Tess Sharpe - Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

Scorn the witch. Fear the witch. Burn the witch.

History is filled with stories of women accused of witchcraft, of fearsome girls with arcane knowledge. Toil & Trouble features sixteen stories of girls embracing their power, reclaiming their destinies and using their magic to create, to curse, to cureand to kill.

A young witch uses social media to connect with her astrology clientsand with a NASA-loving girl as cute as she is skeptical. A priestess of death investigates a ritualized murder. A bruja who cures lovesickness might need the remedy herself when she falls in love with an altar boy. A theater production is turned upside down by a visiting churel. In Reconstruction-era Texas, a water witch uses her magic to survive the soldiers who have invaded her desert oasis. And in the near future, a group of girls accused of witchcraft must find their collective power in order to destroy their captors.

This collection reveals a universal truth: theres nothing more powerful than a teenage girl who believes in herself.

TOIL & TROUBLE

15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft

Edited by Jessica Spotswood & Tess Sharpe

For all the troublemakers and everyone who needs a little magic

Contents

STARSONG

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

THERES A CALM that comes over me when Im painting. The same one the stars bring out.

During the day, Im high-maintenance like my mam says. Face contoured and flawless, brows fierce, lips popping. My nails are perfection in whatever shade my ta whispers from her photo on the top of my bookshelf. Amethyst, for emotional balance. Rose, for an open heart. Obsidian to ward against people who look at me with envyand trust me, there are plenty of them.

Last week, when the comments got too petty, I painted a red-and-yellow eye in the center of each middle finger and posted it on my Instagram account@delasEstrellas.

I see you, said the caption. And you cant touch me.

That one got 38k likes. Its still being reblogged on Tumblr hundreds of times a day.

People call me magic in the comments, but thats not magic, and I should know.

Because when I sacrifice my custom ringtone to the vibration gods and sit down at my desk, the scent of the stars blowing across the Santa Anas and into my open window, I feel it wake up. The real magic. The kind thats bound to blood and culture. To history. To violence I say a thousand thanks a day for never knowing.

Its a hum, and a whisper; its a guiding hand. At least, thats what my mom always used to say when I was a little girl, still clean-faced and wide-eyed. Before Ta went through a guardrail in a rock bands tour bus on a dark, winding highway. Before I was admitted to the West Hills Hospital last year, full of vodka and pills and the strange ramblings of the boy who fed them to me. Before I knew I was born to hear the song of the stars.

Tonight, the moon is just visible beyond the waving palm trees, and I can hear the ocean. My mam is long asleep, a brown seed planted in that big bed in this giant house beside Bruce-the-life-coach, who says she has the purest soul of anyone hes ever known.

He says it like I should be so lucky, and hes probably right. But lets face it, purity isnt really my aesthetic. At least, it didnt used to be.

I pad over to my altar, eggplant toenails almost disappearing in the plush of my rug. Pink. A little girls dream. Im sixteen now, not that little girl anymore. But she missed out on a lot. I try to throw her a bone every once in a while.

Mam and I have come a long way since the trailer I grew up in with the peeling paint. The closeness and the noise. The neighbors fighting. The thuds against the walls that I hid from in the little closet where we kept the recycling, counting my fingers and toes again and again until it went quiet.

Im not there anymore, I tell myself now. The waves crash outside, the only sound apart from the stars.

Inhale. Exhale.

Its more important than ever that I stay grounded.

I light one candle, holding my intentions clear. A bubble of white light around my body. Around the house. Around Mam and sure, even Bruce. Keep me safe. Keep us all safe. From whats out there. From ourselves.

The next candle is for Ta Jasmin. Shes back with the source now. The place our magic comes from.

Inhale. Exhale.

Mam says Im just like her. My ta. That our magic is restless and wild and trouble-bound. But I dont know if I agree. Maybe we were just two people chasing numbness because we didnt know what the stardust inside us was for.

Maybe Ta Jasmin got on that bus the same way I went to that party. Maybe she was tired of feeling different. Tired of the magic and the way it made everything seem so significant. Tired of the way someone was always watching, waiting to see what we would become.

My fingers shake around the last match. This one, I close my eyes for. When the wick catches, I picture the open sky above my second-story room, the clear darkness that gets even clearer as I project myself above the haze of LA smog.

I shake, because the first time it happened was that night, my back against the cold desert ground, the oil-can fire so far away. I was just looking for a little oblivion. A little normal. A little of the dead-eyed shimmer the girls at school wore through the cafeteria after a night in the desertthe kind that made people look at them like they were women.

But in that moment, the distance expanding and contracting before my hazy eyes, I found something so much more. Despite the spinning that had sent me to the ground in search of something that wouldnt give way, Id never been as sober as I was when the pinpricks of the stars grew larger, taking on color spectrums Id never seen.

Thats when a voice somewhere deep down whispered that I belonged. And not among the scattered crowds clutching red Solo cups and scuffing their shoes in the sand. I, Luna Mendoza, was part of the swirling color and dancing light of a sky that had never seemed so close.

After they pumped my stomach, the hospital shrink said those hallucinations would fade, but I just smiled. Even the emptiness in my veins couldnt take away what I knew.

Back home, I finally approached the altar Mam set up for me on my fifteenth birthday, the one that had done nothing but gather dust while I tried and failed to forget it. To fit in. That day, I lit the candles, and sober as I was from forty-eight hours in the hospital and a tube down my throat, the path to the skies was wide open, like Id only needed to find my way once.

* * *

Thats the journey I take tonight, through the mistakes and the heartache and the new circles beneath Mams eyes. The ones that have a hint of Ta Jasmin in them. Poor Mam, doomed to love two girls who followed their magic down the wrong roads. But at least I have a chance to make it right.

Im alive, I remind myself. Alive. I drift up to the stars, repeating it until the magic is tingling in my palms and I cant feel the rug beneath my feet anymore. Until the Instagram haters, the wannabes, and my moms disapproving clucks when I wear NYX Pin-Up Pout in Rebel Soul are all thirty light-years below me and falling.

The match still in my hand, I clear the path between my grounded body and the unbound stars. I whisper to Ta Jasmin, and the Water Bearer of Aquarius, and the moons pale-faced diosa to send their own inspiration down.

By the time I open my eyes, Im not Esperanza Luna Mendoza Stevens anymore. Im a star-child. A bruja with magic sparking from my perfect pedicure to my massive barrel curls and everywhere in between.