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  My cousin would take my laudably compliant sister into my parents’ bedroom while I banged helplessly on the door, jiggling the antique glass handle, demanding he let her go. I sat on the edge of the bathtub across the hall and concocted an escape plan as I listened to my sister crying and begging him to stop. “No, no, no, please no…,” she incanted. My plan was to get him to let her use the bathroom. Then we’d lock the bathroom door and hoist ourselves up over the back of the toilet, slither through the little window above, then escape into the night. Run to Lodi Lake, hide in the blackberry brambles with the opossums and the raccoons, coyote pups and fairy creatures. After a lengthy shouting campaign, I did eventually convince him that my sister genuinely needed to pee, but he didn’t let her out as I anticipated. He told her she could just hold it, or she could go in his mouth. Would she like that?

  We hear the terms rape, molestation, sexual assault every day now. When I asked my grandmother how she didn’t know that my mother was being raped by my grandfather, my grandmother said that she didn’t know that such a thing existed. It wasn’t so long ago that rape was just something that happened on Grecian urns or to drunk girls wandering alone through the woods at night. Now we know that this kind of assault happens all the time: at home, in churches, in doctor’s offices, at film studios. But in the way we speak of it, abuse happens so fast, it seems like we should be able to get over it just as quickly. She was molested. It only takes three words to say it, a few seconds of speech, but it can take a lifetime to heal. Sometimes you never heal; sometimes the wound persists for generations. Each time we speak of someone’s trauma, there’s an event with a million details and a lifetime of messy repercussions that goes with it, which she, who received the trauma like a cursed trousseau chained to her raw and bloody ankle, drags around with her in perpetuity.

  Creating a boundary is one of the most common practices in witchcraft. Spells always begin by casting a circle. The circle is a space only love can enter, a place between the worlds where the practicing witch, a historic target of assault, is protected and safe. Using her ceremonial knife to trace its perimeter, the witch walks three times deosil—with the direction of the sun—to create a circle around her. She calls upon the Guardians of the material world to enter this sacred space and protect her: “spirits of fire, air, water, and earth, be here with us!” She calls upon the strength of her own spirit and the Goddess of all Life. Into her circle she calls her animal guides, her familiars. Here she cultivates her power. She dances and makes it grow. She practices taking that sacred space with her out into the world. She practices keeping her space clear and safe. No wonder witchcraft is attractive to those whose boundaries have been violated by invaders. No wonder the witch is such a threat to patriarchy. Unless it constructs them itself—walls between countries, velvet cords outside the VIP room—the kyriarchy doesn’t honor boundaries. Witches consecrate our spaces, our bodies, and our planet as sacred. One of the central practices of the witch is to say she has boundaries no “Man” can cross. Her body is a sacred space that cannot be violated.

  A well-known axiom of witchcraft is called the Threefold Law: what you do comes back to you three times over. Actions have consequences. But even a brief study of history demonstrates that though all events have consequences, it’s rarely the aggressor who has to face the worst of them. When your body is used as a receptacle for pain and abuse as a child, one of the most destructive consequences is that later you feel programmed to tolerate pain and expect transgression. You expect your boundaries to mean nothing. So when your already weakened boundaries are eventually transgressed, you blame yourself. You feel like any reference to your abuse is just an excuse you’re making to avoid facing the consequences of your own actions and failures. But this mind-fuck is deliberate. Thousands of years of systemic abuse is no accident. It’s just another way to convince you to hold pain that doesn’t belong to you, to Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo you into becoming the bottom rat.

  The Threefold Law of witchcraft is less a description of a universal truth and more a statement of intention: a commitment to living AS IF your actions will come back to you. A commitment to holding your own pain and transmuting it into something that leaves the world better than you found it. A witch is an agent; with her community, she takes responsibility for her own pain, her own experience, we take responsibility together. Witches use magic to compost suffering into something nourishing, something that brings the world around us to life. Of course, this intention is an ideal; not even the most powerful witches I know are able to behave according to the Threefold Law all the time. One isn’t born knowing how to do this work, but if we show up with courage, sometimes our guides and teachers emerge from unexpected places.

  My sister and I lay in our bunk beds, crickets chanting through clumps of freshly cut grass outside our window, the air damp with twilight. At the time, we looked like twins, roasted dark brown, bound with white tan lines as if our bathing suits had been made out of duct tape. We went to bed still wet from the bath, our hair dripping and sun bleached white with streaks of chlorine green. Long after the horns of Star Trek boldly faded with my father’s snores on the other side of the living room wall, we were exhausted from a day racing our bikes around the block and making balloon puppets at the library. As most children do, my sister and I insisted the closet door be all the way closed before we went to sleep. But for several nights, we’d been noticing the door was open come morning.

  Late that night, the door of the closet clicked open, preceded by a hiss. “Kristin, Kristin,” I whispered up to my sister from the bottom bunk. Inside the closet’s black porthole stood a shade, a woman with blazing red eyes and a crown of writhing snakes. She raised her hand. A benediction? A greeting? A curse? She claimed me that night. Medusa, snake-headed monster of Greek mythology, the Lady of the Shadows, dark guardian and avatar of the Queen of the Underworld. I lay gasping, immobilized, like the catfish my father threw still living into our vegetable garden, where they would rot and become fertilizer. Eventually, the Medusa faded. Maybe it was a dream. But in the morning, my sister said she had seen her too.

  Real or imagined, the spirits that come to us in our childhood mean something. Medusa came for a reason. Throughout my youth, she was to be my guide through the underworld. For many of us witch heroines, the first time we enter the underworld, it isn’t by choice. We’re made into monsters there in its caves, vilified and lonely. Medusa was my guardian, my monster, my guide, but it took me fifteen years to recognize that in the venom of her crown of snakes is powerful medicine.

  Growing up, because my mother had experienced severe abuse at the hands of her father, because my sister and I had been abused, because so many of the other girls I knew had, because my father had often referred to his own traumas—beatings at the hands of his chief of police father, his mother locking herself in the bathroom threatening suicide—because even my cousin, source of one of my many early traumas, had himself been abused, because history is awash with it, because my country was founded on it, I grew up believing that abuse happened to everyone. Trauma is ordinary. Trauma is inescapable.

  The Greek root of the word trauma refers to a hurt or a wound, but also to a defeat. The hero Perseus beheads the Medusa, the snake-headed female monster from Greek mythology, slitting her throat with his adamantine sword. The victor stands over his spoils, brandishing the Medusa’s head, her crown of snakes his new weapon. The Medusa is traumatized: tricked, slain, defeated. But the eyes on her decapitated head still blink. The snakes in her hair still writhe. The Medusa still lives, only, her mind is separated from her body. After the Medusa’s decapitation, her body and head are taken in different directions. Her head remains in captivity, attached to the shield of Athena, the Goddess of War, used as a weapon against advancing armies. Her body is left to rot where it falls. But even though I was terrified of the Medusa when she appeared, I could feel her power in me, rising, rising. I had a premonition that we would wander the world together, decapitated and
blind, moving by feel, arms stretched out, uncertain which direction would take us back to ourselves and which would just lead to further punishment.

  Soon after my first sighting of Medusa, my sister and I were playing in our front yard. In our fantastical play, I was a Native American protecting my vulnerable cowgirl sister with my magic. Barely in grade school, all I knew about history was that the Indians helped the Pilgrims at Thanksgiving and that it had something to do with the hand-shaped turkeys we would paint on construction paper and the wide-brimmed black felt hats with brass buckles. The Indians gave us corn, and in return we gave them blankets (infested with smallpox). My father hadn’t yet taken us on the camping trip to Montana, to visit Little Big Horn, to see our ancestor: the man standing nearest to General Custer when he finally met his consequences after a rampage of slaughter and betrayal across the indigenous territories of the Northwest.

  Our game of cowgirls and Indians usually involved one or both of us having escaped from a despotic family situation, an evil husband, a murderous father, and we would take turns hiding and protecting each other by disguising ourselves as cows or other horned prairie beasts. That day, I stood in the bee clover, bowing and stomping a circular dance of protection; my sister was in the side yard. I heard a ruckus above my head, the slapping of silk wings in flight. A cawing protest, a battle cry. I stood there in my yard, alone, looking up. Barreling down from the ethers, a finch harassed a crow, a black asteroid in a stream of smoke and blood. The crow fell at my feet. It lay gasping, staring up at me, blinking and desperate as its life force drained out through its ebony maw, blood into the grass, marking my toes so that I would leave red footprints.

  Chapter 3

  Leaving the Temple of the Father

  I want to do what I want in a world that does not seem to want me to do what I want. I want to not have to fight.

  Amy Fusselman, Idiophone

  Having tasted the bitter fruit of the underworld, I returned from the north to find my mother engaged to Bela, a saturnine first-generation Hungarian she’d met at writers’ group. Jet-black hair and thick mustache, tall and olive colored, he barely spoke, but he loved to write plays. He was living, but like trees or stones live, mostly he was silent. He was only a playwright by night, and sometimes weekends. The rest of the time he quantified carbon monoxide and other toxic particles for the Air Pollution Control District.

  My soon-to-be stepfather hated being an engineer; he always said his parents made him do it. He rarely spoke, but when he did, that’s what he’d say. His immigrant parents forced him to make the practical choice, and every day he would passively, bitterly resent them for it. And so to get back at them, he left them in rural Pennsylvania with the fireflies and their wooden house that smelled of potato-stuffed pierogies, left them with his sister, their daughter, a paltry substitute for a son. One of the only memories I have of Bela’s sister is when she refused to sit in the back seat of the car with him, because otherwise their thighs would touch. Practically incest! Bela moved to California, where people go to find themselves. Mission accomplished: his name was Bela and he lived on Bela Avenue. And it turned out he was someone who wrote plays on the weekends and then suffered Sisyphean labors all week to please his parents two thousand miles away.

  My mother had already moved our stuff over from our squat little apartment into Bela’s house on Bela Avenue by the time I returned home from my father’s. Bela’s was a wooden house, wine-colored, that had a loquat tree in the front and an avocado tree in the back, and a deck that looked out over the field of my new elementary school. I was excited about the new school because its mascot was a panther and I loved big cats for their beauty and ferociousness. And my mother liked Bela because he was quiet and stable. He didn’t beat her or rape me. He was kind to me, in fact. He had a good job and he was creative. He wrote radio plays for the local public access radio station and let me be in them. He even wrote roles just for me, to help me learn to read.

  In the basement Bela had a woodshop where he’d tinker. He’d drill and sand and fiddle with wires while I hid in a box in the shadows and played with a paper towel holder, making it clippity clop. “Hey! There’s a horse in here? Where is it?” He’d turn and look, and I’d giggle in my box, then do it again for hours. When I first came back from my dad’s, Bela took me and my mother out to the Oktoberfest, where he bought us floppy hats. Mine had a transparent emerald-green visor that I liked to look through and reveal everyone’s alien form. They ate bratwurst with sauerkraut and shared their tangy yellow mustard with me while I gnawed on my corn dog and ogled the busty beer maidens in their white dirndls and embroidered corsetry. On the way home, we stopped by the pet shop, and I got a whole cupful of neon tetras for my tank, new messengers to join with Iris, my old one. They flashed their blue stripes at me while I marveled at them. Breathing as shallow as I could and holding especially still, I pinned the cup between my knees and tried not to move the whole car ride home. But then, just as we’d prepared the water to put my new friends in the tank, I got too excited and knocked the cup into the carpet. I shook with tears as I clawed at the floor trying to rescue them in time, but they all died.

  That night, I lay in my new bed, listening to the ghost fish whisper. The radio turned on by itself. I climbed out of bed and went to get into bed with my mother, like I used to do at our old apartment, but when I got there she brought me back to my room. “Bela doesn’t want you to be in our bed, honey. He doesn’t think it’s right. But I’ll lie with you here for a while, okay?” She cuddled me and told me stories just like always. But then when I went to sleep, my mother went back to her own bed. When she opened the door the next morning, she found me sleeping on the floor in front of her door, curled up in my tiger blanket for protection. She’d find me there often over the next few years. I wasn’t allowed to touch their bed, even with a pinky. Bela didn’t even like me to enter their room. When my brother was born a few years later, he slept in their bed all the time, while I slept on the floor outside their door, an exile.

  When they first got together, my mother worked as a tour guide at Hearst Castle. I loved to go up there with her and swim in the pool lined with gold, surrounded by luminous marble statuary, the gods and heroes of ancient Rome. My mother and Bela got married at “the Castle,” before the statue of the fierce lion goddess Sekhmet, healer and warrior, stolen from a treasury in Egypt. Sekhmet presided over the ceremony, fierce between two date palms, one fist open, one fist closed, the wind hurling golden orbs of grapefruit behind her. Her open palm symbolized times of peace and plenty; her closed fist brought flooding, famine, and destruction. According to myth, when Sekhmet closed her fist, the Nile would run red with blood, like the vein of iron that ran through the milky marble statue and through every witch’s heart.

  When I was nine, we moved from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, where Bela would make more money and our house would be more expensive, though not much better, and my classmates would become snobbier, and—my parents told me with a pregnant pause—I would get a pool. When we went searching for homes, I liked one on the wrong side of Hollister Avenue; the girl’s bedroom was painted lilac with a rainbow unicorn mural over the bed. I didn’t care about the one with the pool, but to say so makes me sound ungrateful. I’m lucky that I had a roof over my head, much less my own bedroom (with or without a unicorn), which is far more than most of the people incarnating on earth right now have access to. Still, it’s hard to be grateful for someone giving up their creative life so that you can have the luxury of a pool you didn’t ask for, which they can then resent you for forever.

  In fact, the Air Pollution Control District was just to be a temporary resting place for Bela. While he was working, my mother was to be at home, writing the Great American Novel. Once that sold, Bela would quit his job, and we would move to Cambria, on the pine coast of Central California, and live an aesthetic, Bohemian life amidst swirls of fog and mating monarch butterflies. We’d have well-behaved dogs and listen to coyot
es and waves crashing and the tapping keys of the typewriter as we thumbed through worn copies of the Utne Reader off our patinaed coffee table.

  But we never made it to the Cambrian age, the fantastical era of freedom and fulfillment, because we were trapped in our family legacy. Bela had always wanted to be a playwright, but he gave up the dream, thwarted by his immigrant parents’ scrappy practicality. My biological father also wrote short stories when I was a child, and even a novel, but over the years he grew disconsolate when he couldn’t get anyone to publish it, or even look at it really. He was offended by the form letters he got from publishers upon the return of his manuscript. “You can tell they didn’t even read it,” he’d spit in frustration.

  My mother, too, all through my youth, sequestered herself in our little back study, pinching her eyebrows and sighing if I came in and interrupted her. She took thousands of pages of notes, crammed binders full of detailed outlines, for her epic historical trilogy about the fall of the ancient goddess cultures, which never materialized. I always had this horrible fear that I would never be able to complete my projects either, that my creative dreams would also end up as a series of miscarriages. Recently, my mother told me that when I was a teenager, she had a contract with Beacon Press to write a book about our tradition of witchcraft. The Reluctant Pagan was her title. I remembered her talking about it, but I didn’t know she’d actually had a contract. Turns out she never finished the book. She never felt ready; she needed more time. Eventually she abandoned it altogether.