A Coven of Bitches

We call upon the earth, the air,

The rain, and fire bright.

We call upon the birds, the bees,

The stones, the candle light.

We know we are not made for this,

To stress, to toil, to churn.

We ask that you will grant to us

More than we can earn.

Let me start by being clear; I've always been skeptical of prosperity spells. I don't know or claim to understand the equation of the universe or how it all balances out, but I believe that there's something cosmically true in "blessed are the least of these" and The Great Law of Karma. I've never felt like being born white and American and pretty far up the middle class meant that I'm a bad person — I don't really think like that — but I've suspected that I might owe something to the universe. So yes, if I'm being honest, something definitely struck me as off about a bunch of girls whose parents paid their rent asking the gods for money.

We'd all met in college. Four of us had been in the same sorority, from the same sort of southern, evangelical background; each of us even had two brothers and a dog. Maci also had a younger step-sister, and Gemma had a cat, but, overall, it felt like a lot of the pieces and parts of our lives might as well have been interchangeable. To be fair, this could also have been said for most of the girls in the sorority, but in some very important ways, the four of us were different. By the end of sophomore year, we’d each, quietly, become a bit “witchy.”

For me, I started collecting dead bugs. The first was a butterfly, which wasn’t that weird, but the way she came to me was. I’d been sitting on the chapter house porch, alone, in one of our big wooden rocking chairs. It was late morning on a late September Sunday, and it had that still, sacred feeling of being much earlier in the day than it was, since everyone else was still sleeping.

I’d come out for a cigarette. I didn’t like smoking sober in front of the other girls. Three beers in at a fish fry, and they’d all be coming to me to bum one, but they judged me for smoking alone. I was grateful for the solitude.

I was also a bit more hungover than I’d intended to be, and I felt bad about it. I’d just dipped a toe into a pool of self hatred for wallowing in when I noticed a large, burnt orange and brown butterfly land on the knee-high epsilon that sat at the entrance to our walkway. She wasn’t a monarch. She had a row of big round “eyes” at the base of each wing, and I was a bit entranced. As I watched her, she turned, and it felt like we made eye contact. Then she began to fly towards me. Within a few seconds, she had landed on my neck. It was the most intimate thing I had ever felt. Her little legs tickled, and I could feel the air between my clavicle and chin move as she brought her wings open a bit, then closed again. I couldn’t say how long we sat like that. My cigarette went out and I didn’t finish it.

Eventually, one of the sisters opened the door and startled me. I sat up a bit, and when I did, the butterfly fell from my neck. Wings spread wide, she hovered gently like a kite, and landed on my naked thigh, dead. Makinzie didn’t notice, and thankfully didn’t linger when I failed to respond to her “gooooood morning, slut.” It felt preposterous at the time, but I knew my life was permanently changed.

I put my butterfly in a 32 oz Ball jar (wide mouth, of course) and kept her on my bedroom window sill. I called her Aubrey. When I was alone, I talked to her, mostly asking for help. And in little ways, it always seemed that she did. From there, I pocketed dead cicadas and beetles and many other once alive things. I’d put spiders in the melted wax of my scented candles and bees in my medicine bottles. I cringed to think what my mother would say about my little practices, but, at that point, she seemed very far away.

I’d been doing this for about a year when Elsie, our Vice Social Chair for External Events, popped into my room without knocking and caught me with two dead moths in my hands, gently whispering.

“WHAT?!” she half shrieked, excitedly entering and closing the door behind her. “Are you talking to bugs?”

“Well, yes…” I fumbled to explain, realizing with a wave of terror just how absurd what I’d been doing really was. “Sorry, it’s weird, I know. I just seem to find them everywhere lately.”

“No, no! Don’t apologize,” she said, conspiratorially now. “I talk to the birds.”

She told me she’d started doing it when she was a little girl, in a cute way her family would laugh and tell stories about, but that it had gotten more serious since she’d been on her own.

“I talk to them all the time,” she gleefully confessed. “I ask them for help. I tell them about my day. There are a few ravens, or maybe crows, that hang around the back garden that I have names for. And Maci and Gemma do it too!”

She was exuberant, like she was really spilling the tea.

“Well… Maci is secretly into rocks. Not pretty crystals or diamonds or anything, like she collects gravel and random shit and has them with her all the time. And Gemma has a drawer full of candles and dried herbs that she uses for spells.

“I only know because Gemma was Sober Sis for The Clivingdale Races last spring and was driving me and Maci from Ma’s Pub to the Kappa house, and my drunk ass started talking to a cardinal at a stoplight, calling him Mr. Lovespell and asking him to help me with my plans to fuck Brad Whitley that night. Cardinals are sexy like that.

“I was so embarrassed when I realized what I’d done, then Maci pulls out two pieces of pink quartz from her bra, one for each tit, and says she found them under the bushes outside the bar, and that they helped her talk to that girl from Tri Delt’ that she’s had a crush on for ages. Then Gemma confessed that pretty much every time we go out, she lights a black candle and burns sage for protection so that none of us get raped.”

________

And that was the start of it. By winter break, the four of us were meeting in Elsie’s room every few nights and asking the universe for help, together. The transition from something that had been so private, even secretive, to something communal was hard for all of us at first, but Elsie was so excited, and we all felt special and lucky to be a part of it, so we kept going.

We called ourselves A Coven of Bitches. It started as a silly joke that Gemma made when she was stoned. She’d been curled up on her back on the couch while we debated our official name. Maci suggested Gandalf’s Gammas. Elsie had been persuasive with The Magpies, telling us how they’re called a “tiding” in a group, and maybe not one of comfort and joy for boys - or girls - who were mean to us.

Then Gemma, from her smoky bubble, giggled.

“A murder of crows and a charm of finches… Sorority girls are a coven of bitches.”

I laughed so hard I had to change my tampon.

The name stuck. Being a bit silly about it helped balance some of the awkward seriousness and brought us together. We kept it small, and secret, all through junior year. We brought our bugs, and our rocks, and our stories from the birds. Gemma wrote spells and lit candles and led us in chanting. We asked for help with school, with families, with romance and sex and love. We asked for protection, for comfort, for guidance. And largely, it worked.

Then, senior year, Elsie started to talk about it. She’d been flirting with some girl at a party and started bragging about writing ten thousand words in three hours on the development of plate armor in the Holy Roman Empire after a spell we did together. The girl was not too interested in Maximillian armor, but was very into knowing more about the coven she’d casually mentioned, and, just like that, we had a fifth.

After Julia was Savannah, then Hayden and Brenlee and Saorise and Olivia and Jill. By the time I graduated, we were thirteen.

________

Half of us graduated that year. The rest were a year or two behind. We met the night after graduation to plan for the future, and Elsie had an idea.

“We all know this job market sucks. Yes, we’re all very fortunate to have parents to help us, but I haven’t gotten into fashion school, and I’m looking at having to do some entry level rotational program at a huge bank making, like, no money. That’s just not the life for me. Or for you guys. We have become so powerful. Each of you is a magical fucking witchy bitch, and we deserve all the good things in the world. Think of all the good we can do for others if we don’t have to worry about sending out resumes and fucking… power point presentations. We’re powerful enough to find a way out of this capitalism hellscape. I think… we should win the lottery.”

She went on to explain that she’d been researching prosperity spells and studying up on the lotto drawings that were easiest to win. She’d talked to an elder witch she knew through the local metaphysical shop for ideas, and didn’t get any. But the woman had warned her not to get her hopes up, and if we did win, to be very cautious with how we handled the money. But we didn’t need to worry about that! We all knew bankers and financial advisors. My thoughts were already getting ahead of me, but she was right. My dad’s money guy had been over for drinks or dinner all the time growing up. He’d help me invest it and not blow it all like you hear about happening with poor people who have never had a thousand dollars at a time before. We’d handle money *more* responsibly, since we all grew up around it.

We didn’t all agree right away, but we let Elsie keep talking about it. She said that for a spell this big, we’d need some preparation, but she thought we could be ready to do it by Halloween, which just happened to be a full moon. That hadn’t happened in 20 years. It was perfect timing.

She had jobs for each of us. I was to start now leading a small group in cleansing and consecrating the space, so that there’d be no negative forces lingering around when Samhain arrived. And I was to bring moths. Maci was told to collect citrine, jade, pyrite, and emerald.

“You should get them at the store since they aren’t things you can just find laying around,” Elsie told her. “This is way too important to just use random stuff.”

Elsie and Gemma would write the spell together, but the girls were welcome to suggest any ideas or lines or cute rhymes they came up with. And, of course, we’d each contribute money. $68 a piece, $69 for two of us, since the angel number 888 meant prosperity. We’d buy eight hundred and eighty eight dollars in tickets. She said she didn’t think we’d need that many, since our magic would help us win, but that we needed to make an appropriate sacrifice in order to show the gods we were serious.

As for the gods we would call on, I won’t name them here (trying to keep a low profile where they’re concerned) but I will say that we were invoking a Hindu mother goddess on a lotus throne and a Celtic Pagan god who has horns, for balance.

At the time, I really did have my reservations. (At least, I tell myself I’m not just telling myself that.) We were literally all rich kids. And if we won, didn’t that mean somebody else wouldn’t? The thought of it unsettled me, but not enough to do anything about it.

________

I worked with Saorise and Madaline to cleanse the space. We’d meet in an old, abandoned, walled garden on Elsie’s family’s property. They didn’t live on an estate, exactly, but they had a large piece of land outside of town with an old house and a new house and a number of gardens and ponds and landscaping features in between. We’d drive out every other day with gloves and pruning shears and sage, and work on clearing the area of vines and debris and bad energy. It was a lovely space, really. We had fun chatting while pulling weeds from the stone circle where a fountain had once been and cutting back tangles of thick vines that had leaves and thorns that scratched our arms, like roses, but with no flowers.

“Do you really think we’ll win?” Madaline asked, just a few days out from Samhain. She was one of the newest members of the coven, and I thought she was sometimes a bit skeptical of our bold claims.

“I don’t ever say I know the future, even with spells,” I told her. “We try to be really specific, but even then, a spell doesn’t always ‘work’ the way we expect it to work, but that doesn’t mean it doesn't work, you know?”

She smiled at me with knit brows, like she desperately wanted what I was saying to make sense, but couldn’t help feeling a bit incredulous.

“I believe that if you do a spell, you have to believe the spell will work, right?” I said. “If you do a ritual you don’t believe in, it’s like… insulting to the gods. You’re asking them to help you, but you don’t actually believe they can. So of course it won’t work. And maybe they’ll notice you fucking around and they’ll be mad about it. And that’s never good. So, I can’t tell you specifically that I believe we’ll win the Powerball and split a billion dollars, because I don’t know, but I do believe that our spell will work. I believe something big will happen.”

“Something big will happen,” Saorise repeated, doe eyed. She was one of the more working class members of the group. She never mentioned it, but I thought her parents might have taken out loans for her school. And I could tell she had gotten her hopes up.

Madaline thought for a minute, then told me, “that makes sense.” And I believed her.

________

The night of the ritual, we’d all stay the night in the old house, a 9 bedroom mansion where her grandmother lived with a nurse/housekeeper to tend to her. Elsie’s parents thought we were throwing a party, and were largely unconcerned.

We gathered on the morning of the 31st, stomachs growling since we’d been fasting since midnight. We had an agenda of ritual cleansing and prayer, baths in the creek, quiet meditation in the rose garden, manicures. We were instructed to spend the day saying:

“I cleanse myself and open.

So that I may receive.”

We weren’t to speak to each other all day, just to repeat this phrase, endlessly, and come back to it whenever our minds wandered. In general, the reservations I’d had were calmed by the quiet tranquility of the day, and my belief that whatever happened, it would be the right thing for us. I believed our spell would work, for us.

When the evening finally arrived, we all knew our roles. Some of the girls had already set up an altar of rocks, herbs, bones, bugs, and candles around the stone circle. Olivia played a slow tune on a small harp while we marched into the garden wearing long white nightgowns and each holding our offerings: a meaningful token we had collected for the occasion, and one lottery ticket.

The tickets were as long as a drugstore receipt, and the morning coffee crowd at the Murphy’s Quik Stop had been pretty annoyed at the thirteen of us sprawled across the counters with golf pencils filling in six digit numbers. The clerk behind the counter had been more than annoyed. But Elise insisted that we choose the numbers ourselves because, obviously, “computers can’t do magic.”

I held my two moths on a linen handkerchief as I marched slowly into the garden, and willed myself to keep believing. We looked beautiful there. Lit by soft candlelight and the effervescent moon, we seemed youthful and ancient all at once. And Luna put on such a show. We gazed at her like a fat silver dollar we each craved for our own.

The ritual went seamlessly. In the end, Gemma had written the spell, and it was clever and heartfelt and powerful. We all played our parts, spoke at just the right time, and the energy I felt moving among us was stunning and real. The only surprise was Elsie’s offering. She’d entered the garden last, with a small, live swallow clutched in both hands, her lottery ticket dangling from a ribbon tied to each little finger. We hadn’t spoken about a live bird, but I expected her to release him as part of the ritual. She didn’t release him, and I feel like that might be the end of what I should share about the bird and what happened that night.

________

Reader, as you may have guessed, we won the lottery.

We won big. After taxes, which were shockingly difficult to avoid, we each received approximately 33 million dollars. The days that followed the drawing were a blur of meetings and lawyers and contracts and ecstatic disbelief. We divided it evenly to the penny.

About a month later, once the dust had settled and checks had cleared, we gathered again at a retreat center deep in the mountains. The place was exclusive in a way we might not have had access to before, but we wanted to do something powerful and dramatic to thank the gods for our bounty and come together to plan for the future. So we agreed to do Psilocybin mushrooms in the forest at a luxury resort.

We stayed in a series of fancy tree houses with breathtaking views. Local guides lead us through fasting and meditation during the day, then in the evening, vegan feasts, group chanting, and dance, all working up to the third night when we would partake together.

I was pretty excited. I liked doing mushrooms and thought certainly it would be a welcome chance to disconnect my mind after the frantic planning and decisions that had come with my sudden influx of new wealth. The guides seemed genuine, and the rituals they taught me helped me feel both calm and alert, and also exhausted, going into the third day.

We ate the fungi raw, with nothing but alkaline water on our stomachs. That was unpleasant. Chewing and chewing and chewing, certainly the night would get easier after our endless mastication. But it didn’t.

We moved and chanted together as we each began experiencing shining visual halos around the other figures in the circle. Then the lines of reality, space, and time began to blur, and we each quietly retreated into an inner sanctum. I’d done mushrooms several times, but they’d never taken me under quite like this. I laid down on the hardwood floor, and a guide placed a pillow under my head and a soft blanket over me. I drifted into a galaxy of color and light, pulled ever onward by pulsing, undulating tones. Eventually, everything went black and I sunk into a deep sleep. Then, I woke with a start.

Well, I thought I woke. I saw the girls lying peacefully around me, curled in little balls, together and apart in the big circle. But in the middle, was… my mother. She sat in her favorite straight-backed wooden rocker, floating a foot off the ground, glowing. I started to apologize, I guess for being so fucked up, but my mouth wouldn’t move. She gazed down at me with stern judgment, a look I know well, and I shrank back inside myself in shame.

Then, as I watched, her skin sagged and wrinkles appeared, and she sort of melted, becoming her mother, my Grandmother. Then, she became… my Dad’s mom? That couldn’t be right. But for a moment she definitely was my Nana. And then her mother, my Great-Grandma, who I’d only met once as a little girl, but I recognized her. Her skin continued to shift and settle, until I saw her clearly. I knew her. The Mother god of my ancestors. A god unique to me, gathering within her the spirits of all the women of my line. I knew exactly who she was.

She began to tell me stories of my ancestors. They were typical, American stories, each both universal and heartbreakingly unique. So much loss and pain, houses burned, babies died, sons were lost at war. Husbands came and brought joy, then went loose, or went mean, or went mad. Even in the best of times, the burdens of life were heavy.

And she spoke of subjugation. She told of anger and jealousy taken out cruelly on women who were owned. She told of a lynching, casually attended, by a woman concerned with hors d'oeuvre and keeping up appearances, barely moved by a spectacle of torture. She spoke of factory workers, worlds away in far off places, whose toils appeared on balance sheets that had funded my life.

At the end, she spoke to me.

“My dearest, we have given you this gift. You have not earned it. To keep it, you must give it away. To keep it, you must give it away. To keep it, you must give it away.”

I opened my eyes, and all the other girls did too. The guides greeted us with refreshments, offering wet towels and oils to clear our heads, but we all sat, staring.

Maci spoke first. “I think… I was visited by my ancestors.”

Then the stories came flowing out. We’d all been visited. We all learned intricate details about the women we were descended from, the pains they felt, the pains they inflicted. We were all given an ultimatum.

________

The rest of the trip was awkward, and I was eager to go home, even though I didn’t really know where home was. We didn’t talk much more about the visions. We didn’t talk about what we’d been told to do. We knew we couldn’t give it away, so there was no reason to discuss it.

________

The first tragedy that befell me was a broken nail, three full moons later, on the first night in my new house. She was an old house, only new to me, and she had sat uninhabited for a decade. Too much plumbing and electrical work needed to be done, and there was some fire damage, so they had never found an investor until I came along, cash in hand. I fell instantly in love, and paid a contractor handsomely to renovate just what was needed to make her safe, so that I could move in and direct things from there.

I had gotten a powder dip manicure the day before, figuring they were the most functional for working, I was settling in for bed when I realized I was craving fresh air and the moon. The old windows hadn't been replaced yet, and the window caught in the frame as I tried to force it open, ripping the nail on my right index finger nearly off.

The pain was excruciating, and I was alone. I was proud, though, and tended to it myself. I screamed unselfconsciously while I cleaned it and bandaged it with the contents of a first aid kit someone had stocked in the bathroom. It was both frightening and reassuring that no one would hear me.

Three days later, the pain hadn’t subsided, and I realized with horror that I had an infection. It spread rapidly, and I spent three days in the hospital with an IV drip of antibiotics. I hadn’t bothered at that point to get health insurance, and the visit cost me thirty five thousand dollars. I’ll never grow a nail there again.

I began to hear about mishaps with the other girls too: minor broken bones, sprained ankles, torn ligaments. Nobody was losing limbs, yet, but we’d all suffered from some serious, and costly, mishap.

And then the losses mounted. We drifted apart as the tragedies piled on.

By the time my house burned down, I’d lost an art collection to a flooded storage unit, a Cadillac SUV along with three toes and the feeling on the right side of my face, my Grandmother’s pearl ring, a border collie puppy, all the ash trees on my 125 acre property, and my friends.

When I returned home and saw flames rising from the roof, a still, small voice reminded me:

“To keep it, you must give it away.”

So I did. I called my lawyer and asked him to research the land and tell me who it had first belonged to. He uncovered the story of a few families of Black farmers that had once owned and worked a lot of the land in the area, but had been driven out by big banks and big wealth. I found their descendants, and I deeded them the land.

I still had millions left, so I bought more land, and gave it away. I bought a mountain and handed it over to the indigenous tribe that had once lived there. I bought a plantation that was a local tourist spot and wedding venue, and I gave it to the descendants of the enslaved people who once worked there. I did it as quietly as I could, and I set up trusts to make sure taxes and debts couldn’t steal the land away again.

I kept enough to feed myself and pay the rent for a year on a single wide trailer that sat on five acres, not too far from where my first house had been. I got a job doing data entry and personal assisting from home. By this point, I didn't go out much, or want much. So I worked, and painted, and gardened.

And I started keeping bees. Once the bees joined me, I stopped ever feeling alone, and my whole world got brighter. I was able to make enough to pay rent, and I started selling honey and beeswax candles at the farmers market. After 5 or 6 years, my landlord got sick. He had wanted to give me the land, since I had been working it, but I asked him to put it in a trust that would allow me to stay, but never own it. I don’t own things anymore.

As far as I know, the other girls all lost it all too. No one still has the money, but they’ve also lost pieces of themselves, literally and figuratively, I suppose. A few did start giving things away. Gemma funded a free health clinic, and now lives quietly on a houseboat her grandfather left her. We keep in touch. Maci never really figured it out, and she messaged me the other day trying to get me into some multi level marketing diet drugs she’s selling. She didn’t seem well.

Elsie didn’t die, but she came very close. A diving accident at the lake on her parent’s land has taken her mostly away.

________

I don’t do spells anymore, but I do pray.

I call upon the earth, the air,

The rain, and fire bright.

I call upon the birds, the bees,

The stones, the candle light.

I know that I am made for this,

To work, to toil, to earn.

I ask for peace to fill this place,

And that it will not burn.