Fairies, black, grey, green, and white
You moonshine revellers,
and shades of the night.
William Shakespeare
Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral. And it’s relentless.
Leah Raeder, Black Iris
“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,” Amma said, pulling another Blow Pop from her pocket. Cherry. “Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.”
Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
“When young children, especially girls, wake from an evening’s slumber with tangles and snarls in their hair, mothers with a tradition of fairy folklore might whisper to their daughters that they had caught fairy locks or elf-locks. Faeries, they say, tangled and knotted the hairs of the sleeping children as they played in and out of their hair at night.”
High in the mountains along the Amalfi coast of Italy is a hidden valley with a beautiful waterfall. There, in a tiny hermit’s house with moorish domed roof, lives Vali: beautiful, way-out, painted like Paupin, dressed like a gypsy, with the wisdom of a shaman or a witch. Her Celtic heritage shows in her flaming red hair and green eyes, transposed with an Australian accent. An intense, free child of nature, she is followed by a pack of dogs like Artemis or Diana while roaming the steep cliffs of the valley, hunting for berries and herbs, tattooing in the sunlight a young girl dressed in goat-skin pants who lives in a nearby cave, and making amulets for a love-sick girl who finds her way up the mountain. Weaving dreams, casting spells, Vali is magic.
Write up on the back of Witch of Positano (1965), directed by Sheldon and Diane Rochlin