wall, and various pots and potting soil were on the table.
The pain of the last few years had not been undone, not quite. I had the memories, my mother and what she had put me through, the curses in the mail -- but they were fading, slowly, being overwritten by something else.
My mother, I recalled suddenly, worked as a nurse. She was a passionate gardener, and spent almost every day in her shed. I'd come out to see her, because...
"Kitchen accident," I said, tiredly. "I was cutting an avocado, and the knife slipped. It's not deep, I don't think. I shouldn't need stitches. Just can't use my left hand for a while."
"Jesus," said my mom. "Let me look at it."
I let her.
I knew she wouldn't try to hurt me again.
Fiction, if that wasn't obvious.
Thank you for reading. :)