A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

dug her finger into its skin. Red juice seeped out, and I flashed back to my first ceremony: the knife in the base of my thumb, the red spilling from my hand. A full-body shiver passed through me.

Margot closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, thinking—I assumed—of her mother. Then she tore the fruit open and held it to her mouth. A trickle of juice—scarlet, the color richer than it should have been in the darkness—traced its way down her throat as she tilted her head back. She straightened up, her eyes glittering, and handed the fruit on to the next person.

I was feeling strange, light-headed, almost a little drunk, and I looked around the circle to see if anyone else’s eyes were too bright. Something glowed at the edge of my vision and I narrowed my eyes to bring it into focus: a patch of mushrooms at the edge of the clearing. They seemed to glow in the firelight, their white tops pulsing. A suspicion hit me.

“Vy,” I whispered, leaning over to her as the women passed the pomegranate down the circle.

“What?”

“Was that normal tea, the stuff you gave me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you put something in it?”

Vy stared at me, one pale eyebrow traveling very slowly up her forehead and back down again. Then she gave me the strangest look—I think it was supposed to be a mischievous smile but it came out like a grimace?—and turned back to the circle, accepting the pomegranate from Tara for her own bite. The other women looked on, their eyes blinking in slow motion.

I’d never done a drug besides pot because I was generally a wuss, present circumstances excluded. But I’d written an article for Quill once about people getting high and going to see bad movies, and I’d read up extensively on all sorts of drugs for research. Shrooms had a bitter taste. They were often brewed into tea, and they distorted things—textures, colors, emotions.

Had Vy laced the tea with fucking shrooms? That unreadable, potentially sociopathic asshole. But there was nothing I could do about it now except go with it. And if I were going on a trip, at least it wasn’t a bad one. No nightmare panic. The fire, the women, my own hands in front of me—everything just looked more beautiful.

Vy handed the pomegranate to me and I tore open a new patch of skin. The seeds glistened, droplets of juice from the other women’s bites quivering on the fresh, untouched sections. Almost without realizing it, I put my fingers to my necklace, staining my skin beneath with the pomegranate juice. My mother’s face flashed into my mind. God, I wish you were here, I thought. Then I bit into the fruit, and the seeds burst in my mouth.

Vy threw another log on the fire. Margot began to hum something that I didn’t recognize. Vy joined in, and their voices vibrated together, traveling through the air and into my body, where they made a strumming, a thrumming, inside of me.

This time, I was the first to lift my robe off, my arms prickling in the cold as the others followed. I’d been clenching my shoulders for months, maybe even years, and they’d finally loosened.

As the music grew around me—the gentle, throaty voices weaving with the crackle of the fire, the crickets chirping their own contributions, the rustle of the leaves our steady drumbeat—we all began to dance. And I didn’t lose myself in my own private world, going into my own body as if no one else existed. This time, Margot put her palm up in the air in front of me and I touched mine to hers. We stood there like that for a moment, and then we began to move, together, as if we knew exactly where the other one was going to turn.

Then we were all dancing together, joining hands, breaking apart, circling. We were gliding and graceful, the fire beating hot on our naked backs. The fall wildflowers at the edge of the clearing—hearty, surviving stalks—opened and closed their petals in time with our breathing. We lay down in the dirt and made angels with our arms and my body was so full of sensation, my heart was so full of bliss.

I understood that to be a woman in the world was to spend so much time trying to act the right way. Be loud enough, but not too loud. Stand up for yourself, but pleasantly. Beauty was everything, but you shouldn’t rely on your looks. Always, always I was trying to get it right, to find the balance, but here around this circle, naked but not sexualized, together we could flail and scream and open ourselves raw without worrying about anything else at all. We were powerful and free, and I felt like I had when I went skinny-dipping for the first time: I was moving through something larger than myself, but also I was a part of it, no barriers between us.

Time slowed down and then sped up again. Margot handed Iris her lantern, and a few of the women made their way back toward the cabin for bed. Then Margot took my hand. “Come with me,” she said, and led me to the other side of the fire from where the remaining women danced.

“Hi,” she said, and smiled at me.

“Hi,” I said, and smiled back.

She let go of my hand and moved her fingers very slowly until they rested on my necklace. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

FORTY-TWO

What?” I asked as a roaring in my ears started, like ocean waves. “I don’t—”

“You must have called her, and now she’s here,” Margot said. “I can’t stop it.”

And then her eyes went unfocused for a moment, as if she were in a kind of trance. When they focused on me again, they were different. Instead of Margot’s appraising, languid gaze, her eyes looked out