The Sacrifice

I liked the woman looking back at me. She looked more worldly and confident.

The only remnants of the witch in the woods seemed to be the blue of my half-moon tattoo and my long, dark hair.

Finished, I moved onto the clothing selections, finding myself perhaps more baffled than I had been about the makeup which, at least, explained itself on the packaging.

Clothing had always been simple in my coven. We wore gowns—lightweight linen in the summer and heavy wool in the winter—and cloaks. If we were especially cold in the winter, we had stockings to slip under our gowns.

We didn't wear undergarments save for when our sacred moontime arrived, making us use thick pads of fabric between our legs.

So this strange collection of clothing had me using basic reasoning skills to figure out.

The piece that baffled me most was two circular bits of lacy fabric with a black lining, two straps, and a band around the bottom.

Eventually, though, I figured it—and its troubling clasps—out, finding it supportive, if a bit restrictive.

A breast covering.

For modesty, I imagined.

That was something that had never been an issue in the coven. With no men around, there was nothing to feel modest about. We all had the same parts, more or less. And we faced nothing to fear from showing those parts of ourselves.

But in this world, where men and women mingled, I imagined modesty was necessary to avoid the unwanted attention of the base of menfolk, the type we were warned about with grave voices, our elders telling us the ways in which a man's body could hurt a woman, how some human men were hardly better than wild beasts.

Regardless of the restriction—and the unpleasant cultural associations with regard to it— I liked the garment. It showed off my stomach, the flare of my hip.

It felt daring, sexy.

Going back to the clothing, I found what, by process of elimination, I figured was a skirt. Even if I had never seen one so short or made of such material before. It was black, thin, stiff, and strangely shiny. When I slipped it up my legs, it only managed to fall about halfway down my thigh.

Digging through the remaining bags, I found sprays that smelled chemical and flowery at the same time. Choosing the one the smelled the most like an actual flower—lavender—I sprayed some on my mostly-bare chest before going back into the bags to find some strange foaming product in a can and a razor. A razor, at least, I was familiar with. We used them to shave the heads of the sisters who aimed to become more devoted to the gods, the women who lived fully in the woods, without shelter, without having their daughters, their entire lives dedicated to the land, to their studies of it, and to their spirituality.

And I knew from one of Ace's books about 'feminism' that women in this modern world had started to shave off nearly all of their body hair.

Looking at myself in the large mirror, I could see the hair on my legs that had been allowed to grow as it did naturally my whole life. The same was true under my arms. Between my legs.

Not wanting to be seen as backward, not wanting to stand out, I slipped back out of my skirt, went into the shower to get wet as the directions demanded, and put the foaming product up and down my legs, under my arms, and between my thighs. Then I working the razor blade across my skin.

When I was done, there was blood everywhere. On my skin. In the shower. On the floor as I walked back out, slipping back into the skirt as I tried to think of a way to stop the bleeding when I didn't have any of my usual remedies around.

"What the fuck are you wearing?" Ly asked, voice a strange, low hiss, sounding oddly airless.

"The clothes you brought me," I supplied, waving an arm toward the bags. "Will I not fit in?" I asked, brows furrowing.

"Fuck," he said, sighing, raking a hand through his hair. "You will," he told me.

"Then what's wrong?"

"Here. Just... you need this," he told me, brushing past me to go toward the bags when, suddenly, his nose scrunched up as he sniffed the air, his gaze shooting down to the floor. "Are you bleeding?" he asked. "Did you hurt yourself?" he demanded, grabbing my arm, and yanking me around.

"Oh, I, uhm... I tried the razor," I admitted, feeling the heat rise up my neck, blooming across my cheeks. "It was my first time," I added as his gaze slid to my legs, seeing the blood.

"Christ. You cut yourself more than you didn't," he grumbled, dropping down to a crouch, calloused palm grabbing the back of my calf so he could inspect my cuts.