Small Town, Big Magic

Because women should claim their power. We all know who benefits when they don’t, and it isn’t us.

But I have always believed that a woman's best and biggest champion should be herself. The world sure isn't going to step up and cheer on its own.

You can’t fix the world until you sort out your own backyard. I intend to do both.

And happiness is the one thing that can’t be planned. It has to be grabbed and savored.

Isn’t that what loving someone is? For a woman anyway. You may say you don’t want it. Everyone claims they want equality, don’t they, but men see equality as a loss. And women do the emotional labor no matter how equal everyone’s supposed to be. It’s what happens.

And how do you fight willful ignorance?

I make my requisite small talk, because I can talk to a brick wall if I must.

The storm is coming. I can smell the rain, feel the electricity in the air. I’ve always loved storms—

I don’t have the energy to make it, but I do anyway, because making your bed every morning sets you up to conquer your day.

Might as well smile, agree, then do as I like.

it almost feels like I might cry, except I never cry, because a woman’s tears are too often weaponized against her.

For all the women who came before me who weren’t allowed. Or those who carved out their way and were shunned for it.

Men are applauded for embellishing the truth while women are seen as very confident for telling the truth—and very confident is never a compliment.

I love you. I’ve always loved you. I never needed fate to tell me that. It’s like breathing. Everything you are is everything I want.

Because the amazing thing about being a witch is I can do things like make the PowerPoint I’m constantly working on in my head appear on the wall—no computer or time hunched over slides needed. Ellowyn groans. “You did not magic up a witch Powerpoint, Emerson. That is a disease.” “It’s a time-saver, is what it is.

You don’t want to sit around talking about boys when we have more important things to discuss,” I say in withering tones. “Have you ever heard of the Bechdel test?” “Many times,” Georgie says sadly. “It’s your favorite lecture. I still like boys.

Ellowyn said the bookstore was safe. Centuries of witches made it safe.

You’re a Wilde.” And Wildes rise, I tell myself then. No matter what—floods or magic or witch trials in gloomy Massachusetts towns filled with vengeful Puritans—sooner or later, even if it takes generations and descendants, we always, always rise.

Dissecting data is my love language.

Grandma made the bookstore look like a home, encouraging customers to treat it like an extension of theirs. The lower level is decorated like a parlor. Couches and tables are piled high with comfort genre reads and antique lamps. In the back, there is a children’s area set up like a child’s bedroom, complete with a tent that looks like a canopy bed that Georgie has been known to commandeer after hours. Upstairs a room is outfitted like a kitchen and filled with cookbooks on shelves and spilling out of the antique wood stove. Next to the kitchen area, a shelf was built around the window that looks out over Main Street and appears more like a nook in a garden shed than a bookshelf. Some shelves hold gardening tools, a mix of fake and real plants, and the rest hold the gardening selection, from coffee table books with to-die-for photographs of peonies to how-to guides.

That’s not what I’m being. Since I’m not a twelve-year-old girl.” “Twelve-year-old girls are fierce and fantastic, Jacob, so we can agree. You are not one, poised on the cusp of womanhood and hovering on the verge of entering a society that will do its level best to make her hate herself, yet still capable of joy and childlike wonder.

And I have spent my entire life in training for the handling of difficult men. Like every other woman alive.

Love is a powerful magic,” he says. “Is that archaic? Or is it a fundamental truth of life?