the lord is my shepherd

13. you get famous and wixmart wants to make a drawstring doll in your likeness;  what are the three catchphrases your toy parrots

Violet’s heart stuttered to a stop for a few seconds, she was sure of it, and then it spluttered back into life, hammering hard in her chest. Her awkward feet stopped dancing— if it could have been called that. Many things seemed to crack inside her at once, the dam bursting without warning. It felt like a flood alright, many thoughts hitting Violet all at once. 

First, that she had never told anyone she was a witch before feeling joy about the face. It was so much worse now to have that joy snatched away than it had been to not feel it so long. When was the last time she had felt it? When was the last time she had felt anything other than anger and pain and hate? Some feelings were best left under stones you didn’t turn over; Violet knew now joy was one of them. 

Second, that she hadn’t found a friend here. How foolish she felt to have let her guard down, to have put her hands in this stranger’s and danced with her. To have revelled in not being alone, isolated in a sea of people who didn’t know or understand her. Subconsciously she wiped her hands on her the dark denim covering her legs, as though she might be able to clean something dirty off them. She’d scrub them later when she got home. 

Third, Violet thought she wouldn’t stand and fight here. Her cheeks burned with unexpected shame. Maybe it was her who was the dirty one. Her usual fight had burned out of her in an instant. Her tough words vanished on her tongue. Instead, she sucked in a harsh breath of surprise and pain, stumbling over her own feet as she stepped backwards, trying to put as much space between and Aoife as she could. 

Her “Oh,” when she said it was flat and quiet, almost lost in the vastness of the landscape around them. Later she might kick herself that she didn’t ask why, to try and understand why Aoife had reacted how she did. Now her mind went to all the flyers she had seen around, put up by the overtly religious Anti Magic Coalition, adding two and two and making four; later she would wonder how a girl so caring of a flock of mooncalves could be a part of that. For now, all she wanted to do was leave. And she did just that, without saying another word. 

Violet’s lips turned upwards at their edges. Despite everything wrong in the world, everything wrong in her world, human nature still managed to awe her. So complicated, yet so breathtakingly simple. Strands of threads linked them all. “I think we all did that. What kid didn’t wish magic was real and they could do it? I used to pretend I could move stuff just with my mind. Telekinesis, I think that’s called.” Of course, now the whole world knew magic was real. And Violet’s childhood dream had come true; she could do magic. None of it had come true like she had hoped, but it had all come true. She didn’t want to fester in hatred of it for the rest of her life. 

It was why she looked up at Aoife as she spun in the moonlight and said, “I am one.” She waited with baited breath for Aoife’s reaction.

.

Aoife wasn’t sure she’d heard Violet right at first. Over the sound of the calves mooing soft and deep as they danced and the swishing of her own skirt and stamping of her feet, Violet could have said a great deal many things, possibly. Aoife struggled to think of what they might be. She missed a beat, tripped a little, righted herself but when she went into the next turn she took the dance slower. Her skirt felt heavier in her hands. 

I am too! she thought. I am too! The words were so small even Aoife, who had never been taught to read, shouldn’t have struggled with them. Yet she did. Because she had never said them aloud before. I am a witch. She couldn’t be one. She wasn’t allowed to be one. Aoife thought of all the terrible things she’d endured because of her brother’s sexuality. His! “Just in case.” If there was a hierarchy of damnable offenses she imaged her Mammy struggled not to place witchcraft above murder. Homosexuality was somewhere around the middle—a fun new sin for when patricide and witchcraft had become less frequent in the Muggle world. She’d suffered for that one, what would Aoife endure if they found out she was the worst thing of all in their minds? A witch. 

Later that night, in a bedroom she shared with a handful of brothers and sisters, Aoife would lay on her side in the dark staring hard at the knot in the closet door’s wood until she could forcibly will herself not to cry. If she cried, someone would hear. And if someone heard, they’d tell someone else, and then everyone would know that something was wrong with Aoife, again. 

But that was later. Now, she had to say the thing that would later bring her to stoppered tears. “I wish ye wouldn’t have told me t’at.” Which was, admittedly, a very terrible thing to say. Aoife knew that, and she felt very terrible saying it. It was the truth though, because she had really liked getting to know Violet. She had imagined what it would be like to finally have a friend. Someone who would come to sit in the garden with her, and someone to bring to dinner, and someone to go places outside of Ballycastle with.

Now Violet had to be another secret, and Aoife had just been so relieved by the weight that had lifted from the last. Somehow, knowing what it felt like not to carry it made it that much more unbearable to pick it up and bear it again now. It was a shame she didn’t explain all that, because then the terrible words she had said might have felt and sounded less terrible. But she didn’t. It was a shame, but she didn’t. She couldn’t explain it without also explaining it hadn’t been pretend for her either. She hadn’t learned how to speak about that yet though.

“Oh, fucking hell,” Violet said, as she looked at that two hands proffered out to her. She didn’t say it meanly, just with a sort of begrudging resignation because there was no way - or no kind way - to say no to Aoife when she thrummed with energy, or when her smile split her face. She put her hands into Aoife’s and let herself be hauled out. “Neither of us know the moves, but you’ve at least been watching them do it half your life.” Violet had never seen them dance, only seen terrible diagrams in a book that couldn’t possibly encapsulate what it was they actually did. 

Still, maybe it was enough just to stand here with Aoife, and let herself be pulled about. Violet didn’t think it was as much about the dance as it was excitement. Questions burned within her as she tried clumsily to follow what the mooncalves were doing, nipping at her loneliness. “What else do you know about magic?” Was it just this— a chance encounter with magical creatures— or was it more?

.

“Ye don’t have ter know the moves,” Aoife insisted, feet hitting the ground with some rhythm but not much as they spun in the moonlight. “Ye just have ter be willin’ to keep messin’ up til somethin’ feels right.”

“I know a little about them magic phones.” She could say more, she could say all the things she had been taught about magic, which were numerous and exhausting. Violet would be here listening for days if Aoife listed off all the things she’d been taught about magic. That wasn’t what Violet had asked though; she’d asked what Aoife knew. “I know... sometimes when I was little, I used ter pretend I could do it when no one was watchin’. Even fooled meself into thinkin’ it worked sometimes.” 

Aoife was blushing; it was scary to admit. Half of her expected Violet to run to the church and tattle on her, by tomorrow morning Aoife would be sent away to another camp. But that was her Muggle half. Aoife’s magic half knew the truth. She could trust this person; God would want her to have faith, and to believe the best of people. Even near strangers. No, especially near strangers. 

Even as Aoife spoke, Violet couldn’t take her eyes off the creatures. She felt as thought if she did, a spell would be broken. The magic would fade. It was with that thought that laughter bubbled up inside of her, desperate to be freed, joyful when it was. She clapped a hand over her mouth to quiet the noise of it, so that the mooncalves wouldn’t be startled. She laughed because the magic wouldn’t fade. It was hers to keep. To hold, and to shape, and to love. For the very first time, she didn’t hate it. She had never hated it really; it was everything else she had hated. But it had been easy to blame magic for all her problems. What she realised now, as she watched the mooncalves begin their ritual dance, was magic was beautiful. A gift that had been given to her. 

“I know your mooncalves,” Violet whispered. “Not like this, just from books I’ve been studying. A picture of them is really different.” No words could have described this feeling. It struck her then to ask, “How long have you known about them?” She had the feeling there was too much trust in this relationship for it to be new; there was something loving about it, old and ancient. 

.

“Woah.” The word was a breath she released, and with it something else left Aoife too. Something heavy, that she’d carried like a millstone around her neck all her life. The mooncalves were never her secret because she hadn’t wanted to share them. They were her secret because she had no one in her life that she could share them with; no one who would see anything but evil in them, when they were the farthest things from. “I’ve known ‘em half me life,” she confessed.  

She felt so light with this knowledge out in the world and no longer weighing her down that she sprung to her feet as if pulled by strings from Heaven itself. Her skirt hung loose around her feet, and Aoife bent at the waist holding two hands out to Violet. “Will ye dance wit’ me like one of ‘em?” Her smile was wider than the moon low in the sky. 

A finger held to lips is a universally understood gesture, thank goodness, because it meant it was with the barest sound or breath even that Violet twisted her head. It took her a moment in the darkness to realise what she was seeing and then her eyes adjusted to the light of the moon and she took the creatures in. Long necked, webbed feet, big, bulging eyes. Violet knew what these were. She spent so much time in libraries studying, desperate not to be the uneducated outsider, and she had come across them more than once. It was strange to see in person a creature that looked like it had come out of a book of fairy tales. In a way, she supposed they had. 

Violet whispered back, voice laced with surprise and wonder. “These are magical creatures.” And then, without thinking, she added, “They’ll start dancing soon.” There was only one likely way she would know that. 

.

It took Aoife a considerable amount of time to reply. First, because her brain was working very hard to put all the pieces together, and second because she realized why she’d been nervous. It was because a part of her had always felt like maybe none of it was real. Maybe she was out of touch, mad, not quite right in the head like her family seemed to think. A part of her had been bracing for Violet to turn around and see nothing. 

Instead, not only had she confirmed that Aoife’s calves were real, but she knew what they were. Given the Statute’s fall Aoife shouldn’t have been surprised. But she was. It accounted for half of how silly the next words out of her mouth were. “Ye know me mooncalves?” It was only luck -- and because they’d been aptly named by CoMC experts -- that Aoife had been calling them by the right thing all along, since by design she knew next to nothing about the magic world, despite being very much a part of it from birth. 

If there was anything Violet could understand, it was that. That crushing fear of being cast out, abandoned. Cut off from everything you’ve ever known. She was living it herself now. There was no right way to dive headfirst into that, no easy way. It was something you had to do in baby steps. “Maybe it’s okay for now if you know, somewhere inside yourself. A secret. Just for you and God.” It didn’t feel right to say if they didn’t love her no matter what, they didn’t deserve her. Not tonight anyway. That was too much at once. 

.

A secret. She knew what her Mammy would say about a secret. That it was as good as a lie. Secrets were there currency the devil dealt in, or something like that. (Never mind that Mrs. O’Connor had plenty of her own). 

But Aoife thought of her secrets. Her magic, her mooncalves... Aoife’s secrets were the things in her life that made her happiest. They were the things in her life that really, truly made her feel close to God. How could that be wrong? Aoife smiled, big teeth biting into her bottom lip as the grin split her face wide. And then, when behind Violet she caught sight of something in the moonlight she’d been waiting to see, it grew impossibly wider. 

Aoife brought a finger up to her lips. Shh, the gesture meant. And then every so slowly, she nodded for Violet to turn around. There, in the field among the sheep, was something peculiar. Odd, and maybe even ugly with it’s long neck, short body, and bulging eyes. It was startling to look at, and it was beautiful. 

“This’s been me job since I was fifteen,” Aoife told Violet, voice barely above a whisper. “They only ever come when the moon’s full and low like this.” Aoife was nervous, but she didn’t know why. Even though they’d only met, she knew she could trust Violet to appreciate the mooncalves for their beauty without disturbing their peace.

“Wot d'you think, silly?” Niamh giggled at her sister’s silliness. Aoife always saw things just so and it was with a certain sense of wonder that Niamh loved about her. 

Niamh bleated back though sounding not nearly as good. “I’d love you just the same if you were a sheep.”

.

“Good.” She began to dance around the younger O’Connor. “Because at the full moon I’m going to turn into— OW!” Mrs. O’Connor grabbed Aoife by the arm and yanked her off stage, frothing and spitting her distaste at that perverse devil worshipping nonsense she dared utter in a house of God and shouldn’t she be ashamed she had better go home and clean the kitchen and ask the lord for forgiveness for even thinking such a vile thing and then to say it aloud! In a church! In front of Niamh! Was she trying to corrupt the family youth!?

Aoife did not bring it up again. 

Violet let these words wash over her, quiet for a few minutes as she stared out into the ever growing darker landscape. She had spent the last year being told she was all wrong. And if she wasn’t being told it explicitly, she was being made to feel it, turned away from jobs and friendships, kept alone in her rubbish flat, othered. She knew what that felt like, how it gnawed away at you until you started to think maybe it was true; maybe there was something fundamentally wrong with you. When she spoke, it was out into the darkness, so big and empty it echoed slightly. “I don’t think it sounds right. I don’t think a god would make anyone his punching bag in order to show them the right way. I wonder if you took all those other voices who claim to know better than you, what he’d really be saying to you.” 

Violet let the silence fall for another moment before the rest came out in a great rush, all heat and passion. “’Cause you know, God is for you. And everyone else,” - Violet’s hand cut through the growing night, only just visible, - “but what I mean is, it’s your relationship with him. It’s meant to be personal. It’s what you feel and hear from him when you’re sitting here in this beautiful spot with your sheep. He’ll tell you what your path is, not everyone else and their barbs and fists.” Metaphorical fists or not. 

“Doesn’t he love you no matter what? Have you ever thought they might be wrong?”

.

She didn't know why she admitted this secret now, to Violet. No, on second thought she did know why. It was the passion she spoke with. Aoife found it hard to look away. It was like magic. She spoke magic. So she did know why she admitted it. And it would not be the last secret she shared with her before the night ran out, either. 

"I do think that sometimes." Her hands folded and unfolded the uneven pleats of Aoife's skirt. “That they’re not...” —Aoife struggled with the word wrong, precisely— “exactly right. About all of it.” 

For a moment she fumbled with this. A nearby sheep butted at her shoulder and it made her smile through the hard moment. “But if everyone’s sayin’ it, how could they all be wrong?” Aoife already knew the answer to that though. It only took one shepherd to lead a flock to slaughter. Now the truth came out. “I wouldn’t know who I was if they didn’t love me anymore.” And if they knew, they wouldn’t. “I don’t think they would if I told ‘em they was wrong.”

Violet’s eyebrow quirked. She didn’t know a lot about Aoife’s God, but she didn’t think she liked the sound of him. The sentiment was nice, in a superficial sort of way she supposed, but the idea that forgiveness was what brought you closer to God made Violet feel a bit funny. She’d always believed the only person you had to live with was yourself; it was when you couldn’t forgive the things you’d done you were fucked. She didn’t like the idea of a God who enacted judgement and handed out forgiveness based on an arbitrary set of rules. Her relationship with her god was different; a spiritual presence, a loose guide, rather than judge, jury and executioner. Violet wondered who was hiding beneath the Aoife who didn’t have to worry about such things. She stared hard into the girl’s face, searching. But whatever was there, she couldn’t find. In the end, she said, “And who’s decided they know better than you? God?” That didn’t sound like her god either. 

Violet nodded. She stored the question away, ready to be answered later. Getting to know someone— the words turned over in her mind, strange and terrifying and thrilling all at once. Something she wanted to run from and dig her heels in to hold on to as hard as she could. She hadn’t got to know anyone here. “To be continued, then,” she said. 

.

Aoife shook her head. “Oh no,” she laughed off, “He knows better’n all of us. My Mammy decided so, is who. And she’s usually right.” She wasn’t, but Aoife didn’t know that. How could she possibly know her gay son was no less gay just because he pretended not to be and had married a woman. Like so many other things Aoife believed her parents, and siblings, and pastor were right about, it was really only a tale. She was seeing the band-aid and assuming all beneath was fixed and right. 

“I trust ‘em,” she finished by saying. With gentle hands she gestured out towards her flock. “Everyone needs a little steerin’ into the right direction now and then. I trust in my Shepherds, that they know better’n me sometimes what the good’n right path is.”

“What’s that like?” Violet asked curiously, only because she couldn’t imagine any of it; having loads of siblings, having a twin, a house full of girls. Growing up, there had been only her and her mum to take up space, fill out rooms. When she was little, it hadn’t felt hard to do. But once her mum became sick, it was a chore. Silence echoed through the suddenly much emptier rooms. The house grew listless and dull with Violet’s mother. She stared hard at Aoife now, thinking again how opposite they were. “Why do you let yourself be other people’s punching bag?” Did the words sound cruel? Maybe. But they weren’t intended as such. 

There were many answers Violet could give to that question. That she came from a place the world was more than happy to forget. That her dad had vanished in a magician’s poof, there one second and gone the next. That poverty had meant she’d needed to work to help pay a mounting pile of bills. That her mother was dying so they’d come here, where treatment was better and free. 

Violet couldn’t say any of those things though, not yet. Was it because the girl sitting in front of her was still a stranger she couldn’t? Perhaps not. Weren’t strangers always easier to spill your secrets to? Was it because something about Aoife and her kind face and her beautiful sheep scared Violet? That was more likely, but she still didn’t think that was the reason. More likely, it was a lack of practice. A mouth so unused to making the shape of those words. She had to try not to giggle as she imagined herself suddenly, standing in front of a mirror, practicing how to say those things the same way others did affirmations. 

Violet brought her knees up to her chest now, resting her chin on them. The boniness of them, borne from more meals missed than she could count, jutted uncomfortably into it. She ignored this. It was an easier discomfort to deal with. “Can I tell you another time?”

.

Aoife didn’t really think about her answer before she gave it. She didn’t really have to. “I think it helps ye be closer to God, havin’ all ‘em siblings wit’ ye all hours of the day. Ye have to forgive a lot more when ye have so many different people living wit’ ye. Love gets a little uglier. Not like the pictures. Just... people, bein’ ugly wit’ each other.” Aoife laughed. She didn’t have the word for irony at her disposal, so she just said: “It’s kinda beautiful, in’t that funny?”

The laugher tapered off, her smile did too. Fewer of her teeth shone their crooked charm against the moonlight. “’Cause they know better’n I do.” It was such a simple admission, but it said a lot about her. 

Maybe it didn’t matter now - time took so many bothers away - but Violet still said, “Sounds like he could have done with a punch on his nose.” If she had been there, the one being splashed with mud, she’d have done it too. But Aoife was the opposite of her, soft lines against hard ones. If Violet was the thorn, Aoife was the rose. She shook her head though, no. “Just me and my mum.” Her dad had absconded before there’s been any chance of a sibling, following which there wasn’t exactly time for her mum to try and meet someone. Every second was spent trying to make ends meet, to give Violet as much as possible. And then once she was old enough to get a job herself to pitch in so her mum could relax a little, well. Then came the cough that wouldn’t go, the inexplicable weight loss, the exhaustion, and the unending doctors appointments. Winona had given the first part of her life to her daughter, the second part to cancer. 

It was less of a surprise to Violet than Aoife might have thought. Growing up on the reservation, isolated away from access to public schooling, had meant options were limited as far as education was concerned. She knew more people who hadn’t finished school than had. Not that she’d have wanted to go to a public school if she could; she knew someone who had and the bullying had soon made him drop out. What Violet knew of Charles Darwin she had read in a library after she and her mother had moved here, chasing the boredom and loneliness away when she wasn’t working or sitting in a hospital waiting room. Dropping out of school herself had perhaps been a stupid choice, but it was also an easy one, the blame of which didn’t lay on her shoulders, but the government’s. Whatever education issues there were on reservations scattered around Canada could be followed back to them. “I didn’t graduate school,” she told Aoife. 

.

“I have more siblings than I can count.” Aoife laughed, because it was true. “Jed, he’s me twin brother, he’s the only boy out of the whooooole big bunch of us. And I was always in trouble for him.” She started to laugh again. “Sometimes I still am.” Less now that he ‘wasn’t gay’. 

“So the girls are punished for a boy’s behaviour? Sounds fair,” Violet said brightly. It also sounded par for the course. How often in history had that happened? “It’s funny, that you don’t know him. I thought everyone learned about him in school.” 

.

Aoife snorted, one part surprise one part delight for her new friend’s boldness. “Ye have any brothers?” Aoife was always getting yelled at for her brother’s missteps. “Maybe if they’d said sommat to him rather than us Charlie Quigley wouldn’t’a spent the next four years splashing me wit’ mud from his bike every time it rained.” And in Ballycastle, is almost always rained. “But, that don’t matter much now.” Aoife didn’t say it in the way some people did, just to gloss over the bad parts of life in order to make conversation more comfortable. It really didn’t matter to her anymore. She forgave Charles Quigley his sins cause that’s what the Lord would want her to do. He was just a person like any other.  

A bubble of laughter curled up from Violet’s stomach and scattered across the sheep. Not unkind laughter by any means, but it was funny. “I’m not talking about if people fancy a sheep. That’s between sheep and Manitou, quite frankly, and not for me to think about.” She gazed across at Brandywine, only thinking her agreement; she was beautiful, but only in the pastoral sense. “Do you not know who Charles Darwin is?” 

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Her face said it all but that didn’t stop her mouth from helping it out. “The only Charles I know is Charles Quigley down the lane who shoved two tampons up his nose at Sunday School and now the church isn’t allowed to stock them in the loos no more. And that was eons ago now, mind ye.”

“Yeah,” Violet nodded, as she let her legs stretch out luxuriously ahead of her, feeling as though the whole world rested against the soles of her boots. It might be nothing to some, but for her, this was freedom, unbridled and glorious. Up here, the world spread out in front of her. Gone were the constraints of the magical world; gone were the claustrophobic walls of her tiny flat. It was all space. “Like it’s become ingrained now, over time. They just instinctively know, ‘cause it’s what they’ve always known. Survival of the fittest and all that.” 

.

Well of course sweet, sheltered Aoife didn’t know a thing about Charles Darwin or his theories. So she had to be forgiven for the misunderstanding that came next. “I think a sheep’s as beautiful a creature as any of God’s creations, but I don’t know I’d call any of ‘em fit particularly.” Their vibe was generally asexual and lazy, there was no iteration of the word “fit” as Aoife understood it that constituted a sheep. “Pardon me, Brandywine,” she addressed the grazing sheep nearest them. “I meant ye’re very beautiful and graceful.” Brandywine’s bleat was unimpressed. She turned around and began to graze elsewhere. 

Violet had come armed with her sketchbook, of course. If she was going to be sitting outside somewhere looking down at sheep, there was no doubt she would get the urge to sketch, even if people were usually her forte. It was lucky she wasn’t going to spook the sheep, given she hadn’t been trying to be particularly quiet. “I’ve walked through fields of sheep to know they’re not very jumpy,” was her greeting. She dropped down onto the grass, none too worried about if it was muddy or not. Since she was little she had never minded a little dirt. “Do you think it’s built into their DNA to only move when a sheepdog comes at them?” 

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Aoife didn’t know much about DNA. In fact, she didn’t know much about science at all. Nor magic, for that matter. In a way they were the same thing to her, each as innate to her being, each as forbidden. 

“Ye mean like... they can’t help it?”