The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings

Author:Megan Giddings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

18.

It was an impossible fire. I kept wiping my forehead with the top of my shirt, my hands on my face. Around me, the women were alive. Kissing, bickering, poem-talking about the last full moon and how it felt inside their veins. My mom was clustered with some friends at the edge of the circle, behaving how I always thought she might at parties. She had called this a ceremony when we arrived, but that was clearly wrong. My mother was slowly sipping her glass of wine, looking dubiously at a book a friend was showing her. The light reflecting on the cover made it seem as if it were also on fire. A woman near me was saying in a voice of nasally complaint that this morning she had woken up and it was like her taste buds had fallen out and grown again while she slept. Even the air tasted new and weird. It was a curse. I have to be aware of the air. The fucking air, she kept saying.

Almost every person was dressed in black, mostly cloaks, but a few younger women were dressed like they were going to a cool bar. Black tank tops, tight jeans, pointed black boots, and ostentatious earrings—hoops, starbursts, obscene glaring tigers I kept making eye contact with—that made me simultaneously want to know them and feel already as if there were a large crawl space between who I was now, becloaked on a beach, and the woman I had wanted to be seen as before.

I had assumed everyone on the island had to be a woman, but there were some people who looked clearly like they might be men, others who were androgynous like my friends from the protests, the ones who reminded us all that gender was a cultural construction. Maybe it was because there was no cell phone service on the island, but I felt safe and relaxed. Some people were singing closer to the water, facing the lake. I couldn’t understand any of the words, but the melody was a lullaby. It was easier to people-watch by myself than fixate on the fact my mother hadn’t seen me for more than a decade, but when we got to the party, she had left me to go chat with her friends. She hadn’t even introduced me to them. Just told me to go have fun and strode away, easily shaking off the laughter and moments we had shared just twenty minutes before.

Women were flying overhead. Not a broom in sight, and I wondered how that idea had persisted for so long. Some floated so close to the fire it seemed like the soles of their feet were in danger of being toasted to a perfect marshmallow-brown. Most of the women were shadows, black on black, hair loose and making tiny clouds in the wind as they soared away from the gathering. I wondered what my mother had thought when she came here—all those years of believing magic was

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