Petty Magic by Camille Deangelis Read Free Book Online

she have made herself rich and beautiful—or at least rich? (Or in the case of one-legged Elizabeth Clark, first victim of the Chelmsford hysteria of 1645, she’d have grown herself a new limb.) Ergo: not a witch.
    But back then it was only men with monstrous egos and no capacity for logic who banged the gavels and built the scaffolds. They accused you, imprisoned you and seized your assets, starved and tortured you until they extracted a false confession—but that’s not the worst of it, oh no! Once you were dead and buried in an unmarked grave, they sent your family a bill for the coal and wood they’d used to burn you—or, in the case of Goody Harbinger, the rope with which they’d strung her up.
    It’s the flying on broomsticks that really amuses me. The reality isn’t quite so dramatic: I go by bus most days. Of course, we don’t generally travel along with the unwashed masses, but I must conserve my oomph for my seductions. (For this same reason I don’t, shall we say, persuade an ill-mannered man to give up his seat.) Our preferred means of transport is the “loo flue.” Why do we travel by toilet? First, it is the only public place in which one may find a few moments’ privacy. Second, your mind wanders while you’re on the throne, does it not? While you’re doing your business you are always thinking about being someplace else. The third reason is that toilets are fixed points: they are generally in frequent use even when their maintenance has ceased, so that it is easy to travel between them. We are never inside the sewer system, mind you; it is merely a navigational aid. Travel by privy is possible as well, though it’s best to use them only to go to the places you know by heart, and using a loo on a train or plane is like telling a ticket agent to surprise you.
    Flying on broomsticks—“transvection,” those self-appointed witch-hunters called it—is only a small part of the hysterical mythology imposed upon us. They used to say we traveled in our dreams to a witches’ Sabbath, where we would feast on babies and take turns kissing the devil’s arse.
    We have our own mythology, of course. I always found it rather poignant to read of the “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve” in the works of C. S. Lewis, but I roll my eyes whenever I hear those silly dabblers refer to themselves as the “Daughters of Lilith.” We are the daughters of Lilith. They say she was with child when Adam cast her out of the Garden and asked for a more obedient replacement, and that Lilith, exempt from the punishment imposed after the Affair of the Apple, walks the earth to this very day. This is why we, her descendants, live so much longer than ordinary women; it is only because of our fathers and grandfathers that we are not immortal.
    Now, you might be wondering how we can go on living so long without anybody getting suspicious. It’s quite simple: we become our own daughters and granddaughters in the official census, and when anybody starts getting a little too nosy we distract him with a nice thick slab of ambrosia cake. We don’t worry about the neighbors anymore because our families are simply too big for them to keep track of.
    Otherwise, our great-grandmothers were protofeminists who engaged in frequent and often underhanded acts of social subterfuge, dropping full-strength sleeping tonics in the pint glasses of all the local wife beaters and replacing the text in the Sunday missals with demands for universal suffrage. Others weren’t so subtle. Marion Peacock and Philomena Jester used to stand on dairy crates outside a millinery on Alabaster Street handing out leaflets explaining how corsetry was indirectly responsible for puerperal exhaustion and shouting things like “It is the men who dictate the fashion, for that is the means by which they enslave us.” Their shrill proclamations distracted their neighbors from ever suspecting they turned themselves into great golden Labradors to frolic in the