#hag's day out

[banisheed]

TIMING: 1942 + Current; after MYSELF I MUST REMAKE LOCATION: Saol Eile, Ireland CONTENT WARNINGS: Unsanitary tw, Self harm tw (one-line reference to banshee specific training) SUMMARY: Putrecia has a "solution" for Siobhan.

“I’m not going back, am I?” Siobhan asked

1942 || Ó Dúbhláin Estate; Siobhan's family house.

"I heard Putrecia was a beauty in her glory days." Siobhan swung her long legs wide, kicking them up on the kitchen table. The manure crusted between the ridges of her sole knocked lose, raining pebbles across her grandmother's lovingly—Siobhan called it loving the way a butcher calls a vegetarian "pleasant"—crocheted tablecloth. She thought the tablecloth was trite; she thought most things were trite.

"No!" Orla leaned across the table, pulling the dry ends of her wavy blonde hair out of her mouth long enough to speak. At twelve years old, Orla was hopeless: practically an adult and barely coping with the loss of her pacifier. Siobhan was constantly telling her that she looked like a cow, chewing on her straw hair and blinking with her big brown eyes. "I thought she was born old! She looks like she was born old."

Siobhan liked her cousin about as much as she liked her grandmother's attempts at art. The tablecloth supposedly depicted sunflowers, but it looked more like corn if someone simultaneously forgot basic shapes and was allergic to the use of a single color. "You mean ugly; she looks like she was born ugly." Ugly like grandmother's multi-colored flower-adjacent oblongs.

Orla's face scrunched together and Siobhan thought she looked even more like a cow. "Mother, doesn't like the world ugly. She says it's for uncreative people."

Then it was Siobhan's turn in the eternal stage comedy that was interacting with her cousin, to frown. Mother was what Orla called her mother; as in the mother that belonged to her, not Orla. The mother that was to Orla, to be generous, an aunt. But she always said it like that: "mother" in English, as if mocking the strange way Siobhan spoke to hers. Her mother, as in the mother that had birthed her and not Orla, was born and raised in England, not Ireland. Her accent wasn't particularly strong and when speaking to her mother—as in Siobhan's crocheting grandmother—she defaulted to English.

Siobhan dropped her feet from the table, sitting up straighter. Dirt from her boot had stained a few of the multi-colored oblongs, etching the shape of her heel into the fabric. Family was strange: as much as Siobhan hated Orla and wanted to—for example, and not something she had regularly fantasized about—push her out of a conveniently open window, she had to remember that they were related (albeit distantly) and that Orla was twelve (even though when she was twelve, Maeve pushed her out of a window).

A lifetime ago (multiple, in fact), her grandmother ran away. She was found, the way runaways always are, but not before she'd tried to raise three little kids in the north of England. One of them was Siobhan's mother, the other two she didn't ask about. It was better not to talk about the little smears.

Siobhan's great-grandmother—as in the woman who'd given birth to the one that couldn't crochet—always said her daughter had just come to her senses. But it was obvious to anyone that knew Siobhan's grandmother—as in the woman responsible for the fucking tablecloth—for more than a passing second that she didn't have any sense to come back to. "Well, Putrecia's ugly."

Orla was back to sucking on her hair. "I guess so," Orla said. "Is it wrong to be ugly?"

Siobhan pierced a finger between the weaves of the tablecloth, pulling a new hole to join the dozens of others she'd made. "If you have to ask, Orla..." she intoned. At twenty-five years old, Siobhan was perfect and would be for, at most, another forty years.

—

2024 || Putrecia's hut.

There wasn't an answer for Siobhan's question; the silence, she supposed, was the answer. Having just enough sense not to degrade herself by repeating it, she watched Putrecia scratch more letters, seal them up, and stack them into a jagged pile. Every so often, she would lick her dry quill, leaving a streak of black on her tongue. Even more often, she would drip black ink over her workspace or worse, on to a letter. Then she'd lean over into her pile of crinkly, stained rags and uselessly dab at her table.

Siobhan would sooner relive the day her wings were unrooted from her back than compliment Putrecia, but she did have an astonishing amount of patience. For a hag, anyway.

"Do you even remember me?" She asked (it would be less embarrassing to try a new question).

Putrecia didn't answer.

"You called me Sadhbh; that is my mother. You know that, right? You remember us?"

Putrecia licked the end of her quill.

"You have always been ugly," she said.

Even that didn't shake Putrecia from her task. The pile beside her grew until letters rained from the edge. As if satisfied with her sloppy work, Putrecia fell into her chair with a huff, holding up a sheet of paper, dribbling ink onto the floor.

"Ring the bell over there, you gnat." Putrecia coughed and Siobhan, stunned into obedience, rang the old bell handing between animal skins. She waved the soggy paper around. "And take this."

Siobhan plucked the paper from her hands, turning it over and squinting at Putrecia's famous scrawl. When she could work out the words between the ink-stains, fingerprints and cross-outs, she realized it looked like a terrible shopping list. "You want me to run errands for you, Putrecia?" Siobhan was finally what she'd wanted to be for forty-two years: much, much more like the girl—woman—who hadn't lost her wings yet. She believed herself to be better than errands.

Putrecia pulled a handkerchief from the front pocket of her oversized dress and coughed into it. When she looked back up at Siobhan, her hazy eyes seemed a little more clear. It might have just been the sunlight that decided to take that moment to pierce Putrecia's moth-eaten curtains. "I'm getting old," she said, which was never an easy thing for a banshee of Putrecia's age to admit. Siobhan didn't say that she thought Putrecia had been born old (did she think that? Why did someone else come to mind?).

"And that concerns me because...?" Siobhan waved the list around. It sported such darling elements as: leprechaun, golden goose, best worm, big bone.

Putrecia broke into wild laughter and then hacking coughs. "You were so meek when you came in here, no one would recognize you. But like this?" She wheezed into her handkerchief. "Stick your nose up a little higher, you still look like your mother from down here—a tale as old as a fossil: a daughter who doesn't inherit her mother's sense."

Siobhan flushed, crushing the letter in her hand. "And there's the Putrecia everyone loves," she hissed, adjusting herself under the hag's clouded gaze. It was impossible to tell where Putrecia was looking; her eyes were almost all sclera. It was somehow more impossible to read her expressions from under her sagging skin and deep wrinkles, like the grooves of a tree. In the right light, she always looked amused. In another, she always looked incredibly pissed. Her voice—a gravely mixture being shot out of a phlegm-filled well and bounced into a wet, toothless mouth—wasn't any help either. Siobhan hated her for it.

"I'm getting old," Putrecia repeated herself without any embarrassment, "and I'm not the judge anymore and I'm not interested in going back up there."

Siobhan chewed on her lip. "Again, this concerns me..." She stopped herself. It might have been anger, it might have been indignancy—Dolans don't put words to things they aren't supposed to feel—but it was wrong and it choked up Siobhan's dry throat. "I did what you asked. I've been doing what you've asked of me." She heaved. "You send me letters and e-mails and I do what you ask; over and over again I have done what you've asked. What you tasked me with!" Siobhan's hand was curled tight around the paper, wrinkling it into a paste. "You said I could earn my place!"

Putrecia gestured around her small hut. "Do I look like I have a computer?"

She bristled; that wasn't the point. The 'who' of 'who sent the letters' was the furthest thing from the point—which Siobhan now fancied to be the end of a sharpened knife. "Fine," Siobhan grumbled. "Someone was sending me letters and e-mails."

"Not me," Putrecia said. "That list?" Putrecia raised a bony finger. "That's me."

Slowly, Siobhan unfurled her fist. In her palm, across the deep groove where she ran her knife a lifetime ago (multiple, in fact), black ink dripped off her skin. Paper and skin; neither go back the same away again.

She pressed the wrinkled paper to the wall, ironing it with her fingers. "Fuck," she hissed. In imitation of the hubris that had led to the letter commanding her to bring Regan Kavanagh home being smudged to illegibility, Putrecia's already hieroglyphic scrawl was smeared. "Fuck." She could ask Putrecia to write it again; she could ask Putrecia to tell her what was on it. She could—

"I wasn't sure if you wanted the big bag or the small bag so I brought both." Orla Dolan burst into the hut, knocking the old door free from its squealing hinges; leaving of open air of Saol Eile there, just right there. Her curls of straw-blonde hair bounced with each skipping step she took right up to Putrecia's ink-stained table. She portioned the letters equally between her big and small messenger bags and Siobhan heard Orla's whiny voice in her head explaining it: the bags would be sad if one had more than the other. She'd do that pout she'd learned at sixteen and never let go of, the one that really amplified her cattle features.

"Orla?" Siobhan asked, which was a stupid thing to ask.

Orla dropped her bags, and her big eyes with the long, pale lashes turned all of their glossy attention on to her. "Shiv!" Orla exclaimed, which was a name no one had called her in forty-two years. Her cousin charged at her, tackling her to the floor in a tight embrace. The two of them smashed into trinkets and furniture, toppling over bones and taxidermy; a china shop greeting the bull.

Orla was never a girl of coherency and instead of speaking, she sobbed into Siobhan's sweater. She might have been saying something about how she missed her cousin, how she smelled good, how she finally learned how to throw knives, how she had this cool new job. But all Siobhan could think about was how much she wanted Orla to get off of her and go be emotional somewhere else.

Siobhan was elbowing and shoving her when she got a face full of Orla's new hat. Well, it might have been old—it might have been exactly forty-two years old—but it was new for Siobhan. New, and very familiar.

At thirty years old, far too old for getting new hobbies, Orla announced to an uninterested crowd of Dolans that she was going to be a fashion designer. This came a year after she announced that she wanted to be a supermarket clerk, so no one took her very seriously. That summer, she made an array of hats. If pressed, Siobhan could admit that Orla's only skill was in hat-making. However, it was not in hat design. Or hat ethics.

"What the fuck is this?" Siobhan shoved Orla off, snatching her red and black hat from her head. The color wasn't as bright as it used to be but the tiny, hair-like scales were a sensation Siobhan was unlikely to forget. "Did you turn my wings into a hat?"

"I begged them to let me keep it!" Orla stood up, brushing down her clothes. "I said 'Those are my big cousin's wings! Someone ought to keep them!' and they wouldn't listen! They wanted to throw them in the pit and I said 'Okay, but not both!'" She smiled at Siobhan but when she didn't get a smile back, she pouted. "And you know, with how much you support crafts—you were always on about the tablecloth—I thought 'Oh, this is perfect! Shiv will love this!'. So I used the one wing—the other went down quick in the pit, you would've loved to see it—and I didn't have enough fabric so I just used that old tablecloth but now it's art!"

In one hand, she crushed Putrecia's list and in the other, the brim of Orla's hat; both quivered. Siobhan didn't think about it; it was a moment she could recognize that thinking about it would send her nowhere. She threw the hat out the door like a Frisbee and Orla chased it like a dog. She spun around to an amused or annoyed Putrecia.

"I get the things on this list..." Siobhan said through gritted teeth, "...and I go back home?"

Putrecia shrugged. "That's for your judge to decide; you're going to a re-trial. You get those things and maybe Fate looks down kindly. You know how the system works, child."

She couldn't know how a system worked if it had no real rules. She couldn't get the items on a list if she ruined that list. She couldn't do this again, if it meant someone would turn it into a hat. But Siobhan didn't say that; Siobhan didn't think about that. She didn't ask who her judge was and please, not Clare, as though it mattered; so many banshees hated her and the one that didn't—

"I got it! Oh no, that's a leaf."

was Orla.

Siobhan didn't think. Siobhan didn't say anything. Siobhan didn't ask.

Siobhan left through Putrecia's back door and accepted the only option that had ever been offered to her.

Again.

[daily-hanamura]

[keoke03]

you're in team magma? seriously? 0/10 worst evil team out of all of them.

wrong courtney, sorry ♪

[aclaywrites]

You’ve all heard the joke, yeah? How many lesbian feminists does it take to change a light bulb? One, and that’s not funny.

I believe that there are more gay men’s bars for several reasons, the biggest reason being the stereotypes and attitudes of straight people towards gay men and lesbians. Gay guys are fun! They’re camp! There’s disco and drag shows and sexy shirtless guys with glitter on their ass cheeks. Gay men are fun, yeah? Always sassy and sardonic and love to look their best! Straight girls love to go to gay bars because the guys won’t hit on them, and they drag their dates along and it’s a wild good time for everyone! So new ones open, with a bigger dance floor, or a stage for better drag shows, or the biggest Halloween costume extravaganza in the whole city!

It’s also true that gay men on average earn a lot more than lesbians, and have much more disposable income for pricey cocktails and new year’s galas, so there’s another reason to open another club.

In some small towns there’s only enough market for one bar, so for sure it’s gonna be the boy bar because they’re gonna bring their straight girl friends, and maybe there’ll be a bachelorette party!

And who’s gonna go to a lesbian bar besides lesbians? Straight girls don’t want to get hit on by dykes. They’ll tell you that as soon as you come out to them (I don’t mind but I’m not gay, so….). Straight men are not welcome. I’ve danced on some lesbian bar dance floors, but they’ve never been mirrored and glittery with banks of video screens. I’ve been to a lot of women’s folk nights, with sliding scale cover charges and bottled beer. Women don’t make as much money, either, on average, so a bar wouldn’t be much of a big profit investment.

Gay men are fun and a good market. Lesbians aren’t and aren’t.

[heylittleriotact]

Somewhere out there my Rook and my Tav are sitting in a dive bar and getting absolutely shitfaced while they trade horror stories about having a completely fucking unhinged ancient elf who’s utter garbage at making plans in their heads.

[bruxbea]

Look, all I'm saying is Ethel wants a daughter to raise...while Orin just wants a parent who validates her creativity... *repeatedly smacks them together as if they were dolls*

[crownrots]

big al is literally that “i’m a bad bitch you can’t kill me” meme and i think that’s what every geriatric mercenary needs to aspire to

[art-soboro]

um. boobs blast..... 2 !! full image below cut !!! 16+ !!!!!

UH SO YEAH..... HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY TO ME I GUESS!!! i Promise boobs arent the only thing on my mind. i just get possessed sometimes. women lol!

[crazycatsiren]

Hagging Out: April [🧹]

"Choose Your Own Adventure"

April showers brought May flowers.

Since we overhauled our garden several years ago after buying our house in Germany, May Day became the start of planting season for us. Which more or less matches local customs as well.

This year, I finally have newly planted healthy daisies flourishing in my garden. My dream of a pollinators' garden is just about complete. It's now time to prune the roses in the other patch.

[bcneheaded]

hag with amnesia... stuck in fort five year old human lady form....

[seokmattchuus]

Omg please park gunwook birthday smut !!!!

Not to be that bitch...but newborn adult birthday smuts give me this kinda vibe:

[breadharmskoi]

the casino chapter, or as i like to call it, "john doe has a no good, VERY BAD day"

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Anon who asked about the coloring here. Gotcha! Hope that didn't come off as rude! I just saw that piece you did of the bad kids at the diner and LOVED the highlighting on it!

dw it didn't, and I'm glad you enjoy the piece! just mostly taking the opportunity to make clear where I come from in this space (I do what I want and I have fun and u can have fun too if u'd like)

[coaleyed]

Hagging Out

Hexxennacht was part of a whirlwind weekend of gardening and getting sun-drunk and I'm nowhere near done. I got my wife a cherry tree on sale and gave it a new home in one of the spaces where I've been killing grass.

We had dinner outside next to a ritual bonfire that got oddly star-shaped toward the end.

Then it was flying ointment time and I eventually had the most incoherent visions of my life, including a grotesque reminder that capitalism intentionally rots the brain. Thanks, Datura. Sorry if I used too much of you, babe.

For Beltane/May Day, I fucked off of work early to make us a gorgeous spring potion: Honey Lavender Lemonade.

The blue above is cold water that I turned blue with some butterfly pea flower, my usual springtime obsession. When combined with citrus or other things that change the pH, it turns purple or pink.

The honey-lemon part looks creepy on its own but I swear it's delicious.

Anyway, we gulped it like loopy spirits and loved every minute.

[stormcrow513]

Hagging Out April/May Hexennacht/May Day/Beltane 2023

@graveyarddirt

So I actually managed to celebrate both Hexennacht AND May Day/Beltane this year! Go me!

So I spent the 29th 30th and 1st completely Witch faced high, lol

I got a shit load done, I did some cleaning, smacking out a lot of dead/shitty energy,

Combining that with a road opening and shit ton of blessing work,

I also thoroughly gave Offerings, April was such a fuck awful month I wanted to forcibly shove it out the door and lock the door behind it, I was so tired I was actually dreading Hexennacht this year cause I hadn't had time or energy to really plan anything or set things up well,

But somehow *cough* cannabis *cough* I became a fucking whirlwind and got everything done, and had a fucking blast,

I have to make do with a candle on my bedroom floor as a fire, but frankly it works just as well as when I was able to do outdoor rituals when we first moved here,

This was my second year with my Mighty Steed and Snakey Wand,

Though I've had that Steed since I was a little girl, you ever have something from before you started a magic path and one day go 'oh hey', that was me with that horse head cane,

See as a kiddling I fucking love collecting two things, rocks and sticks, I had a whole area in my basement 'playroom' (it was half done fucking dungeon, cause my father never finished shit, and it creeped me the holy hell out, but it was where I kept my sticks,) I had em all nicely sorted,

Anyway this gave me an appreciation for walking sticks and canes, my ma had her uncle's old cane I was always trying to play with, but dude was a big fucker, and cane was good deal bigger then me and ma knew I'd never grow into it like I'd been hoping, she found this horse head cane the head snapped and therefore adorable for her, she grabbed it up and brought it home to me, with plans to fix it up I was delighted I spent hours sitting in her closet rubbing my little hands over it,

Ma never was able to fix it up, but surprisingly through all the moves, and that time we asked my sister if she could store some of our stuff and she agreed and then went through it all and tossed and sold most of it,

Horse somehow made it, and I'd been keeping it in my closet,

Also funny enough I grew into it almost perfectly,

I realized a couple years ago while trying to come up with a Sabbat Steed that uh hello I had a perfect one sitting patiently waiting for me to get my shit together, lol,

So I before even fixing the head, started working it, cleaned it up nice, put the pieces near me while sleeping on Sabbat nights, bring it into circle, ect. Last year I finally put the dear together enchanted and Named horse, and off to the Sabbat we went, with my new snake wand tagging along,

And so we flew again this year!

May 1st is also my great aunt who raised my ma's birthday, I never got to meet her but I owe her my existence so I went to put a Coke can (her fav) out for her when I got a shock of a 'welo don't put the whole damn can down' so instead I shared a can with my great aunt for her birthday,

After that I did some work with The Spirit Of The Land, to bridge a better connection between us, that went extremely well

[graveyarddirt]

Hagging Out: April [🧹]

A huge 'thank you!' to all of the ill-tempered and greying-haired Baba Yagas who took part, an enthusiastic thank you to returning Hags, and a welcoming thank you to the new Hags that joined us this month as we focused on the rituals, workings, customs, festivities, and/or sabbat spectacles of Witches’ Night [aka Walpurgisnacht & Hexennacht], Beltane, May Day, and International Workers’ Day.

If you're interested in reading what the Hags got up to this April entries can be found using the tag #hagging out, and by clicking the entry-linked Xs below:

🧹 https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/hagging%20out 🧹 https://graveyarddirt.tumblr.com/tagged/hagging%20out 🧹 https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/haggingout/

💀 April Hags: @buddyblanc [X, X, X], @satsekhem [X], @coaleyed [X], @thedosianexplorer [X], @msgraveyarddirt [X, X], @moeder-geit [X], @aircea [X], @stormcrow513 [X], @crazycatsiren [X], @pagan-stitches [X, X, X], @hrusewif [X], @goddess29 [X], @wildwood-faun [X], & @lupinelace [X, X]