As he had kissed her neck, she could not repress the feeling she was a lamb making time with a wolf.

If he had to spend the evening with madwomen, he would prefer at least one of them be willing to let him grope her.

Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of...

Once everyone thought you were crazy, they ignored you even when you told the truth.

They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities.

Humanity expects there to be vast conspiracies, even if they will not admit it in polite company. It is understood shadowy conspirators must thereby be somewhere.

enough people disagree with what Jesus is to prevent Him from…from manifesting, as such. And billions don’t believe He existed at all. He is a legend, a myth. A Jewish carpenter people ignore while committing...

Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their...

She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.

College is a blossoming new world of genital opportunity.

He’s very good at chaining girls. He can make cold steel feel like silk.

Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one’s guard to be offered sex under the...

Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers...

Opening her mouth to take a bite seemed forward. Chewing? Obscene. Mutual mastication was out of the question.

We’re not mad,” he began, meaning he was. He was always a plural when mad, as though grammatically throwing his lot in with her mother gave him the power of her authority.

My mother buys a handful of wishing beans, which just seem to be white, dry beans with no specific magickal import. She will parse these out over the months when she feels her family members...

That these people are wandering around, looking for aliens to justify the emptiness inside them and let them feel special without effort, creeps me out.

The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.

Everyone you meet is an aspect of the gods and has a lesson to teach you.

When I see the moon on a clear night, I do say “blessed be” and I remind myself to be grateful to the universe that I happen to exist in such a lovely and wondrous...

They act as if their religion were a celestial gumball machine, taking no blame for personal failures because they won’t manifest their will in the real world by working for their goals.

Despite what novels implied, vampirism did not make stalking sexy.

The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word.

Being certain one is alive isn’t something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin.

My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.

Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.

Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.

…He sounded as though he had just seen The Pokey Little Puppy meet the business end of The Little Engine That Could.

None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it’s the little facts that make us.

Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other… The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists… So, I chose to believe in magic.

You look like something the cat coughed up, dragged through dirt, ate, and coughed up again.

The whole concept of some stranger making his way down our chimney – not that we had one – suggested burglary more readily than generosity. Any Santa who tried it would have gotten a bullet...

Nothing in my beliefs tells me to let my relationship with the divine interfere with romantic love, the friction of sects never getting in the way of the friction of sex.

If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words.

I honor the divine on a daily basis, but I want to know that the greatest magick in my life is living authentically with what I have and can do.

They had perfected their team nagging to a level where they no longer had to confer and felt they would be wasting their talents if they only admonished their own children.

He regarded Huginn as only slightly more dangerous than most pets, in that he understood why people had pets but harbored the paranoia they would one day eat their owners. True, it kept Eliot from...

Mythology didn’t cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology.

You were abducted by space aliens. Of course you want egg rolls.

She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.

Holding fantasy to our chests only means our hands are not free to work.

In this decaying world, these moments with her help keep me sane.

He was a fixture of the New Paltz community, an inexplicable light switch in the new apartment that definitely turns something on but you can’t quite say what. You flick it whenever you get home...

The vampire community has enough problems. We don’t need to add petty backbiting to it.

Adolescence impelled her eyes to stay at an even keel, to deal with the ground before flickering to the heavens. Night became not dotted with fairy clouds of celestial brilliance, but simply the time when...

Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.

There weren’t always happy endings and children would do well to know that vile things could happen to them, that witches and wolves were desperate to steal them should they be disobedient or foolish or...

I have long seen my spirituality as personal, to the degree that I harbor a slight mistrust for anyone who practices similarly. It is as though they are admitting to have on the same cut...

There are three people in your life: your great love, the one you want to have children with, and the one whom you can spend the rest of your life with. If you find that...

Magic was not in glitter and sparks. Real magic didn’t need to be.