They Were Hers
Marigold’s sister, Sophie, arrived at the family house the day before Marigold’s birthday. Even though Sophie could be a pain, Marigold ran the last couple of steps up to the front door after school, eager to see her sister.
They were the kind of sisters that were inseparable when they were together in the same location, but rarely spoke when they were physically apart. Sophie was in her second year of college, getting a fashion design degree, so Marigold had barely talked to her since the beginning of the school year.
Marigold had entered the house to find traces of Sophie everywhere, as was usual. A backpack, an abandoned hairbrush, a bolt of fabric and two different colored socks littered the entry hall.
“Mari?” Her mother’s voice came from the kitchen, which is where Marigold found Sophie pinning an inside-out, partially-sewn, pink tulle dress onto herself, squinting into the mirror in the family room to see her back.
Marigold caught Sophie’s eye in the mirror, and they exchanged smiles. Neither were willing to actually show affection for the other, but they both knew that it was nice to see each other.
An hour later their mother found Marigold in her room. Standing in her doorway, her mother had said, “Have you said anything to your father?”
Marigold twisted her hands in her lap. She knew her mother was asking have you told your father about your magic? The answer was no.
After telling her mother, Marigold had gone upstairs, exhausted, and fallen into bed. At first she had tried not to cry, but when she couldn’t hold her breath any longer she’d sobbed as quietly as possible into her pillow, curled up into a ball like the tighter she squeezed the more likely it would be that she’d become so small she’d disappear.
The difference between telling everyone at school she was a witch and telling her mother was stark. The newspaper picture was easy. Freeing. But explaining everything to her mother had felt like she’d needed to justify herself. It felt like she had had to convince her mother that she really was a witch.
The easier option had always been to just do some magic, but that felt showy. And personal in a way that Marigold wasn’t ready for at that time.
She’d dreaded coming home from school for this very reason. She didn’t want to tell her father. She didn’t want to relive that moment. She didn’t want to feel the regret all over again, for telling a secret that had felt so precious and bubbly and hers, despite sometimes being terrifying.
“No,” Marigold eventually said softly.
“Do you want me to send him up? Tell him you have something to tell him?”
Marigold shook her head. “That makes it weird.” She was aware how whiny and small her voice was.
“You’ve got to tell him before tomorrow,” her mother informs her. “If your… friend is coming for your birthday.”
It’s true. If Delilah, covered in moss and half-transparent as wood nymphs were, walked into the house without warning, both her dad and Sophie would be shocked beyond repair. Or, her father would be at least.
Sophie, who was downstairs at that moment seam-ripping a curtain in order to make it into sleeve cuffs, realized that she didn’t have any of the blue organza she needed to make the details on the dress she was making. It is this realization that lead her to ask her father to drive her to the craft store, and it is this chain of events that led to Marigold sitting in the grey passenger seat of their grey van, staring out the window.
The girls’ father drove, as Marigold never learned and Sophie wasn’t trusted to drive the family car after an incident last year. Sophie insisted that Marigold sit in the front, while Sophie rode in the back stretched across two seats.
Their mother stayed at home. She had whispered to Marigold, “This is the perfect opportunity to tell them.”
Marigold’s stomach roiled. She had never once been car sick, but she thought this time she might. She was so nervous she kept having to brush little thyme leaves off of her calves, as they kept growing there. Her dad was too busy driving to notice.
Marigold’s head pounded so hard that she felt like her ears were going to pop.
At the last possible second, after Sophie had retrieved the fabric she was looking for, and when Marigold knew they were only fifteen minutes from home, Marigold felt so ill she thought she might faint. She had shifted deeper into the seat, wanting to disappear into the shadows of the car. She wished she’d been allowed to sit in the back.
“This is random, but,” is how she meant to start, because she couldn’t think any further, but she couldn’t choke out the words. She thought the words again, and again, but they didn’t come out of her mouth.
A rush of snowflakes fell from the sky, but it was warmish and October, and Marigold willed the words out. “This is random, but–”
“You’re dropping out of school?” Sophie supplied from the back seat. This was very like her.
Marigold laughed and twisted a little to look at her sister. This made it easier. Sophie would always be there for her, a buffer against her and her dad if need be.
“I’m a witch,” she told them.
Her father laughed.
Marigold will remember this moment as well, the moment her father laughed in disbelief at the most true fact about her life. Somehow it had surprised her, that he’d do that. But that was his gut reaction: to laugh at her.
Marigold gave a half-hearted explanation, a fraction of what she’d said to her mother yesterday. A sentence, at most, because she didn’t have the energy for anything else.
The car was a few minutes from the house, the air sickly quiet. Even Sophie said nothing.
The four of them ate dinner that evening as if everything was completely normal.
That night, though, Marigold didn’t cry. She didn’t go to bed early either. She didn’t think about magic. She sat on her bed while Sophie sprawled across the comforter. They talked about school and boys and girls and TV shows and snow in October.
Sophie didn’t ever say the word magic, but Marigold didn’t think she needed to. There are times Marigold wished that her sister had said something in particular to her, some kind of explicit words of support, but in the end, they had an agreement.
Just after midnight, Sophie danced off to her old room, still wide awake, and Marigold crawled into bed, too tired to think. That night as she slept she listened to Sophie singing in the room adjacent to hers, just like she used to when she was younger.
Many years later, Marigold learned how to grow pears shaped like hearts and twist roots into woven baskets without touching them. Delilah didn’t stay in the forest by her parent’s house, but neither did Marigold.
Marigold’s eighteenth birthday had been fraught with unsaid words. Her parents never did say the word witch, because they were afraid of the word. At the time Marigold had thought that they were afraid of her too, but they weren’t, not really.
They hadn’t get along with Delilah that day, which didn’t surprise anyone, and the wood nymph had scampered back to the forest in a huff after a good twenty minutes of barely being looked at. Sophie had attempted polite conversation, but nymphs weren’t much for polite.
Marigold had thought that it went about as well as she could’ve expected.
She didn’t regret any of it later on. She had at first, but her parents had come around, however awkward the conversations were. A week after her birthday Marigold had been openly feeding a yellow canary that was the size of a housecat, and her father had stood in the doorway of her room and watched. Sheepishly, Marigold had laid her hands on the creature and shrunk it back to regular size. Her father had just said, “I rather liked it big.”
And many, many years later, though she would have forgotten all of this, surely, Marigold still remembers little things, like the small joy of first seeing her photo in the newspaper. Or that boy, Cyrus, who had been so shy and kind. Or the side-stitch laughter she had shared with her sister in the middle of the night.
These things, along with the way that the tree branches braided themselves into her hair, and the way the owls sung when she walked home, and nearly house-sized tortoise that lived at her doorstep in the forest, were all magical. They were magic, she was a witch, and they were hers.
(read part 1 of 2: https://theprose.com/post/544515/marigolds-magic)