Witchy Woman

It is seven o’clock in the morning on a Saturday and I am awake. The October sun bursts through the unveiled windows at an autumn angle. Its buttery light temporarily blinds me as I open my eyes. My bedroom is freezing. I have left the window open to counteract the blasting heat. I asked my incompetent roommate to turn the heat to sixty-eight degrees or lower at night; sometimes, I think she actually cranks up the heat, just to piss me off. That is the narrative I tell myself. I have often been told I make up stories in my head—that I project my own vengeance onto other people. No one is out to get you, Lucinda, my mother has often told me. But I think otherwise; I believe that at the core, everyone is out to get everyone else. We are selfish beings who are trying to survive. We all operate on one single objective: we want to get what we want. When things stand in our way of getting our way, we are angry and combative. Or, we become passive aggressive. And I am certain that she is passive aggressive. I am always certain of what people are thinking and feeling, because I am a witch.

You don’t believe me?
 
Let me give you some examples.
 
Everything I want, I get. Not so much because I work really hard to get it, but because I cast spells to attain these things. I chant, I visualize, and I cast spells. I won’t tell you exactly what I say when I cast these spells, because it wouldn’t work for you anyway. Don’t be stupid. Everyone needs to create their own spells; my spells only work for me. Anyway, I cast these spells over things I want like my boyfriend, my luxury condo, my closet full of exquisite clothes, not to mention my c-suite job in the skyscraper overlooking Central Park. A middle-aged woman I work with, a cantankerous bore, complained to me, “I had to wait twelve years and work weekends before I rose up the ranks!” Well, I think, it is too bad you didn’t know how to cast spells, isn’t it?
 
My next spell will be to send off my roommate, get her good and married, out of my condo so I don’t have to deal with her erratic temperature preferences. After that, a big, shiny diamond ring from my clueless boyfriend. I’ve been collecting all the ingredients for those spells the past month. At the next full moon, it will be time.
 
But I don’t want anyone to know that I cast spells—that I’m a witch. No one can know that secret. Yet it’s no secret that people think I am a bitch. A spoiled, assertive, demanding bitch. You know what? That’s fine! As long as they think I am a bitch, but not a witch.
 
Because society has already found ways to write off bitches—those powerful women who don’t take crap from anybody, who know what they want and know how to get it, who don’t waste their time serving others like Puritan goodwives. Society takes one disgusted look at bitches, snarls, and rejects them. Society hates women who act like like men.
 
A bitch is one thing. But a witch? Society doesn’t know what to do with a witch. What do you do with a woman who really does have power? Who really is in control? Who really doesn’t need any of you?
 
What to do about that ghastly Woman Problem? Society couldn’t figure it out hundreds of years ago during the Trials, and they still can’t.
 
But they won’t have to. Because you won’t tell them, right? It’s our little secret.