The High Priestess, Reversed

Mary Margaret has had it in her head awhile now that I must be as terrifying as Artemis insists I am.

Today is the day this no longer matters. Mary Margaret flees and makes an instant choice. She is angry. Artemis is supposed to be the leader and Mary Margaret is pissed because she’s been shit at making the hard but obvious call: they need more help. They need some Ascended Ones, and there is only one she knows of. So she gets on one train after another, doing the directions by memory.

She arrives in front of the shop with the happy suns painted on the windows and the bright colors standing out against deep red. While spring has officially sprung, the shop windows are still fogging with the baking ovens and the crowd’s breathing and talking and laughing, a panoply of glorious humanity nestled in against the cold. Saint John’s cathedral is at her back; not the one she used to visit, but it’s impossible not to feel a hint of safety, of sanctuary in the shadow of this hulking gray monolith.

She knows instinctively where to look, though she has never been here before. This is a child who sees in gulps. A remarkable mind; Mary Margaret is fun to watch because she is brilliant and often she makes the teenage decision anyhow. Most adults would consider this rooted in stupidity or ego, but I know better. Mary Margaret knows what will matter, in the end, and what will not.

Her eyes light on me right away with a snap and I am already pulling out her chair, patting the back of it.

Hello. I’ve been expecting you. Come, sit.

Unnerving, she thinks, for more reasons than one. My thin voice arising from within her as though my words are her own thoughts; that she is expected here when she did not know her plans for certain until she was on the second train. Unsettling, yes, but not necessarily dangerous.

She sits as I settle in across from her. So, I Say, you have ignored Artemis and shown up anyway. How do you feel?

“Fine,” she lies.

Try again.

She swallows hard; she can see why Artemis hates this. It’s like being transparent. And I Speak about it in such an infantilizing, humiliating way. I can’t help that, I Say to what she has not told me. This is who I am. I cannot change it and I’m not sorry about it. Of course, I am lying. I am sorry about it. I’m sorry about it often, but it doesn’t do any good to self-flagellate. Now, try again. How do you feel about defying your mother?

“I feel guilty about it. I mean, I do plenty she says not to, this just feels—more personal? Like—she really fucking hates you. But I think I’m making the right call.”

Everyone always thinks they’re making the right call. Including Artemis in telling you to stay away, including her decision not to come to me sooner about the Hex.

“So you know his name.”

I’m Watching all of you.

Mary Margaret shivers. Goose bumps ripple up her arms. “All the time?” she asks.

I Look away when you are doing something private. Do not worry, child, I am not a monster. I do not tell her that I watched her smoke a cigarette in the school bathroom. I do not think about it; I do not think about it. I can See your body. Your thoughts. Your past. But there is something I cannot do unless you are here, in front of me, and you tell me it is all right to do.

“And that is?”

I cannot clearly See your future, not more than a few steps, and I cannot experience you the way people experience you when you are casting. For all that, you must say you want to know, even if what I have to say is something you do not like. You must Invite Me In, not just with your words but with your whole soul.

Mary Margaret swallows big and she feels like she’s got to fart. A giant fart. A big ripping fart indicative of a nervous stomach. She clenches her ass. She watches me hide a smile and simply ignores what she (rightly) assumes I know. “Yes,” she says, with gravitas. “I want that. I want to know.”

I try to echo the gravitas. You are seventeen.

“Yes,” she answers. “But I’ll be eighteen soon. In May.”

I nod. In this world, the world in which you have come of age, with the things you have experienced, that is old enough to decide. I will tell you what I tell everyone—my Readings are true, real. And therefore they are terrifying. I will not change what I See to make you comfortable. Are you sure, child?

Mary Margaret tilts her head up at the word child. She is not too proud to use it, nor does she exactly prickle against it. Rather, the word feels like a sweater too small, yet one she still wears, shoving herself inside it. As she should. Why should she give childhood up before she’s had a real chance to experience it?

And here she is, giving it up. This is sad and I don’t want to do this and also I do. It would be an insult to ask her once again if she’s sure. No one is ever ready to come of age anyway.

I begin to shuffle my cards and I reach into her. She is a maelstrom, which is shocking, but not surprising. She is difficult to grab; she flits away from my grasp. It is simply her nature to be Unbridled, Unheld, and somehow I must match her to draw Power. To See clearly.

This has been my city long enough and I know how wind works; I make my Inner Galaxy, my Power, into a corridor of buildings. I coax Her, rather than take hold of Her with my Hands. I know better than to ask someone to go against her nature.

She explores Me. Tentatively touches all my windows and doors. I have made my buildings tall and fun to clack against, so many shutters and window boxes and clangy fire escapes on which to push. A plaything for a smart typhoon.

I look at my cards as I pull Power and I wait for my physical fingers to tingle; that is when I will start shuffling. I breathe deeply into the palms of my hands. I leave the buildings where they are inside me and ground myself into the space. Send Eyes into each small ridge of my fingerprints to See the light sprinkle the back of the deck, then Lips to the tips of my fingers, to brush against the cards, to Feel when they become hot, because that is how I know they are asking to be flipped.

Nothing.

All the ways I usually feel and Feel that the cards are ready to be caressed, to split open like the shells of crabs or the legs of women (back in the days when I still had game, when I still touched and fuck the consequences), to show me the soft insides of reality into which I so desperately crave entry—gone, all gone. I continue to reel Power toward me and still. My deck is nothing but a lifeless stack of sad linen paper, an inanimate object. I frown.

My buildings drop and Mary Margaret opens her eyes, which she closed out of wonder, awe. Who knew a person could be a city? She ponders how big she is, in this Place that is Her.

“What?” she asks, and she flips her hand out flat, curls her fingers in, and examines her nails; she is a teenager once again. Tries to be indifferent even though the shock of my sudden collapse has her just as terrified as if I’d Read.

Something’s wrong. I can’t See your future. Not even the next moment. Not even the next breath.

“But you didn’t even pull cards.”

If I had, they would just be cards. No more wondrous than if we were playing Go Fish.

Mary Margaret pouts, theatrical, practiced, but anyone well versed in the language of teenage girls knows performative gestures do not indicate falsehood. Rather, something deep and scary that must be pounded, refined into palatable exaggeration. “Why?” she asks.

Because something is terribly wrong, I answer.

“I know something is terribly wrong. But like. Things have been terribly wrong before. So like. Why now? Why this?”

I cannot help but smile. Fuck if I know. But that is not the gravitas Mary Margaret expects and she pouts bigger. I have lived a long time, I continue, and even I am not sure how Power works. But I have my theories.

Mary Margaret swallows hard. She’s long since learned that adults rarely know as much as they think they do. But to hear someone older than all the adults in her life combined admit to not knowing is terrifying. Because even if the scope is narrowed to only the next place she must put her foot, the next step she must take, she is always sure. Even if that next step is to flee, she does it with the unshakable knowledge of her rightness. To hear me say I don’t have that, not even for seconds from now—it is as though she expected to see steady earth in front of her and she sees only empty air.

“Then tell me the theories?” With her queer and cobbled-together coven, this would have come out as a statement. But staring into my disguised eyes, the question mark escapes her lips.

Well, I meant it when I said fuck if I know. But in the line of her frightened eyes, I reach for something. I think, in the end, it has to do with patterns. This isn’t untrue, just half-baked.

“Patterns?”

Humans love patterns; sometimes they even see a pattern where no such meaning exists. If a mortal, a human without Awakened Power, right now were to touch these cards, they would give you a reading. Not a Reading, but perhaps they would sense something large and looming anyhow. I am not human, so I am not fooled. We are in an unprecedented time, which means the billions, trillions, of patterns that make up every second of our world every day no longer apply. Me and my Power, we cannot extrapolate even a guess. Unlike every day before this one, I can See only what is happening right now, and no further.

Mary Margaret touches the small hairs at her temple with an open, graceful hand. She looks toward the front of the coffee shop, out the window and into the bright blue sky. “I hate this,” she says.

I know.

She sits for a second. “You’re not that scary, you know.”

I lean back in my chair. Stretch my arms over my head. I blink and let my eyes show through, the slit pupils, the whites turned the color of egg yolk. I lick my lips and let my tongue curl out of my mouth, too large, too long, and it curves back in on itself as though the handle of a delicate china cup. Mary Margaret’s eyes widen. She needs to understand. She cannot treat me like another parent in her life. That is not what I’m here for.

“You’re still not that scary,” she continues. And she means it. Most witches aren’t scared of me, not really. I’m just a stand-in. What they’re scared of is their future, and they cannot decide which is worse if true: the idea that I will speak a prophecy and it is unalterable, or the idea that they have the power and the Power to change whatever it is I say.

No one ever asks that, by the way. They never bother to sit with me and parse out the delicate balance of free will and destiny. So I’ve never had the opportunity to say that when I Look, when I prophesy, it’s a mixture of both. I See the effort, the things they try and fail at. Their future neither unalterable, nor something they have control over.

Mary Margaret asks the question I have been expecting, not because I can See any future, but because it’s the logical question for her to ask: “What did you say to Artemis, to make her hate you so much?”

That is not mine to share, I reply. You’ll have to ask her.

Meanwhile: Wilder is trying their best at their own divination. Or, trying to secretly speak to the Hex. Even though they have radically shifted their opinion on his threat level, even though they’ve agreed to surrender the phone, to surrender their computer, to become dependent (they sneer) on Quibble.

Wilder has their own vision, one that is not based on the future but the past. The people who gave their family money believed that they would be fine to never see it again. They even knew Wilder’s father was going to make that money disappear. But the second the family did anything with which the lender disapproved, from a steak dinner to going to the movies, the money always became a giant raised eyebrow. Then came the stage of unsolicited advice giving, a parade of “if you would just,” and then the cruel assumptions about where the money might be going.

The truth is, it’s expensive to be poor. The truth is, Wilder swings from paycheck to paycheck but having only one roommate is above and beyond where they ever thought they’d be. Truth is none of those friends or church families or anyone who lent their father money ever wound up continuing to love the family, was able to continue being truly connected except by strings and conditions. Wilder was forever a charity child.

That is what they fear will become of them and Quibble. Wilder has already transgressed against Quibble in ways that make them uncomfortable to think about. They will, perhaps, think about their casual erosion of his consent every dark morning at 2:16 when they should be asleep. And now, now they’d gone to bat for the Hex and it turned out he was doing something terrifying. Wilder has been on the receiving end of Quibble’s scorn now for two good reasons. The kindness in that face activates something deep within them, a belief they are perhaps safer than they imagine, and certainly witnessed. Seen in ways they don’t even See themself. And what if, now, he never makes that face at them again? Money ruins everything.

They arrive home in mourning already. They take off their headphones (playing no music but turned on just the same) and listen for language, but their home is quiet. Wilder feels as though a small puppy they’d taken in off the street bit another person. Guilt, responsibility, the need to make it right and nurture at the same time.

They sit on their bedroom floor and open the Ouija board. Candles ring their cross-legged slump, whatever cheap scented options they could find at the bodega. Lit in their bedroom, they smell like having set a ’90s-era Cupcake Girl Doll on fire. Burning sugar and plastic.

“Pay attention,” they say, and they don’t feel quite as stupid as before. “Something amazing is about to happen.” They take the stolen planchette from their bag, place it down on the cardboard, and, tentative, place their fingertips on it. Despite the sorrow and the anger and the sense the panic wave will crash upon them from behind, they breathe deeply and reach for their Power. They do not remark upon how fast they find it, but I do. I can’t Know, but I do wonder—is this a person destined to be one of the Ascended? It is so frustrating that I cannot See.

Next to the planchette, Wilder places a phone on the board—not theirs. Roommate Andy’s, stolen from the dining room table while he’s still sleeping. It doesn’t matter if the phone is locked, inaccessible; it only matters that it’s powered on. I can See the presence, called into the room. I stay back. It grows. The eyes have multiplied—there are eight now, like a spider squatting on the window ledge in the dark.

I wonder if Wilder would be conceptualizing him as a child if they could see him. Treating him like a child is reductive. It’s also not entirely incorrect. I watch Wilder’s invitation, now with no one else to protect them or to witness the sensations they Feel when they dip their Hands into their Power: this time, of being slapped across the face with bare knuckles, and the absolute pleasure of cocooning oneself in warm sheets fresh from the dryer. Only I experience them.

Wilder takes a deep breath. “Well, Hex. You fucked that one up real good.”

i m unable to keep me from looking at her

“When you say you can’t, what does that mean?”

I am sick to my stomach and Sick to my Stomach. I can’t stop myself from Looking at this coven of Awakened either. What, then, is the difference between the Sibyl and the Hex? Can’t implies nature. No amount of decision-making will change it. But so many people insist they can’t do things when what they mean is won’t. Am I one of them?

i could never saw a child fairer than the magpie.

“The magpie?”

i could hardly look back after having conquered the greatest seer

“Who is the magpie?”

the magpie is the genius who is now seventeen and the change.

“The change? Why are you calling Mary Margaret the magpie?”

the seer had given it to her

“The seer—Artemis?”

No.

Wilder waits. Does the Hex feel compelled to fill silence? Wilder isn’t sure; chatter is a human impulse, after all.

artemis suspects is true. Artemis is a poor medium

“Then who—Do you mean the Sibyl?”

Smile

Wilder shudders.

My physical body, three trains away from where Wilder sits, shudders too.

“How do you know—You know what, that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is what you mean by can’t.”

I is innocent. I could never could never saw plainly. She is very confusing and when she entered: her countenance expressed affection for me. I shall never look away

“But could you look away? Could you look away if you wanted to?”

Smile

“Yes, that’s—Hex, I’m here to teach you about self-control.” Wilder looks down at the stolen planchette spelling the Hex’s words out. They flush, not sure if they’re the right person for this lesson.

“Self-control means sometimes we want to do things but we don’t do them because—well, it’s not just that it will make someone sad, but it will take away their decisions. The sadness isn’t the point. The decisions are the point. Everyone gets to make choices. You can’t trick people into talking to you, into going on dates with you—how were you even going to show up? You don’t have a body! And we’re trying to have a society here—in that society, children can’t make some choices. Rather than making those choices for them, we just don’t make them make those choices.” Wilder steps off their figurative soapbox and waits, fingers light on the planchette, for the Hex to spell out his response.

I is innocent. I could never could never saw plainly. She is very confusing and when she entered: her countenance expressed affection for me. I shall never look away

Wilder opens their mouth to argue, to say something, anything that will convince the Hex. To parent him. But they swallow their tongue about it. Because he says, plain as day, never. Twice. Never look away. They listen to the voice within them, installed by Artemis, that says Mary Margaret is a child and the Hex is not. They say the absolute worst thing they could possibly say: “Quibble is right about you. Artemis too. Sorry, Hex, but if you can’t learn self-control about Mary Margaret, you’re going to have to go.”

Now on the surface of their conscious mind, they mean “go away.” But I can see that’s not how the Hex takes it. It’s not how I would take it either. What they won’t admit is that, deep down, they mean the Hex must be destroyed. The Hex, in the Space Between, turns toxic, nuclear green. Then the eyes, all eight of them, blink from blue to the sort of red that means only rage.

But Wilder cannot see that, of course. “The amazing thing has happened,” they say. Fuck yeah, they whisper-think. They close their circle, put the planchette in a drawer, and tape it shut, power off their roommate’s phone.

A pause, here, after Mary Margaret leaves, for me to sit in this coffee shop and freak out. What on God’s sweet green earth does it mean that I cannot Read for the girl, something I have desperately wanted to do since Artemis confirmed the glimpses I’d been receiving unbidden, of a little mouse scurrying around beneath us all, shining with unrealized Power? I tried not to show how upsetting my newfound inability is; I do not think I entirely succeeded. I blink my eyes into their slits and try to See everyone in this place, one by one. The woman who has been coming here for decades, who always wears a fur hat far too late into the season. I can See her past, and the son she lost to cancer and the way she strong-armed every person who lives on her floor to give her money to redo the hallway as an ill-conceived coping mechanism for her grief. Telling everyone she was an interior designer when she wasn’t, the neighbors realizing and whispering behind their closed doors that it looks like Halloween out there. I can See all of that.

But when I turn my eye to her future (just the next few moments!) and touch my deck, nothing. Future-Seeing is complex already—so many paths and possibilities and I have to use my Power to figure out which is the right one, if there is a right one. It Feels like my Sight is groggy with sleep, hazy in that morning way before glasses are grabbed and the floor is touched with waking toes. Bleary.

This happens, sometimes, when something is so uncertain for an individual. But two in one day? I turn my Sight to the person at the table behind her. A playwright who always says hi to me, who doesn’t find it strange that I write large letters into my notebook and hold it up to say hello back. He is easy with a smile, and he loves this place as much as I do. Looking into even what he will order next, when he is done with the Danish on his plate (he always orders twice), is like Looking through a cold window fogged with warm breath. I can See that he has a future; I do not Know its contents. My cards feel like some dead thing; my fingers never zap or tingle or shoot with heat.

How have I not noticed?

I’ve been watching these witches and the Hex so closely. Sometimes no one comes to me for weeks, months even. People put off seeing me, like I’m their dentist. And still. Now I’m finding this strange. There are enough Awakened that these long stretches are remarkable. I would have wondered had I not been so busy.

I look up at the regulars again. None of them are Awakened, but all are practiced in explaining away the small synchronicities, tiny miracles that happen around a witch. Instead of Looking, I look. There are many more on their phones than normal, distracted by the endless scroll of the wide world, called by the siren song of longing and engaged enough that they do not notice their own mouths hanging open. They do not feel the sensation of stupor.

The image Arrives to me or arrives to me; I am so flustered I cannot tell if it is Magic or one of imagination (and really, sometimes there is no distinction at all). All the witches usually under my eye just a touch more allured by the pull of their internet. Everyone standing in their kitchens stirring stockpots with their eyes on their phone; everyone walking from their dining room table to their bed not tearing their eyes from the computer balanced on one hand; everyone unable to walk from their front doors to their subway stops without putting in headphones, unable to sit with their own thoughts for even ten minutes, dependent on the voices of others to quell the noise of the void inside them. The Hex has made the digital world into honey, sweet and sticky. He has made them distracted, distracted enough that Artemis is the only one who caught him out. And in turn has made Artemis and her babies into my own personal trap, a timeline I cannot stop watching.

Another image arrives-Arrives. A witch I know well—the one with the bright green glasses frames that she refuses to throw away, gets them refitted with new lenses whenever she needs. One of my Awakened, not Artemis’s coven, slurped slowly into her phone. Not her Spirit or her Body—her living, breathing material. Her skin, her eyes, her hair—unspooled? I search for the word to describe this horror show.

To anyone else, the sound I hear would be the mere squealing brakes of a bus, the hydraulic whoosh of the doors opening, the beeps as it raises and lowers to let off passengers. But I know it for what it is: a chuckle. Some words, just for me.

unfold to kill.