Home was her sisters, once. But they left and never came back—never even sent so much as a two-cent postcard—and now neither will Juniper.
Red rage swells in Juniper’s chest. She crumples the map in her fist and keeps walking because it’s either run or set something on fire, and she already did that.
She walks faster, faster, stumbling a little on her bad leg, shouldering past wide bustles and fashionable half-capes, following nothing but her own heartbeat and perhaps the faintest thread of something else.
She passes apothecaries and grocers and an entire shop just for shoes. Another one for hats, with a window full of faceless heads covered in lace and froth and frippery. A cemetery that sprawls like a separate city behind a high iron fence, its lawn clipped short and its headstones straight as stone soldiers. Juniper’s eye is drawn to the blighted, barren witch-yard at its edges, where the ashes of the condemned are salted and spread; nothing grows in the yard but a single hawthorn, knobbled as a knuckle.
She crosses a bridge stretched over a river the color of day-old gravy. The city grows taller and grayer around her, the light swallowed by limestone buildings with domes and columns and men in suits guarding the entrances. Even the trolleys are on their best behavior, gliding past on smooth rails.
The street pours into a broad square. Linden trees line its edges, pruned into unnatural sameness, and people flock around the center.
“—why, we ask, should women wait in the shadows while their fathers and husbands determine our fates? Why should we—we doting mothers, we beloved sisters, we treasured daughters—be barred from that most fundamental of rights: the right to vote?”
The voice is urgent and piercing, rising high above the city rumble. Juniper sees a woman standing in the middle of the square wearing a white-curled wig like some small, unfortunate animal pinned to her head. A bronze Saint George glares down at her and women press near her, waving signs and banners.
Juniper figures she’s found St. George’s Square and the New Salem Women’s Association rally after all.
She’s never seen a real live suffragist. In the Sunday cartoons they’re drawn scraggle-haired and long-nosed, suspiciously witchy. But these women don’t look much like witches. They look more like the models in Ivory soap ads, all puffed and white and fancy. Their dresses are ironed and pleated, their hats feathered, their shoes shined and smart.
They part around Juniper as she shoves forward, looking sideways at the seasick roll of her gait, the Crow County mud still clinging to her hem. She doesn’t notice; her eyes are on the strident little woman at the foot of the statue. A badge on her chest reads Miss Cady Stone, NSWA President.
“It seems that our elected politicians disagree with the Constitution, which grants us certain inalienable rights. It seems that Mayor Worthington disagrees even with our benevolent God, who created us all equal.”
The woman keeps talking, and Juniper keeps listening. She talks about the ballot box and the mayoral election in November and the importance of self-determination. She talks about the olden-times when women were queens and scholars and knights. She talks about justice and equal rights and fair shares.
Juniper doesn’t follow all the details—she stopped going to Miss Hurston’s one-room schoolhouse at ten because after her sisters left there was no one to make her go—but she understands what Miss Stone is asking. She’s asking: Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns?
She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?
And oh, Juniper is. At her mama for dying too soon and her daddy for not dying sooner. At her dumbshit cousin for getting the land that should have been hers. At her sisters for leaving and herself for missing them. At the whole Saints-damned world.
Juniper feels like a soldier with a loaded rifle, finally shown something she can shoot. Like a girl with a lit match, finally shown something she can burn.
There are women standing on either side of her, waving signs and filling in all the pauses with hear-hears, their faces full of bright hunger. For a second Juniper pretends she’s standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her sisters again and she feels the hollowed-out place they left behind them, that emptiness so vast even fury can’t quite fill it.
She wonders what they would say if they could see her now. Agnes would worry, always trying to be the mother they didn’t have. Bella would ask six dozen questions.
Mags would say: Girls who go looking for trouble usually find it.
Her daddy would say: Don’t forget what you are, girl. Then he would toss her down in the worm-eaten dark and hiss the answer: Nothing.
Juniper doesn’t realize she’s bitten her lip until she tastes blood. She spits and hears a faint hiss as it lands, like grease in a hot pan.
The wind rises.
It rushes through the square, midnight-cool and mischievous, fluttering the pages of Miss Cady Stone’s notes. It smells wild and sweet, half-familiar, like Mama Mags’s house on the solstice. Like earth and char and old magic. Like the small, feral roses that bloomed in the deep woods.
Miss Stone stops talking. The crowd clutches their hats and cloak-strings, squinting upward. A mousy-looking girl near Juniper fusses with a lacy umbrella, as if she thinks this is a mundane storm that can be taken care of with mundane means. Juniper hears crows and jays calling in the distance, sharp and savage, and knows better.
She whirls, looking for the witch behind the working—
And the world comes unsewn.
Sugar and spice
And everything nice.
A spell to soothe a bad temper, requiring a pinch of sugar & spring sunshine
Agnes Amaranth Eastwood was the middle sister, with hair as shining and black as a hawk’s eye. She was the strongest of the three. The unflinching one, the steady one, the one that knew how to work and
