1. Wisteria

The basement that I'm sitting in smells of old carpet and coffee, with a hint of slightly stale snickerdoodle cookies filling the room. I shift on the folding chair I'm sitting on, wondering for the thousandth time why I come to these meetings at all.

"Victoria, do you want to share how your week has been?"

The woman speaking is prim-looking, with a kind voice and neat brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She's dressed like any average counselor might be, except she's not a counselor, and we're not your average group therapy meeting.

We've got an entirely different set of problems.

"I–well, my mom called." Victoria bites her lip, and there's an air of defeat hanging over her as she speaks. There's an air of defeat around most of us, honestly–one or two who are newer members seem hopeful, but the rest of us have a certain tiredness that I expect is infectious. "She wants to meet for coffee. In a–well, she said it was better a public place than my apartment." Victoria's eyes are starting to well with tears again, and I feel a pang in my chest. She deserves better than this. Honestly, we all do.

"And how do you feel about that, Victoria?" The counselor–her name is Ava–still has that kind, patient smile on her face. If being an anchor for this collective group ever wears on her, if she ever gets tired of spending her Mondays and Thursdays drinking bad coffee and sitting in a musty basement, she never shows it.

"Awful," Victoria admits in a tiny voice. "I've never done anything to deserve that. I never would."

There's that pang in my chest again, that feeling that we've all been dealt a shitty hand in life, but the ones here like Victoria especially. Victoria's supernatural leanings were the result of an accident, and now her family is afraid of her. For me and the others like me, born with our abilities, it's just always been this way.

Two sides of the same tarnished coin.

"What about you, Wisteria?" Ava turns her attention towards me. "How has your week been?"

I shrug. I haven't had much to contribute to these meetings in a long time, and it's just one of the things that makes me wonder why I keep coming back at all. "Just another week. I went to work, and I went home. Watched some tv and ate some food in between. I had a nice vanilla latte this weekend." I bite my lip, reminding myself that this is a safe space. I can talk about who I am here, and no one will think less of me for it. They might even be interested.

"I went through one of my grandmother's old spell books," I say softly, feeling a tug of resistance at the idea of mentioning something more vulnerable. "I went to one of those herbal shops on the side of town where they don't really ask questions, and made some tea blends and lavender cookies. Maybe they'll help me sleep better." My grandmother was a hedge witch–the kind of magic that I've always been drawn to, also. For just a couple hours this weekend, I'd felt more at peace, sorting through herbs to make the teas, whispering spells over cookie batter.

It's just never quite enough. Like getting to the edge of a restful sleep, and being abruptly dragged back into wakefulness.

"What about your personal life?" Ava probes gently, but with enough firmness to let me know that she's not going to drop it easily.

"I think I've kind of given up on that." I look down at my hands, fiddling with one of the rips in my jeans. "I've already talked in here about how I don't like having to hide who I am from friends. Especially not a boyfriend. And finding people like me–it's hard. We all know how hard that is."

I hear a general murmur of assent from the group. We're all so very different–different genders, species, magical ability, stations in life–but there's one shared trait, and it's that we all have to hide what we are. To the mundane world, human is all there is–or rather, all there should be. To them we're stories and legends, spooky tales to tell in the dark, or something to imagine and feed fantasies with. For people like Victoria's mother, we're something to fear. We're not welcome in the real world.

There's a few places, scattered around, where supernatural beings and people with magical abilities have made safe places for themselves. There's a town like that here in Washington state, further down the coast, a sleepy little beach town called Bayton Heights where the mundane tourists who come through are the oddity, and the locals are all people like us. It's the kind of place I wish I could live, if it were that easy to just uproot my life and go there.

"That doesn't mean you should stop trying," Ava says calmly. "You can't resign yourself to a life of loneliness just because it's hard, Wisteria. Connections matter. That's why we're all here tonight, isn't it?"

A smaller, more hesitant murmur of assent follows that. Truthfully, I think a lot of us just keep coming back because it's familiar, because for a little while once or twice a week, we can drop our pretenses and the careful personas we've built and just be ourselves. If Joseph gets emotional and his nails grow a little longer, no one thinks twice. If Bailey's cup has blood in it instead of grape juice, we don't ask questions. And if Victoria sounds a little like she's growling on the rare occasion she gets angry, we're all fine with it. We understand.

Even those rare mundane humans who aren't afraid, who try to be accepting, can't really understand. For me, that makes that kind of relationship feel impossible, even if there are some who are willing to try.

I really do wonder, walking home from the meeting, if I should keep going to them. It's nice to be in the company of other supernaturals once or twice a week, but it feels so much lonelier afterwards. I trudge the blocks to my apartment–calling an Uber is money I probably shouldn't spend–and nothing about going home feels particularly appealing. It feels more like a place to hide than a haven.

My studio apartment smells like lavender and lemon when I walk inside, and I take a breath, trying to center myself as I flick on the light. I've tried to make it cozy–yellow curtains at the window over the small sink in the nook that serves as a kitchen, a floral-patterned duvet and soft pillows on the bed, a pink couch, whitewashed wooden furniture. Anyone who looks at my tiny studio apartment would know that the person who lives here craves something different–a cottage in the woods maybe, or a small farm somewhere, something soft and slow and peaceful.

A siren blares from outside my window, followed by honking car horns, shattering my reverie. It feels jarring, and I walk to the window by my bed, yanking it shut and drawing the curtains. For the millionth time, I think about leaving the city, moving away. Going somewhere where I could have a garden, instead of making do with a few indoor flowers and succulents that I can keep alive in the stale air. And then I remember my bank balance, the paycheck I get every two weeks from the bookstore, and I'm reminded why I can't just uproot and go.

There's a certain amount of comfort in known misery, too, I suppose. Finding the will to change everything is difficult and scary. I might be unhappy in my life right now, but at least it's an unhappiness I'm familiar with, that I know. Trying something new and failing might mean unhappiness of an unknown quantity.

I kick off my shoes and flop back onto my bed, closing my eyes. Some nights I try to use a spell to calm my mind and help me sleep, but tonight my thoughts feel too jumbled, my emotions too chaotic. That's something about the city that I hate, too. The constant noise and pollution makes it hard to focus, the removal from nature and organic cycles makes it harder to access the magic I was born with. Some witches flourish in cities, some are unaffected by their environment, but I've never been one of those. And on nights like these, when I'd very much like to be able to weave a spell around myself to get through the night, that detachment leaves me feeling hollow. Like there's a place within myself that's closed off even to me.

It's not just others that I'm hiding from. Sometimes it feels like I'm running from myself, too.

—

I wake with a vague headache and a feeling of being emotionally hungover, twenty minutes before my alarm is supposed to go off. I drag myself out of bed with a groan, stumbling to the shower and turning on the hot water. I have a citrus diffuser in my bathroom and eucalyptus hung up in the shower, both of which usually help me jumpstart my morning, but today even the bright scents that I've tried to surround myself with don't help. Caffeine doesn't either, and I know I look like hell when I finally get to the bookshop.

Miriam, the morning manager, eyes me when I walk in. She's as human and as mundane as they come, entirely unaware of my supernatural leanings, and she gives me a suspicious look. "You weren't out partying on a Monday night, were you?" she asks, and though there's a touch of humor in her tone, I can hear the disapproval there too.

"Just up with a cluster headache," I tell her, tipping back the last of the double espresso I bought on the way here. It's not entirely not the truth–that feeling of straining to find my magic approaches something like a headache, but it's not something I could ever explain. "Long night."

"Well, I have a shipment you can unbox and shelve if you don't want to deal with customers." Miriam purses her lips in a way that tells me that she was hoping to do that herself, but I work hard enough and she likes me enough to give me a break. "Go on. But leave the coffee here. I don't want to worry about you spilling it all over the new books."

I stifle a groan. "Don't worry," I tell her, tossing the cup in the trash. "I'm finished with it."

One time, and I can never take coffee back with me again.I've never been the most coordinated person, and one especially early morning around the holidays last year I accidentally tipped a peppermint mocha over onto a stack of children's books I was supposed to be turning into a display. The store smelled like mint and sugar for days until Miriam finally got the carpet professionally cleaned, and the cost of the damaged books came out of my paycheck.

The downside of working at an independent bookstore instead of a Barnes and Noble, I guess.

I go and fetch the shipment boxes, slipping the earbuds I treated myself to last Christmas into my ears and blocking out the world for a little while. The entire shipment is science fiction and fantasy, all shelved near each other, so I settle in and get to work, letting the time pass by and blocking out all the anxious thoughts that try to crowd in–like whether I'm going to go to the meeting again on Thursday night or maybe give it a break for a little while.

Of course, the reprieve can only last so long.

Is this really all there's going to be?I think to myself, a little glumly as I clock out later in the day and start to head home. I ordered Thai for pickup on the way, a little treat for myself since I worked overtime last week, but instead of a comfort it feels like a different kind of depressing. This is the most exciting thing in my life. Noodles and tom kha gai soup.

I'm so tired and down that I almost don't bother checking my mail when I step inside my building. I haven't looked in a week, though, and there's bound to be something that needs paying, so I set down my bag of takeout and fish out my key. There's a small stack of letters inside–the electric bill, a credit card offer, a flyer for a new pizza place–and another, thicker envelope that stops me in my tracks.

It's not the typical thin white envelope I'd expect. It's heavier, with a little texture, and a cream color. On the back there's a floral-embossed wax stamp, an affectation that makes me suspect that I know who the sender is before I even turn the letter back over to see what's written on the front.

In bold, heavy black script–the kind you see when the writer is using a fountain pen–there's my name and address in the upper left corner. And in the middle of the envelope, a name I recognize–from someone I haven't spoken to in quite some time.

Eleanora Avon

Bayton Heights

My aunt–and my only living relative.

I suck in a sharp breath as I slide my nail under the wax stamp, my hands suddenly shaking. No one has heard from her in years–I haven't heard from her in years, despite the fact that once upon a time, she was the one who encouraged me to focus on my magic. To lean into what I was, instead of shying away from it.

Sometimes, I wonder if I might not have been happier if I'd tried to bury it, instead.

Slowly, I open the flap, and slip the folded papers out, my breath catching in my throat. I have no idea why, after so long, she's contacting me now.

But if she is, something awful must have happened.