This scene shows Snyder’s approach to horror in Wytches. He’s using childhood fears, be it of a bully or of something strange in the nearby forest, and suddenly making it adult- the bully has a gun and the strangeness in the forest turns out to be horrific, yes, but something that forces you to radically change your social life because everyone blames the incident on you. The fears of childhood are being matched with the fears of adolescence and the fears of adulthood.
I’ve learned and mastered the skill of ignoring inappropriate statements and questions like these. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, so I can just brush it off as I always do even though I feel nearly powerless and weak. I can’t answer their questions or assertions or else I will become a joke that they will mock. Helpless.
They expect me to show proof that I’ve exhausted absolutely every other option before accepting the orientation as true for me. It only exists as a last-resort diagnosis—given, of course, under the authority of someone they trust—and even then, I probably ought to be trying to cover it up or at least not talking about it publicly. If asexuality became a thing we could all accept as part of our reality for a minority of people, well, then asexual people might start recruiting and nobody would have babies anymore.
I picked the route that would take me through places like Kansas and Idaho. Those places can become somber, desolate collections of crumbling small towns very, very quickly, but at least the landscape changes to a certain degree. Even someone who feels a legitimate spiritual connection to the desert is going to find themselves wishing for something, anything that doesn’t resemble the background of a goddamn Roadrunner cartoon, if they go through the entire American southwest by car or bus.
The kind of life I liked to lead on the road is the kind of thing that’s cute when you’re nineteen. When you’re twenty-nine, you start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, you’ve wasted your entire goddamn life. After getting back from Denver, I had to deal with this question. I also had to decide if traveling at a near-constant rate was really something I enjoyed as much as I used to.
Geoff listened intently. He spoke English to me, keeping his voice at a normal conversational volume. “She’s not a hooker,” he said. “Not yet. But he wants her to be.”
My father took everything from me. He had his vision of who I should be: a Christian, straight A student, warrior, black man. It was a noble vision, but to shape it, my father undermined everything that I was, took everything that didn’t bring me closer to his vision and erased it. He erased me.
The lack of power and the pursuit of it have defined my life. In truth, we all have power, for we all have choice. It took me a long time to understand that, so I was like the beggar in the old Buddhist parable. The story goes: a man lost his fortune and had to live in the street with nothing but his clothes and a coat his father had willed him. He spent his days begging for food until one day a man asked him why he was begging. The beggar, of course, explained that he had no choice. A Zen-style dialogue unfolds between the two, and by the end of the conversation, the beggar has discovered a priceless jewel sewn into the lining of his father’s coat. The beggar had been rich all along; he just didn’t know it.
My husband and I are rebuilding our house, which was destroyed in a fire a year and a half ago. You could say it was my fault. Before the fire, I insisted on renovating my husband’s bathroom, turning it into a spa-like space with a steam shower, mosaic glass tiles, and a waterfall tap. He said, “Why bother? It is perfectly good as it is.”
My father said he wanted a boy. I remember hearing this when I was young—maybe six years old—standing in the Grill Room at the country club. I was most likely wearing Bermuda shorts, a cotton collared shirt, and sandals in a “Kennedy-esque” style, which was my mother’s preference.