by Natalie C. Parker
We grew up together and we were good girls. Most of the time. She was quiet but not meek, bare feet on hot sand, a secret pack of gummy worms after bedtime. I was none of those things, but I was always ready for a fight. Right from the very beginning, I was the press of fingernails into a clammy palm, the grate of paper across a match head.
We weren’t much alike, but we were inseparable. We shared secrets and brownies and we held hands.
They called us two-peas-in-a-pod, just like sisters. And we believed them.
They cooed when we exchanged toys even though hers were always nicer than mine. They smiled when I dedicated a summer to getting her off training wheels. They laughed when we bought the same dress for our first school dance. They feigned annoyance when we stayed up late studying for the chemistry test neither of us felt prepared for.
They called us best friends, such sweet girls.
It’s hard to know exactly when that changed. It felt slow and also sudden. It felt like the kind of change we should have seen coming, but didn’t. One moment is very clear. We sat on the hood of her car in the shade of the dogwoods lining her driveway. It was autumn, but we were in skirts and the car was warm beneath our thighs. We were laughing. Not paying attention to anything but the world that was our own, when her father walked by and snapped, “Grown girls don’t hold hands.” We hadn’t even realized that between us our fingers were woven together like tree roots. But there they were. Locked between us in some form of a crime we didn’t understand we’d committed. We had questions. But we were afraid. The anger in her father’s face was so new, so unexpected, that I dropped her hand and fled.
I spent the night with a fire in my breast. Embarrassed at having done something so terribly wrong, confused over how something as natural to me as running was suddenly wrong, angry that the rules of the world had changed to make our clasped hands wrong.
When we saw each other the next day, we were shy. Our patterns were in question, our instincts untrustworthy. Our world of coos and smiles and laughter and feigned annoyance was nowhere to be found. It had been replaced with disapproving stares and raised eyebrows and “hmm’s” and “don’t you know better’s?”
It felt like a challenge. A warning. It felt like being cemented into place or behind a wall. It didn’t feel like a choice. Until one night, she slipped inside my bedroom as she’d done a hundred times before. She slid into my bed, her body hot against my own, and placing her mouth against my ear whispered, “What if?”
We found the answer together. She was sweet kisses and bold touches and whispers meant only for me. I was teeth on bare skin and the scrape of nails and fingers twisted in hair. And the next day, we clasped our hands together and didn’t let go.
They called us witches, lesbian bitches. They called us too big for our fucking britches.
They’d called us so many things, named us so many times. Only this time they didn’t want us to be the things they named. They hurled the words like rocks, thinking we would run in the opposite direction. Away from each other and the power we didn’t know we had. But once we’d found it, once we’d wrapped our fingers around it like roots, we knew it belonged to us just as we belonged to each other.
Together we learned another secret: they called us witches because they feared our power.
So that’s what we became.
Luca's Roost 