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The Magician
There is no coloured cloth. Only a sheet, stiff with starch and stripped hurriedly from your narrow metal bed. Greying in the daylight, and now lit silver by a moon who peeks through the gap between the heavy cotton blanket, and the brightly shining floor.
You are reflected. In shapes, and in pieces. What is it that the moon sees, when she looks at you, and the curve of your spine? The nape of your neck, prickling?
You rock forward. Strike a match.
The world is orange in an instant. Not the ache of deep terracotta that sits, warm and smoky-scented in your bones. Instead, a burst, the shape and colour of a marigold, blooming from the smallest red bud.
For a moment, you watch it shudder. Ghostly petals of this flaming flower stretch, and lick against your skin. You draw close, and closer still. Almost swallowed by this proximity, and this half-forgotten warmth. A warmth you know will never reach beyond the boundaries of cold and iron.
But for these fleeting moments, it shall serve you as an altar.
From a tangled pile of unwashed clothes, you unfurl candles. Smaller than you’d like, but striped with colour. Red, for strength and for protection. Yellow to bring wisdom. Black to banish harm. To ward away malevolence that haunts this place.
You light these three and close your eyes. A prayer bubbles in your chest, and swells in silence. Not in this country’s blunt and arrhythmic tongue, but with the musical and ancient words that belonged to Abuela. Sound buried in the earth’s red clay since a time before you, or her were even the smallest drop of dew in the great waters from her stories of how people came to be.
From the box comes the sun. The moon, his twin. The world, a child of many faces, many names. Beneath the stars; a painted, vaulted ceiling of deepest, darkest blue and jewels of twinkling silver.
You spread the cards, and in procession, they appear behind your eyelids, warmed to life beneath your fingertips passing over each in the fan. A chorus of voices, some fitful and difficult to coax into song. But all here. Each present in their own way.
Except…
Your hand ghosts over empty air.
The candles flicker. Warmth leaves you, perhaps only for a moment, but that moment is a chilling breath. Angular eyes snap open.
The Devil. In an instant, you know.
You extinguish the flames, drawing yourself out from beneath the bed amidst the melody that falters around you. The English cold returns to creep through your bones.
On the other side of the room, Geraldine sleeps dreamless, her creased face dyed ghostly white.
You eye the door. A heavy thing.
There is no lock on the inside. Only out.
But even so, you press your hand to solid wood. Scales of paint flake off into your palm.
It swings shrill on its hinges, ajar for the first time in all the days and nights you have spent, losing yourself to the dull grey green.
With candles, red and black, still burning in your mind’s eye, you inch beyond the threshold. All before you is darkness, rolling as waves against your feet.
You take a step, and in an instant, feel yourself shrouded by a thunderous, choking ocean.
Eyes closed. Mouth closed. You will yourself to float. Guide calm into your body as the tempest roars and sucks you under.
This place. This place that you don’t recognise. It heaves and groans, pregnant with sorrow.
Inside, you feel a sharp kick that makes you gasp. You tear your eyes from the floor, from the great sea that looms on either side, and see the end of the corridor bathed in brilliant moonlight.
El Cuervo sits on the sill, ink-black feathers shining blue as oil. He cocks his head, clutching The Devil tight in his beak.
You free a trapped breath that passes through your body, registering a tremble in your legs. A pounding in your head when you reach for the window, and start to slide it upwards with a deep rumble of blistered wood.
‘Gracias, mijo.’ Your voice is a whisper as he drops the card into your hand with a soft croak. With a finger, you stroke the rumpled feathers on his neck. He blinks slow, contented.
Stowed away, The Devil’s laughter fades. In its place, you hear footsteps.
And then, a voice. A man’s voice, ringing out.
You do not recognise the sound. Or his face, as he rushes over, too fast for you to turn and run. Your vision is flooded with his white figure, like Abuela’s waxen saints.
You recognise his anger. His contempt, as he grips you by your wrists. Tugs you away from the window, shooing El Cuervo with a flurry of noise and swatting hands until El Cuervo is screaming, and screaming, and does not stop screaming.
You hear him screaming through the glass, slammed shut.
You hear him screaming as you are hauled up from where you’ve slid down the wall, and pulled with rough hands back down the corridor.
You hear him screaming when your jaws are wrenched apart and crammed full of bitter-tasting pills.
Pushed back, you fall onto your bare mattress, your body full of lead.
And when you dream, it is filled with the sound of El Cuervo screaming.
* * *
You remember the weather that day.
A day deep in the drowse of mid-summer, when the golden sun climbed highest. How the tall cornstalks stood, browned and wilting, against a gathering wall of sullen cloud.
The hazy heat was stifling, trapped inside the bus down from the mountains to Oaxaca City. Your lightest cotton blouse already clung to the back of your neck, damp by the time you passed beneath the market’s gauze awnings and reached the cantina.
You busied yourself with wiping down the bar, ignoring strands of hair that came loose and trailed across your face.
Customers came in the thin trickle of a drying stream. Too hot to be out, was the murmur from each table whilst you brought out sweating glasses of mezcal. Longing for a moment to press your cheek against the chill.
Instead, you duly laughed, long after it amused you, and replied, in the language the Spaniards had left you. Nahuatl had its place, at home.
Adrift in the low wash of lunchtime conversation, you felt your eyes wander, sliding over these people, as much fixtures and fittings as the flickering lamps on the walls, and the tinny crackle of the wireless.
It was in this tide you met another pair. Dark, and sharp, beneath arched brows. They paused, but never widened. The colour of flint, and his hair, severed at the point of his chin, much the same.
He was not a handsome man, and it seemed to you as though he knew that, from the way he’d dressed—in dusky, heavy clothes; the sort you’d never seen before. Silk around his neck, polished buttons, and trousers patterned with neat grey stripes. It was clear to you he did not fit, as though taken from another place, another time entirely.
And true enough, he beckoned you, with a finger pointing upwards—not the custom. It took a moment for you to see the gesture for what it was, though his dark, dark eyes were still affixed to you.
You approached his table, a new and swooping thrill taking flight in your stomach. He sat alone; the chair opposite taken up by outstretched feet. His shoes, glossy black and buckled, crossed over at his ankles.
‘Tequila, por favor, mar girl.’ He said, in his strange English way, his lips curling around every vowel. Shaping them, like a potter might do, to his own whim.
‘No tequila,’ you told him. ‘Mezcal?’
‘Pardon?’ he pointed towards his ear, with his left hand. The other seemed quite comfortable, buried as it was, in the pocket of the long woollen coat slung over the back of his seat.
‘Mezcal,’ you repeated, motioning at the half-empty glass at the next table along. ‘It is…sort-of tequila.’
‘Sort-of wun do may fine, love.’ He replied, with a smile that showed his white teeth.
You poured him a glass.
You poured him another.
From a distance, you watched as he drained both with the satisfied gasp of a man dying of thirst, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
Something came over you. A feeling of not wanting to look away from this anomaly of a man, and his words in many shapes.
The name of a saint. Uttered softly beneath the mournful brass of a half-forgotten ballad, buzzing through heat. Through your own distracted ears, as he wound a strand of your hair around a slender finger.
‘Lucia’. You replied in kind, voice clumsy over the rushing of blood to your head.
‘Oh,’ His voice dropped, and you could barely suppress a shudder. ‘Lucia.’
It felt like a chant. A magic word that had you rooted in place by the light of his glittering eyes.
In that moment, you felt the whole city vanish into dust.
‘Research,’ He said, in reply to a question you could not remember asking, tapping his glass with a chime that made you jolt, and blink from the return to sudden brightness. ‘This ent bad for not-tequila.’
You shook your head in foggy agreement. His lip twitched.
‘Mebbe I’ll tack a bottle back to Blighty wit’may.’
You watched his fingers as they drummed the table at a restless pace.
‘When do you leave?’
‘Ah,’ He glanced back over at you, with a wry grin ‘…Na fer a while, I should think.’
Your face burned under his knowing look.
A squawk of laughter erupted from his chest. An odd sound, unbefitting of the clothes he wore, and the silken hat, doffed and lying on the table. An English style. Far older than you, or he.
But you told him nothing of these thoughts. Instead, you only smiled, and took his glass. ‘That is good to hear.’
‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘I think so, too.’
Later, when the sun was sinking low, and the clouds had burst at last, the deep thrumming of the rain called out to you.
Outside, you saw him, standing in the yellow flicker of the streetlamps. A trick of the light in the sweeping summer storm. The pavement shone with a thousand unspent rainbows, and yet he stood, bone dry beneath a jet-black umbrella.
It would not have suited him were it any other colour.
Black, to banish harm.
Your San Sebastian
The Tower
Through windows thick as bottle glass, you see pieces of England. Quilted, fuzzy blanket squares, where everything is washed in tones of grey, beneath ragged cotton clouds in the dishwater sky. Left to drip, and drip in the rhythm of a day that does not belong to you.
Your little England stitches itself together in a waking dream of stark shapes, lying heavy on your shoulders. You are weighed down by its cloak; by the boundless wall of red, stacked high. The birdcage gate, wrought of shrieking shadows. The ghosts of chimneys, far away. Bottle-shaped, they stretch to the sky in stoic silence. The saints of this place.
Here, time is tangled. Fraying. Knots, forgotten, tug at your thumb. Time sucks you through a mass of morning oatmeal laced with powdered pills. Down to the yawning hollow of the day room, where your head aches with the pulse of buzzing words in a language that is not yours. You feel the fibres of yourself, unravel, inch by inch. Swallowed by synthetic, creeping fog.
Your mind spins and spins, until you are surrounded by a spider’s web and pulling at the strands.
Harder. Harder. Silver thread streams out of you. Wraps around your fingers.
You pull.
Pull—
Sound echoes in your skull. A slap.
Your hands fall away from your hair. Stinging.
Starched, and stiff, you are herded out into the grounds. To stand, and stare around. Trees, and shorn-down grass.
You close your eyes and turn towards the sun. Towards ochre, umber, terracotta.
They call, and call, in a baying song. ‘Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.’, and you do not come.
Your shoes are gone.
You walk on the grass, and it prickles the soles of your feet, but it is a feeling. A green feeling, amongst the white and cold.
From gnarled, ancient branches, El Cuervo churrs his mournful, rasping tones.
You drink in his music. Phantom sunlight and warmth, drawn closer for a moment. On tiptoes, you stretch for it.
‘Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.’ The noise bubbles from beneath your skin, until this name you have never had becomes a beating drum inside your head, and you cannot remember how it feels to have silence. Silence that is not cast over you by men and women dressed in white, brandishing their needles, their chemical cures.
Time twists, and turns, and writhes around. You clutch at its thread, even as it slackens in your hand. Slips through your fingers
Geraldine is wheeled back to your room, her placid face without a gleam of recognition.
Bedsprings dig into your back. You cannot remember feeling them this morning. Or whether it is this morning still.
You bite a thread, just as Abuela taught you.
‘Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.’
You roll over.
Inside, your baby squirms and writhes in half-light.
A screen flickers with pale, static faces.
The sun beats down on your neck.
You feel like you are drowning.
Up against a wall, you crouch, and curl in on yourself.
Geraldine sounds out words from her Bible in a quavering voice.
A man feels your stomach with cold hands.
El Cuervo brings you a shard of obsidian, serrated.
‘Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.’
They wheel you downstairs, and park you by the wireless.
You feel like you are drowning.
Eight of Cups. Nine of Swords. The Hermit.
You sit high in the branches beside El Cuervo.
A white candle shivers in the dark.
You roll over.
Blink.
Water swirls in murky greenish shapes at your knees. Your reflection gleams, and wavers amidst drifting clouds of algae.
Then, there are voices.
Hands.
A tattered towel, flung across your shoulders, trails along the grass. Your body stumbles towards the darkened silhouette perched on the hill, shot through with yellow light.
Through the doors is heat, and the clucking sound of the woman, Matron, with her lacquer-smelling hair and bright white apron.
She takes you by the shoulder, and you shrink away from her clasp as she hurries you past rows of doors that you lose track of in an instant.
You close your eyes, your head full of the squeak of her shoes on the floor, and the ringing of her voice. A sound that echoes and echoes, leaping and dancing over itself.
When you open them again, your body is swaying, outside the room with the deep basin where every greying, faded dress and shirt floats limp and lifeless.
Matron mutters, too fast for you to understand, and plucks an unfamiliar dress from the drying rack. She does not look at you.
You dress slowly. The fabric groans. squeezing the curve of your stomach,
‘There.’ comes Matron’s voice. You feel her eyes travel up and down your body. ‘Much more presentable, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes.’ you reply in a strained whisper.
You think of your poor, cramped baby boy, and want to scream.
* * *
Abuela’s home stood high above the city. When the rain rolled in, she would take you to watch the clouds pass by on their way down into the valley.
You remember the house. Its yellow stone walls, and thatched roof. The jade-coloured shutters that Abuela would paint each spring, as you hung the precious talismans in the window. The soft clatter of the hamsa and the Ojo Turco, tousled by Ehecatl's playful wind.
She spoke of saints, and older gods, as friends and neighbours. Around the house, she kept clay bowls, filled with scented oil that would invite the spirits in.
You had felt the spirits for a long time. Since before you had the words to call them by their names. Abuela helped you shape them into figures you could recognise. See behind your eyelids as rows of painted prayer cards, and almost touch.
She washed the floors with lavender. Sliced soap from the bar in thick white hunks, scented with citronella.
You learnt the names of every plant that grew upon the mountain, guided by footprints along the twisting narrow trails that flowed like streams.
The city, with the glow of a thousand candles, beckoned you down into its cradle. At once so different from the gentle dream of the house in the clouds, where you were Nahua before all else.
In the sprawling square, you stared at Spain. At Spanish churches with their pointed shadows, creeping along the pavement, but not any relief from the blaze of the sun in the bare sky.
A sky that would not tell you if you were home.
Taking flight, you sheltered beneath the market’s awnings where the light shifted into deep and calming colours, breathing the smell of familiar plants.
You saw the saints, lined up in rows upon a table, and closed your eyes in prayer for just a moment.
‘Oh, child,’ Abuela shook her head when you returned, your body shaking. ‘You should not have gone without protection. Come.’
She led you by the hand to sit at the kitchen table, where she fastened a string around your wrist of smooth black stones.
‘You will be safe now, noyoltzin.’
You rolled a stone between your fingers. ‘Are you sure?’
’Trust it, Lucia,’ she rolled up her sleeve to reveal her own bracelet, covered in jagged lines. ‘When these stones crack like so, the energy, the Evil Eye, will be absorbed, and drained away.’
As Abuela shucked corn to grind for tortillas, you fingered the Azabache stones, drifting out to stand in the doorway. You watched the city lights below flicker to life, the size of fireflies you could cup in your hands. A breeze toyed with your hair. Smoke curled in the burnt orange sky from distant chimneys, carrying the smell of mole heating on the stove.
Abuela’s gate, white and streaked, creaked its sadness to the wind, and the wind replied with a howl that you felt deep in your bones. You crossed the front yard to where the dandelions grew wild, and pulled it shut, feeling the energy shift at once.
Silence fell. A ring, stretching inward to cover you in a shroud. White, for purity.
You moved the beads of your bracelet back and forth along the cord, inching closer to the new and strange as it stood. A ghost in the back of your mind.
Abuela called you from inside, and when you turned to respond, you found that you could not remember the shape and size of every distant building. You watched them scramble, rearrange themselves inside your head into another image.
‘Not hungry?’
A jolt coursed through your body.
Rubbing at your eyes, you found yourself staring into a plate of mole verde.
‘No.’ your voice rang out from outside your body. Something made you shake your head.
Abuela watched you pushing pork and tortilla scraps around your plate and sucked her teeth. You said nothing as she took the food away and started clearing up around you.
Behind your back, you felt the city spring up in hypnotic colours when your eyelids fluttered closed. Burning. Gleaming.
You grimaced, laying your head against smooth wood.
‘Lucia!’ Abuela’s voice was sharp. ‘What is the matter?’
‘Nothing!’ you told her, louder than you had imagined, and already up from the table. Your feet carried you through the door in a whip of cold air and a rattle of windowpanes.
With watering eyes, you stared the city down, leaning against Abuela’s gate until the old posts dug into your skin and shook in their foundations. Your breath came hot, and fast in the chill of the night.
The moon gleamed above your head, casting a glow on the Azabache stones. In that silver light, you felt them, one by one.
And sure enough, you found it.
Like a scar, etched upon the side of one round bead was a single, ragged crack.
The Lovers
In the grey of morning, you slip your hand beneath the scratching blanket.
Across your stomach, you trace shapes. Snail-shell whorls, and cresting waves. Squares inside squares, Triangles. Angular lines. The back of Quetzalcoatl, sewn upon the quilt Abuela made when you were small, in scarlet, jade, and turquoise.
He coils himself around your baby boy. A boy, you know, for you foresaw him in a bright October moon, wrapped in golden starlight.
Abuela would say that the magic runs stronger through the veins of a woman. But this boy shall be a brujo, if you must make it so. You have felt his warmth inside, his tiny, sacred presence whilst rousing the altar in the middle of the night, when a boy who did not wish to know the spirits would be sound asleep.
This morning, in the still air, he is alive with movement. He kicks as though he swims, and you feel him everywhere. Your ātzintli, your beloved water.
‘Oh, baby bird,’ you murmur, in soft and liquid Nahuatl, the language of your dreams. ‘Tōtōtzintli, you are so small, you barely peck.’
Geraldine’s pale eyes wander across your face. Her lips churn, soundless, and she motions briefly towards you, her hand pressed tight against her chest. Her other arm hangs slack.
‘…Baby.’ It takes a while for the word to come to her, breathy and singsong. She sways herself this way and that.
‘Yes.’ you smile across the room. ‘Will you listen?’
She neither nods, nor shakes her head, but starts to shuffle forward, face knotting with the effort to reorganise her body.
As she nears the bed, you guide her to sit in the vacant chair against the wall.
Her hands are clenched, veins brilliant and blue against the taut white of her skin. You help her splay them, rough, and chapped upon your belly.
Your baby stirs, and wiggles like the smallest fish.
Geraldine says nothing. Eyes open, but breath slow. Her face is blank.
With great effort, she leans forward, pressing an ear to your skin. You try not to laugh, tickled as you are by the faded wisps of her hair.
You feel the stillness wash over her body while your boy’s heart beats and beats, flooding through you with the flutter of a hummingbird.
Geraldine raises her head from where it lies against you, tongue curling inside her mouth. You feel her want to speak, but words are distant, dwindling things. A thread of saliva trickles from the corner of her lips, blotting the damp neckline of her tired floral dress.
You move your hand to cover hers.
‘Baby.’ her free hand flexes back and forth, unfurling as a fern would in the summer rain. ‘I had...I had Baby…’
You incline your head. ‘You did? When?’
Her face twists, lips smacking together. You watch her eyes drift far, far away from you.
‘A long time ago?’
‘…Long.’ she agrees, and starts to rock herself once more, hands drawn to her chin. Beneath her, the chair creaks and groans, and it sounds to you like sobbing.
‘Geraldine?’ she may not turn to you, but you know she hears. ‘Mija, what happened to your baby?’
There are no words for a long time. She blinks, and writhes, and her tongue falls, hanging loose outside her mouth.
You hear the jingling of keys outside. The door rattles open, and a thin-lipped woman in white walks through, pushing a trolley filled with clinking glass.
She does not greet you, wrinkling her nose as poor Geraldine tries to keep the spit from rolling down her chin.
You cannot help but look away as the woman stretches over to pull her helpless, trembling lips apart with a gagging, gurgling sound, and pushes pills far down her throat.
With one gloved hand, she grasps Geraldine’s flailing jaw, and mashes it up and down. More saliva drips and pools from between her teeth. The medicine is crunched to white dust.
You wrap your arms around your stomach, body shaking as she looks over her shoulder at you.
‘Medico!’ she barks, in some unknown language. ‘Comprende?’
You know to nod, through the prickling behind your eyes and tightness in your chest. The cart rattles noisily towards you.
Beside you, Geraldine is slumped, head lolling. But her eyes are wide, and white above the gasping O-shape of her mouth.
Your baby boy swims whirlpool circles inside you, and you ache to catch him in your arms. To hold him, still slippery with blood, against your chest, so that he may not feel the chemicals pressed on your tongue. Tumbling down, down, into the precious ocean where all he knows is to be warm and safe.
You feel foaming. Fizzing. Numbness spreads through every muscle, and your body fades. Forgets itself.
The sound of the sea drags you deeper. Spiral, spiral, you wreathe around the heat and wet where your baby boy lies and suckles on his dreams. Translucent and beautiful in his shifting shape.
You weave and twist until he is pressed against you, his warmth beating a rhythm through the weightless self you have become.
He shines gold.
***
He hated the sea.
He did not tell you so, but you saw the curl of his lip. The set of his jaw, as he stood and gripped the metal railing, slick with salt spray.
His body was firm, unyielding when you wrapped your arms around him from behind.
He came by plane, he told you. But as summer’s wet warmth blew itself out into the gulf, so too did the money he had brought. And so, the journey back to England would be made by boat. A week-long trip.
Content as he was to confine himself to the small cabin, you found yourself far more at ease upon the deck, watching as the water shifted. Green to blue, to grey, to deepest black as the moon waxed and waned, and the sky was soon filled by different stars.
You arrived with cool rain, and the wind of an English autumn, shivering in a snaking line of strange new voices.
Sebastian stood tall, and silent, with a hand upon your shoulder. Urged you on, whilst he retrieved papers that you had never seen from the deep pocket of his coat.
You felt yourself shrink into his shadow upon reaching the head of this great serpent;
A man in uniform, with steely eyes that raked across your body.
Sebastian stepped forward, speaking lower, quicker than he had back in Oaxaca.
‘Forgive mar lady,’ his arm curled around your shoulder. ‘Dunna speak much English, arm afraid. Fresh from Spain, see.’
You nodded. Smiled tight.
‘And you, sir?’
‘British Battalion,’ he replied, drawing his right arm from his pocket to reveal the stump at his wrist. ‘1937.’
You felt a ripple of shock pass through the line behind you. Sebastian turned and fixed you with his white smile.
‘Of course,’ remarked the man, with the faintest hint of a stammer. ‘You and your wife can move right along, sir.’
You did not mention to Sebastian the flutter in your chest whilst passing through the building, and out onto a grey street lined with taxicabs. He shepherded you into one without a word. For a while, you laid your head against the window, covering yourself in his thick coat.
You remember him, half-carrying you through the threshold of a building far larger than any home you’d imagined him to have. Thinking nothing, on the edge of sleep, of the fact that he had not brought you to his house, but a hotel, when he had told you the money was gone.
Perhaps it was just an English way to be, you reasoned with yourself.
Something that you could not quite understand, and even less articulate, as the rhythm of those days, those weeks, fell into place, and you found yourself alone in the room, watching your reflection grow ever more distant.
The tea came in bags. Unreadable, unknowable.
You lost yourself in the endless shuffle of the cards, until on their own, your hands would be forever caught in absent wringing.
He would come back some nights, with bitter-tasting breath, and an unknown scent on his skin; A scent that fell to the back of your mind when he loosened the cord from your bathrobe and made love, running hand and stump through your hair to reach your ear, purr your name.
And when day broke, and the cleaner came with fresh and laundered bedclothes, she would regard you with such sad brown eyes.
Autumn’s colours dulled. With little sign of any change, you got to practicing your English when she came by, once the ritual of smiles and nods had outstayed its welcome.
One morning, you snuck a glance to read the nameplate on her uniform: Farha.
You invited her to sip the pallid English tea with you, for it felt the only thing you could offer. She accepted, nonetheless, and you shared a grimace, and laughter as you drained your cups. A sound you could not remember hearing for a long time.
‘Who is he?’ she asked, once the room had lapsed to silence. ‘The man you are with?’
For the first time, you felt tightness. Cold squeezing in your chest, though the orange sun still glittered brightly through the windows.
She spotted the gnawing of your lip between your teeth, and wrapped her arms around you, muttering softly in her own language. The words sounded like water.
One solitary night, she let you spread the cards for her. There were no candles in the room, so by the clouded bulb of the bedside lamp, you drew.
Strength.
The Empress.
Queen of Swords.
October rolled on, and with it came a nausea that would not leave you.
Sebastian returned, lips thinning when you pushed him away from breasts that had grown tender, and sought comfort in his chest.
‘Fucking hell, woss wrong wit’yer?’ he growled, but did not move.
You closed your eyes and did not tell him what you had come to realise the prior morning. How Farha had opened the door to the sound of you retching in the bathroom, and asked in a hushed voice when your monthly was due.
You had not told him by the time you left a short while after, hustled into a sleek black car with a folding vinyl roof. In silence, you sat beside the mound of cases that belonged mostly to him.
In your hand, you clutched the gift Farha had given you; A small clay figure on a string. Horned and winged, with the face of a skeletal dog, and the talons of a bird. An ancient spirit from her country.
Wrapped around it was a note, only three words:
For the baby.
The High Priestess
Through heavy, half-closed eyes, you watch Geraldine pace the floor. Her hands are bunched and twisting in her dress, as though she feels it for the first time.
She is older than you. Her lined face curls and crinkles, like the yellowed, wrinkled pages of her Bible. It is a tiny thing upon her nightstand; palm-sized and bound in peeling leather.
You have heard fleeting snatches of her story, floating freely from the corridor in careless conversation
Sent to a convent as a strong-willed child, the sisters tried their best to lead Geraldine to God, full of sighs and shaking heads, and harsh hands when she disobeyed.
Obstinate.
She hunches in upon herself, and sways from side to side. A timorous hum escapes, briefly musical, before it fades away, forgotten.
‘Geraldine, what song is that?’
She does not respond with words. You watch her raise her arm, locked tight as though made of stone, towards the window.
‘Did it come from outside?’
For a moment, she stops pawing at her clothes to blink at you.
Her language feels intuitive. Something that she could not lose, however much is taken.
You stand, cradling your belly as a tremor passes through your legs, to inspect the glass. Smeared with handprints that do not belong to you.
Today the view is still. It brings you nothing but a sky out of reach, and the subdued song of unseen birds.
‘Is that what you heard? The birds?’
There is a tremble in Geraldine’s lips. She hums a soft note, eyes darting up and down.
You cross the room and take her by the hand. Her uncut nails press fine white crescents deep into her palm.
‘Bird.’ the sound is faint. Her eyes travel in a haze to rest upon your stomach. She gestures with the arm curled to her chest. ‘Lucy.’
You nod, gently, as her tongue forms more shapes. Feels around for more sound
‘Lucy’s bird. Baby.’ She jerks her head back in what feels like a nod.
You run your hand across where fabric stretches. ‘He will fly soon, I am sure.’
Geraldine goes still. Her voice barely creeps above a whisper. ‘Fly away.’
Still in your grasp, she turns, eyes dropping to the floor.
‘Who will fly away?’
In front of you, she scrunches, clutching, tugging at her hair. Her skin.
‘Baby. Baby flies away.’
‘Where?’
‘To God and Heaven.’ She pulls and pulls at her hair, until a chunk tears away in her hand.
‘Oh.’ You gasp. ‘Oh, Geraldine.’
You gather her into your arms, stroking circles on her back.
She does not cry. Her breath is rapid, rasping against your shoulder.
‘Come outside with me, okay? We can find your birds.’
Geraldine says nothing, but she grips your hand with strength that surprises you.
When nobody comes to get her dressed, you sit beside her on her bed, and ease her slowly, gently out of her damp nightdress, and into freshly laundered day clothes. You see how they do it, the women in white. Never calming her with soft words. As though content to have her thrash and struggle in their arms.
Now, she is still. Walking her fingers together in front of her while you pull a comb through her thin hair, and do your best to cover the sore spot on her scalp.
In all the time you have known her, she has never had a visitor. Some mornings, they park her in the day room, and you watch through the corner of your eye as she sits in front of the television. Hour after hour, until her face droops, and her chest is damp with saliva, left unwiped until it is her turn to be bathed.
You feel a sadness come over you, as she stands, squinting in weak April sunlight, and rubs at her warmed skin, as though such a feeling is unfamiliar.
You know little of the things that happened in this country, prior to your arrival. But something happened to Geraldine. That is clear enough. Something happened to that obstinate girl, spoken of only in whispers, to leave her stranded in this world of white, cold shapes, without the words for her to piece the picture back together for herself. Her time, like ashes, cast for wind to scatter
‘Bird.’ she jerks her arm towards a brown and tiny creature, pecking at the grass just as your baby boy kicks inside you, with the gentlest of pinprick pains.
You nod, an absent smile forming at the gentle hopping back and forth, and you imagine him doing the same. With arms held out, his own pair of little brown wings.
Geraldine hums in time with the lilting birdsong, high-pitched and pealing in its clarity. Beside you, her body feels loose, her mouth wide with soundless laughter. She kicks her feet against the grass.
In every way that matters, she is smiling.
You feel a tugging on your sleeve.
‘Lucy.’ she says, still in song, and pulls you down to squat, then sit upon the ground. Grass skims against your stockings.
It must feel rough against Geraldine’s bare legs, but she pays it no mind, and leans back until she’s splayed right out on the lawn.
Her mousy hair spills out around her face, trailing in a halo as her eyes fall shut.
* * *
Abuela once took you to the ocean. With turquoise beads around her neck, the same shade as the water, she waded out to sea. You watched cross-legged from the sand, the layers of her skirt, quivering like flower petals in the waves
She stooped and let the water rush in salty foam to fill the glass jar in her hands, until it spilled over the lip like a fountain.
On the shore, you peered into its depths, now stoppered with a cork. Full of floating grains of sand in white and black and gold.
‘The ocean’s water, child,’ she said, ‘Has strength beyond any other,’ she guided your eyes back to the roll of the tide. ‘See how it pushes and pulls?’
You nodded.
‘That is the power that we use, Lucia. To will things into being so.’
‘How? What sorts of things?’
Her face crinkled into a soft smile. ‘You are too young to enact these kinds of spells just yet, noyoltzin. Spells in the realms of love, and passion can be wicked things if they are not practiced with caution.’
‘But you know them?’
‘Of course I know them. And you will learn, in time.’
People would come to see her. Climbing the winding mountain trails to her house in the sky, they would ask for Isidra, sometimes in the language of the Zapotec, or the Mixtec, or the Zoque—although Abuela spoke few words of these, and Spanish only when she needed in the city.
You would watch her bring them in and sit them down to tell her of their woes and wants and needs. And all the while, her altar shone and hummed with eager magic in the ripples of the water in its basin, and the fluttering of coloured cloth in the breeze. For luck, and money, green and gold, she would bathe the room in candlelight, arranging crystals at the water’s edge to channel their power into a bowl, then swiftly covered with a cloth.
In fine weather, you would journey to the meadow, Llano de las Flores, wicker baskets in hand beneath a sky filled with butterflies. She darned your socks with plants. Cosmos, dahlias and marigolds.
You remember her laughter, a crackling sound, as the fronds shivered, tickling at your waist. ‘May you always walk among the flowers, noyoltzin.’
With the flat of her obsidian knife, she would slice away the roots from every plant you had picked, and let the juices flow over the blade, washing it in the protective power of rose, skullcap and white tea.
Before her day of work, you would find her in the kitchen, boiling herbs into a steam. The smells of cinnamon, centaury and linden flower wafted through the house, forever tickling the edges of your dreams to drag you out of sleep.
Her saints sat everywhere, each with an alcove and domain to call their own, and she in turn would call upon them in her work. To bring guidance and to heal sickness, some of body, but many more of spirit. Afflictions that most could not see, severed as they were from the messages, the voices from her deeper world.
Abuela asked for little payment, but those who had travelled many miles to see her were only too happy to fill her hands with pesos as they left. She stored the silver-coloured coins in a bowl of jade, the luckiest of the stones.
With creased and mottled hands, she cupped your palm, and pointed to each line. Heart, and head. Life, and marriage. The twelve signs upon your fingers, first spotted far away in skies over ancient Babylon. When you were very small, you asked her what meaning these lines held for you.
Abuela only smiled.
‘Now, child, that would be telling,’ kneeling, she reached to shift the hair out of your eyes. ‘Surely, it is better to make meaning for yourself?’
You held your hands up close to your face, narrowing your eyes to sift through roots and rivers. ‘When will that happen?’
‘As soon as you stop looking quite so hard.’
When evening fell, you would join her in sweeping the house. Shooing away errant dust, and smoke, and the soft thrum of energy from the day’s spells
Beside you, she would sit in the silence, in prayer or meditation for a long while. You looked at her, and willed yourself into stillness, tight as it felt around your body, like a coiled serpent
You wondered to yourself how it was that she could be so still, when all around you, the murmur of the spirits grew so loud. So loud that it felt like shouting. Like screaming.
Abuela opened one eye.
With a hand, she drew you closer, stroking up and down your arm.
You felt your body shake beneath her touch, longing to lean against her and be held in a quiet that you could never seem to keep hold of.
The Hierophant
You are brought out of the clouds by El Cuervo’s rapping at the glass. Distant first, then pointed, the sound slides beneath your skin.
‘Visitor.’ breathes Geraldine, her head tucked against her chest.
You slide the window open. He ducks and wriggles through, landing with a skitter on the slick and chemical floor.
Cacalotl, Abuela would call him, when she told you of the spirits taking animal shape.
Inside a fading dream, he would perch upon her gate, and regard you through his onyx eyes until you saw yourself, reflected.
Abuela never shooed him. She would lay clay bowls at his feet, of blessed seeds, and grain, and popped corn, to tempt him and his magic closer to the house.
You have no such things to offer now. Instead, you draw him close, and gently stroke his head with the tips of your fingers. He croaks low, squirming at your preening touch with eyes aflutter.
As the moon waxes, he will bring his treasures. The many things you cannot reach from here, that speak of a world that you find, even standing here before the smallest square of light, to be slipping. Vanishing from view.
You clutch El Cuervo’s gifts to you ever tighter. With thread, and wood, and glittering silver pieces, you fashion chimes, and hang them by the window. The tinkling sound of breeze and rain washes over you, and with it, your baby boy ripples, warm and alive in his fluidity.
For a while, the gentle music holds the darkness back. The pulse of rumbling thunder stays at bay, on a horizon only faintly seen in dreams that El Cuervo knows to wake you from; His solid, satin self a weight that ties you to your body with the pointed press of talons. Never sharp, but enough to draw a breath that echoes, builds a room back up around you to blot out swirling, angry clouds.
Sometimes, he is gone. In those moments, for those days, your mind will start to trace those paths. The threads will lead you down, into depths of void and starless black, where light no longer glitters against his eyes. Caught in limbo, dark leaks through cracks you cannot reach.
Time falls away.
For days, you wait by the window, seeing nothing, until his circling, swooping shape is within view once more.
Released from silence, and from stillness, the colours come to you, jewel bright through awakened eyes. El Cuervo, bathed in iridescence, lights the room on fire with his glow.
You feel thick cobwebs burn away to ash that falls like snow around you. The warmth of magic fills your fingertips. You card your hands through chimes, and chimes, and chimes until the music never ceases. Melody meanders dulcet through your sleep, and cuts through the sludge of slow and ponderous time that looms each morning.
You can fight it now. You have that strength, freshly set alight inside you.
You keep awake.
El Cuervo brings you daisies, fresh on their stems.
The moon rises, clear of clouds, and glowing crescent-shaped and milky.
The limpia must happen now, for the magic to be strongest.
With no red cloth, you improvise, scrubbing at the ground with a cake of red carbolic soap until it crumbles in your hands.
You draw The Sun, and place it, leaning, against an incense bottle, lit to purify the air.
Sparing a glance to Geraldine, in the depths of sleep, you slip in silence out of your nightgown first, and then, your underwear.
You anoint yourself with oils of Venus, and the sun.
Bathed in moonlight and the glow of the flame, your obsidian blade, the arrowhead, gleams. You take it in your hand and press the edge against your skin.
In glancing, scraping movements, you work your way along your neck. Across your shoulders, and down your arms, to the tips of your fingers.
You feel the spirits shift. Their heaviness prising from your body, with the scoring of an unseen line between your breasts and down to your navel. Halting at the pelvis to reach back up and comb through each curled strand of your hair.
Your body tingles with the feeling as you trim the daisy stems with that same blade. Whisper the cleansing, healing words that still carry in Abuela’s voice, to charge them with their power.
There is no clay jar, as she would use to hold them, so you prop them up in a plain glass and move them to the window to sit beneath the chimes.
The magic oscillates in waves across the room. You bask in its protection, stepping back into your clothes.
At the foot of your bed, El Cuervo perches, his eyes unblinking as the candlelight fades away to nothing, and you drift off to sleep.
In the morning, there is haze, and fog. You fight yourself, your clouded eyes, to see glass shattered, wilted daisies spilled across the floor. Your chimes torn from the window.
El Cuervo is nowhere to be found.
Wheel of Fortune
Days run like a river. The smooth and quiet ebb and flow, a gentle curving line of blue across the surface of your mind,
You lift your skirt—a long one, like Abuela would wear—and wade into the water. Stand there for a while in the morning’s soft light to feel your feet against the bottom. A moment to be savoured, when the stream runs clear, sparkling, and every piece of you is seen in symmetry.
There was a place like this. You watch it shimmer in and out of focus behind your eyelids. The feeling of a still and glassy pool, around your waist.
Abuela’s words are lost to time, but the rhythm of them is sharp, and fresh as the lonely chill of mountain air.
The sky was the deep blue of the honeycreeper’s breast. Beside you, a waterfall raged, frozen in time as stalactites that tumbled over into open sky and nothing.
It was there, Hierve El Agua, where you felt it first. Your head held underwater by a force impossible to name. Your body pulled by a current that was not there. Drifting closer to the edge of the world.
You do not remember screaming. But your next feeling was of Abuela, hushing you with slow, gentle rocking, and a throat that burned so raw you could not speak, or breathe.
Once dried, and back within the confines of her garden, she did not ask you to say more. You thought, perhaps, she took it as a spirit. with a strength that overwhelmed you. Easily repelled with cleansing and protection from an amulet she had made, with herbs and charms, around your neck.
In dreams, and distant waking moments, you got to know the river. How its flow could change with any faltered step. A foaming rush, and you would find yourself washed to parts unknown and shining. With a gleam that brightened every corner of your mind, and made it seem so whole and able, to be filled and filled, with things you’d never thought to think before. You felt ideas blossom from your skull in vibrant colour, and your head became so heavy with the flowers.
Until, dragged ever faster, your body would collide with solid debris, and at once, the lights would be snuffed out.
In dark. In cold. You floated, motionless. Stagnant water soaked your clothes. Your skin. Your hair. Every bit of you wet through, and frozen to the touch. Even as Abuela roused you from your bed, you remained muted, sagging in the glow of the candles she would light for your protection. Unflinching as obsidian trailed along your skin.
You imagined yourself among things that you could not reach. You imagined the pain of a place built atop and covered over. The losing of a self.
It made you shiver. Even as a girl. A shiver that you could never explain to Abuela, for she would only tell you to trust the amulets and charms. To never dwell upon these feelings, for the magic would not work in such a state.
The magic had to work.
The magic was Abuela’s lifeblood, trailed a ghost’s faint whisper into your ear’s shell.
You were twelve years old, when you opened the gate, and made your way down the mountain in the darkness.
In the dead of night, the Spanish church cast no shadow. You stroked your Azabache bracelet with a prayer not to the saints encased in white, but to Santa Muerte, the most beautiful of all. To heal you of this push and pull. The tearing of your body that you felt, and heard, in the depths of your bones. For Abuela’s sake, if not for yours.
The river carves deep troughs inside you. You run your fingers in a trail along your skin, and feel it lap against them. Warm, inviting for a moment.
You stay still in this place, this spot in the shallows, and feel yourself bathing your baby. Cradling his head in the crook of your arm, you let the water kiss his velvet skin clean. He is warm, and safe.
You navigate the days for him, as they slip and slide and weave and flow together. When the leaden feeling overtakes you, it is all that you can do to let your body lie listless and uncared for. Unresponsive to Geraldine’s timid stroking of your skin.
Time shudders to a halt that feels at once booming and distant, muffled by the fuzz that swamps your ears. Makes your bones so heavy that you cannot bring yourself to stir when El Cuervo flutters through the window.
You attempt a smile that feels like a grimace, unsure for how long he has been watching you, when he hops up beside you on the bed to draw the blanket back.
You make no move to stop him, curled into yourself, with your knees against your stomach.
El Cuervo tilts his head. He mouths at your hair but does not pull.
You remain still. Silent. A tremor passes through you.
Inside, your baby boy is slow and languid, like sweet syrup.
‘It will pass, ātzintli,’ you whisper in your mind. ‘I promise, it will pass.’
The Emperor
His house was not as you expected.
You said nothing of the shattered paving that led up to the peeling door.
Nothing of the way it sat, somehow askew on its foundations. Sandwiched between two others on the row as though bursting, misshapen, out of both. Angles bulged and slumped, almost spilling over the severe brick wall that ran on either side.
No trees. No tended flowers. A few wisps of unruly grass below the jutting window, fronds of nettles waving high enough to bat against the glass.
Your eyes fell to a leather ball sitting in the shadow of the house, limp and deflated.
Sebastian did not look twice at the disarray. Laden with his cases, he hurried to the door—only to pause, remember you, and turn.
‘Wait there.’ he told you shortly, and fumbled with his stump to nudge the doorknob, kicking it ajar with the toe of his polished shoe.
You did not see much. Only a shaft of dim yellow light, before he pulled it closed from inside.
The low rumble of his voice was easy to pick up through tarnished wood.
The air was silent. Even the magpies, El Cuervo’s cousins, sat sombre on the wires as they watched you from above.
You startled at the sound of another, unknown voice. Higher than Sebastian’s, but with that same curling to the words.
There was a sudden crash. A clatter of retreating footsteps.
Then, he reappeared, pulling the door wide. ‘In yer get, mar girl. Thassit.’
The entryway was dark and narrow, with a ceiling that sagged. You smelled the smoke. Felt it hanging in the air as heavy clouds.
In that hallway, you found yourself worrying your lip. Placing a hand to your stomach, where a baby—his baby—grew, still unknown to him.
You shared his bed and slept on sheets that did not smell of him, nor you, but you said nothing. He twisted your curls in his fingers, lapping up your body with eyes that glittered black.
Behind his ear, you would glimpse a bare-branched, blackened tree. El Cuervo perched within the branches, looking on in stubborn silence.
It was hard to feel the magic in that cold and dinge-filled place. The soft whisper of the spirits, strangled by the blare and buzz of radio, of television. His face made spectral by the screen. You felt winter loom in the creeping dark.
He kissed you, and the taste of alcohol was overpowering.
As ever, he would leave. For long stretches, you would sit in some withered room or other until the darkness drove you to distraction, and you summoned courage enough to pull the curtains wide, displacing showers of dust and swarms of fluttering moths.
You prayed a lot for your forgiveness, from every saint and god that you could think of. It did not seem right to have your altar there, for any spirits entering this home would surely balk at its unseemly state.
There was no soap in the bathroom. None for dishes, or for clothes.
A bus would pass the window most days, but your money was all pesos, sitting dull at the bottom of your pocket.
One morning, as you tried to wash a blouse with water that came cold and sluggish from the kitchen tap, you felt a presence stood behind your shoulder.
Turning, you met the glowering eyes of your observer. A sour-faced boy, maybe six or seven. His skin was fair, but sickly-looking, with dull brown hair, and the same striking nose as Sebastian
‘Dunna bother,’ he sniffed. ‘Tap’s brok. All are.’
‘Why?’
‘He didna pay, so they took th’water,’ the boy’s ill-fitting t-shirt rode up with the shrug he gave you. He had broad shoulders, but his arms and legs were long, and lean. ‘Yer’s na from here, ay?’
You blinked, and then shook your head.
‘Yer can toke English, rate?’
‘Yes.’
He scoffed, curling his lip in a sneer. ‘Tha’s na much. What’d he bring yer all th’way back for?’
You fell silent, hands wringing and wringing at the time-softened cotton of your blouse.
The boy wrinkled his nose and slouched off.
Night fell. Sebastian’s arms snared round you in an unconscious, drunken daze.
You laid still, and cried, for his strange and surly little boy. For his baby.
His son. Your stars.
You cried for you.
With the weeks, your belly swelled. Sebastian took little notice. Little care, as his hand stroked and teased at your clothes, sometimes with his firstborn only feet away.
Some days, the words were on your lips, in a momentary calm. Broken, as he reeled you in to make love yet again, and you would feel yourself leave your body.
All the while, the saints would frown and shake their heads. Their whispers, clandestine, would fill your ears with ringing, sonorous in every moment when you prowled the empty house, still tender from the ache of skin on skin.
The boy stared at you with eyes that pierced, in their coldness, deep into his brother’s sanctuary.
You pressed yourself against the door and held your stomach tight. The saints began to shout from inside their locked case, pure white silhouettes aglow.
You had to look away.
El Cuervo pried the window open, his wings cloaking you in darkness.
You curled beneath him, shaking with your sobs.
The shadows took you to Sebastian. His body coiled, writhed around you as he gorged himself on soulless sex.
Your lips trembled, heavy and swollen from all the breath he had stolen from your lungs.
‘Sebastian.’ your voice swam, faint in your ears.
He did not hear. Or he pretended.
Hands you could not feel gripped his shoulders. Pushed.
You breathed air that was not shared and found it sweet.
‘Sebastian. I’m pregnant.’
Silence.
His face froze, lips barely moving.
‘You stupid bitch.’
The light in his eyes was gone.
He said more, but your head was already underwater.
In the greying, fading light of a dream, you saw the cards float past.
You drew them. Plucked them from the stream as they drifted by in slow-motion.
Turned them over.
Five of Cups
Ten of Swords
The Devil.
The Devil
You feel him first.
A prickling. A constant breeze along your skin, and down your spine.
His fingers never touch you, only ghosting. Carding through the air that hits the back of your neck.
You shudder, eyes fixed open, and search for him in corners. In motes of light and dust and heat. is breath is silk, and dark.
Beside your bed, there is a locker. You pry it open. Wind the winged amulet around your fingers. Press it to your palm until the indent stays and place it round your neck.
The days are short. They are fleeting, flashing. Filled with time that you do not remember. Spent by someone who does not feel like you.
She is running. She is always running.
She is crying out.
Her mind is on fire.
You rub the spirit’s wings between your fingers.
For hours and for days. You are caught in this. Curled in, and caressing your demon in the dark, whilst she sees oblong eyes that stare at her from twisted faces, melting like candlewax.
There are voices. Floating, buoyant voices that come to her in waking dreams.
And yet, you cannot hear, with his low song an echo, pouring through the cracks as thick oil.
The nights are long. You hear him, his cloven hooves that clatter on the rooftop. His howling in the wind, whilst everything is still and silent.
You cannot sleep.
You cannot sit.
You pace, and pace, and pace, and feel the threads begin to fray. Work yourself into a knot of sounds and songs and saints and spirits.
The fire burns with every day and night. You hold your head and feel its roar.
He is grasping. Grasping with his shadow hands to reach inside you. Rip your baby from your womb.
You search for signs. For meanings. Hold the flimsy paper bags of dried tea between your fingers.
Tear them, one by one, and watch the scattering of a thousand flecks upon the ground.
On the wall there is a piece of paper. A calendar to mark the days.
Devils. Devils. Devils, they spill out across the page, and spiral, spiral over the wall in black and running red that pours down in a dripping wound.
He is clinging, clinging to your flesh.
You crush red soap between your fingers, shaking shaking shaking. Scrub and scrub yourself in a mirror full of fog and fragments of a shattered face.
You gnaw your fingers. Bite down to feel warmth between your teeth. Rushing, pulsing blood.
Still, you cannot sleep.
You whisper to your baby in the light of the moon, even as the Devil rages.
Rock yourself in a slow sway that feels like rest. Like calmness in this endless ocean. He is a single, twinkling star amongst the swathe of black that coats you.
In your veins, you feel the fire spread. It sets alight your fingertips, your hair, until you glow with dizzying warmth.
The colours flash so fast. So loud.
You cannot be touched. The fire lashes out and holds them back.
Candles. Candles round your feet, in walls of quivering flame. A thousand colours glow and dance against the shadows. They lick your skin.
The Devil watches on with eyes of liquid gold. His hunched shape shimmers in shades of deepest black as sparks writhe and waver.
You try to close your eyes against him, but they are pinned, and darting with each vaporous shift of his body. His voice threads and weaves through the distant wash of sound. Crashing, crashing over every part of you.
You feel the pieces falling. Watch them float. Further, further out to sea.
You cannot sleep. You do not sleep. You will not sleep.
The Devil’s eyes are never closed, even as he rests. They are fixed, and burning, burning holes through the paper of your skin. To look upon your baby. The only water that can put the fire out.
On and on, it burns. Stretching from your feet with every step. Every motion brings more heat. More glowing embers, pouring from your mouth, your eyes. You cannot see. You cannot breathe, for smoke and ash that spews forth in a blaze.
Your head pounds, and pounds with saintly chanting. White and wax, the figures shift around you. You feel them taking hold with wandering hands and, with a screaming slash of fire, melt them to the ground.
And from those ashen puddles rise more, and more. Solid, faceless bodies build a barricade. The ground shakes with The Devil’s laughter as they advance, and you are pressed, and pressed towards the darkness.
In veins of lava, sharpness ripples through your arm.
Your body sways. Staggers. A cotton feeling fills your mouth.
You fall. Forwards into clouds, and deep, deep nothingness.
The stars become unclear.
In and out of waking, you wander, full of static silence. Distant dreams of half-remembered birdsong and the ocean’s roar.
Voices come in only fleeting, fading wisps of sound.
Your eyes slide slowly open.
You have been placed before the window. Looking out at things unseen.
Women comb out your curls with stiff brushes and hot iron.
Your lips tingle. Twist. You feel them gape. A sound escapes as a soft gurgle.
Your hands are solid. Leaden. You try. You try to reach up. Push the brush away. But they are pulled. Draped back into your lap without comment.
‘There,’ comes a voice that rings. ‘Much more manageable now.’
Sluggish, your eyes roll upward to catch the woman’s face. The tease of laughter in her smile that flashes far too fleeting for it to be disguised.
Beneath the shroud of heavy haze that binds you, your head sinks. Sags against your shoulder.
You cannot make a sound.
Cannot cry, as they leave you to survey the reflection of a woman you have never met, unable to escape her gaze in your body’s captivity.
In your mind, you tear out locks of her lank and flattened hair.
The Stars
Your body swells, ripe with summer heat.
English heat is wet, and close. It smells of tar, and exhaust fumes, and brittle, crunching grass.
They bring you down to bathe, and it is a small comfort in this room of glistening tiles, where warm air is trapped, swirling into clouds of steam.
Water flows around you. You lie back, and your stomach rises in an island. Close your eyes and take yourself to the river’s serene bank.
You see him. So close to you, reflected in the ripples. Still shimmering and imprecise in his image. But you know his skin is soft. His hair is downy as a chick’s. His eyes are closed, in perfect half-moons.
You have felt his fingers, pressed against you. Splaying in his ache to watch the world through his own eyes.
Your body drifts downstream. Travels fast beneath the waterfall rush of the sluice jug.
But what of after?
You feel your mind reel back and catch itself against sharp stones.
When he is born?
What then? What then?
You are lodged tight. Your body shifts. Twists into a shape that feels tighter still
You cannot see out from this. All is the river, rising. Filling every part of you.
The cards. The cards, you lunge for them. Fingers scrabble against slickness, and you shudder, shudder with the thought of water, water spilling out of you. Pouring, as you press and press yourself together tighter, and hear bones groan and bend to your body’s new course.
Pressure thunders in your ears. In a soundless world, you sob, banks bursting.
The water flows and flows and does not stop.
The colours of the cards run, bleed, into your body. Stain you with white and red and black and gold.
He will surely drown in you.
You clamber from the bath, and curl against the tiles until they come to rub at you with towels of sandpaper and thorns.
El Cuervo brings you respite in the night with the flap of his wings, whilst you squirm in restless discomfort. Farha’s spirit charm swings like a pendulum around your neck.
You stroke his feathers, sticky from the summer sky.
‘Mijo, will he be safe?’
His eyes shine solemn in the moonlight.
‘Please answer.’
El Cuervo cocks his head, deftly hopping down to where the cards are spread. He plucks one from the fan, and drops it in your waiting, trembling hands.
The Hanged Man.
Your breath shakes, muffled by your hand as Geraldine sleeps on, unaware.
El Cuervo says nothing, a frozen shadow on the ground. His head is bowed.
‘No.’ comes a sudden, startling croak.
You stare at him, and he repeats.
‘No, no, no.’ the word is clear. Ringing out as human speech.
He struts forward, eyes flashing, and tugs the card from your hand. Throws his head back to rip it clean in half.
He plucks another. Tears another.
You cry out for him to stop.
‘No!’ he screams, scattering the cards with frenzied wingbeats. Pieces, fragments merge, until they are a collage. A mosaic tiles the floor with disparate splinters of colour and shape that you cannot describe.
Your baby thrashes inside you, and you gasp and groan with the force of him, screwing your eyes shut.
You stumble to your bed, body rolling like a heaving tide.
El Cuervo stands among the wreckage of the arcana, feathers mussed. Some lie scattered on the ground, amidst the cacophony of cards.
You watch him staring at his feet. He paws the floor with an irate clicking of his talons.
You open your arms. ‘Come here.’
He picks his way across the blanket, wingspan stretching across the crest of your stomach.
With each breath that passes through you, you watch him rise and fall, as though in flight.
His eyes are locked on yours. In the silver of the moon, they appear almost moist.
June dawns, and El Cuervo is a constant presence, never straying from the sill for all the times he is swatted, chased away.
Your baby boy is person-shaped. You feel the pieces of him clearly when you press a hand to your swollen stomach. Each part of him is perfect.
It is a challenge now for you to sit, with pain that ripples through your spine and shoulders. Most days, instead, are horizontal. Through dry lips, you whisper Nahua lullabies to your boy, and still him when the squirming turns into a throb.
In your mind, you paint the ceiling full of stars for him to look upon. The sort of thing he would have, were there a nursery, a crib for him to sleep in.
You shape these things from clay behind your eyelids, where the saints once stood. They are the colours of home. Of ochre, umber, terracotta. The cot is draped with Quetzalcoatl’s soft blanket.
Abuela’s turquoise beads hang from a mobile overhead.
One night, the pain becomes unbearable; A fierce heat that pulses through your body.
‘Oh, darling boy.’ you gasp, to clinging, thunderous air. ‘Not now. Not yet.’
All you see of him is skin of gossamer, and brittle, bending bones. Unready to be dragged away from precious heat and softness, and the low thrum of a heart that guides his into beating. Teaches him to fill your every spare moment with his music.
You struggle free from jumbled, scattered blankets, and lurch towards the window.
El Cuervo, ever present, watches from behind glass. You pull the wooden sash with a creaking whine
He gazes at you in the moonlight, eyes dark with knowing.
From your neck, you take the amulet and place it over his head. The ancient spirit of the wind sits against his chest.
‘Protect him, always.’
El Cuervo slowly blinks, his ink-black shape lit only by a silver gleam.
Doggedly, you move to sit at the side of your bed and start to coax slow and steady breaths that move in time with the roll and hiss of the sea.
In the dark, your mind drifts to Abuela. Her peace, and how she found it in the silence.
But not you. Your comfort comes from water. From the sound of waves.
Your ātzintli has been with you, always.
As dawn breaks, you shift, and struggle to stand.
You part your legs, and with it comes a rush of water, running clear and pooling at your feet.
Amidst your own cry, there is a sound. A low and distant fluttering of wings.
El Cuervo’s body shines, black as obsidian against the rising sun.
Breath catching, you watch him swoop, and glide between the distant, looming chimneys until he is out of sight.
A spasm passes through you. Vision clouding, you bury your teeth in your lip.
Geraldine stirs. Her pale figure swims in and out of view. The sound of blood, and ragged, rasping breath thunders in your head.
Your body thrashes, eyes rolling with another wave.
Geraldine reaches out to take your hand.
You feel her. Circles. Whirlpools. Stars spill from her fingers and drift through the current.
The world collapses onto you in stripes of blinding light and choking, crushing darkness.
Face drenched; you cry out. Words that she does not understand.
She strokes your hair, tender as Sebastian once was when you were held and kissed, and Oaxaca bloomed around you in turquoise, jade and gold.
‘Okay,’ comes Geraldine’s faint whisper, above the roaring tide that drags you down. ‘Okay, Lucy. Okay.’
You scream. Your mouth floods with saltwater.
A baby’s feeble cry rings out, and fades as you sink beneath the waves.
Your boy.
You feel him writhe against your chest, his grey-tinged body hot and slick with blood. It coats him. Plastered to his head, his hair shines black, forming curls that wind like vines around your fingers.
You part your lips against his crown, drinking in his scent. The iron taste of life that glistens off him. He quivers. Splays his hands in stars against your skin.
When your eyes next open, he is gone.
You do not hear the howl that rips your throat in two.
The air is silent. Soundless, as your body staggers, still bloodied, to claw against the door.
All that you feel is his imprint on your skin. The burning shape where his body lay, cheek pressed to your heart.
You tear the door open, and stand in the shifting storm of a room, filled with a rising cacophony of nothing.
The faceless swarm approaches with a drone of sound that leers too close. Too sharp against your body.
You beg for your baby. For hours, you sit, and beg, and plead, to every flickering shadow passing by this fading place that trickles between your fingers. Dust and earth.
They do not tell you where he is.
Your lips are cracked. You tear pieces away until blood warms them.
You cup your breasts and feel them leak your milk through the fabric of your dress.
With the days, they try to bathe you. You fight them off, with ragged, trembling strength. They will not wash his scent away.
Beneath your fingers, your belly slowly shrinks. You clutch it. Pray for it to stay, to gods that have forgotten you. Saints that lie toppled in a pile of severed limbs and heads.
The nights smother you in black. You lie, and coil phantom curls around your fingers. Cradle empty air, singing in a voice that wavers. Cracks.
El Cuervo casts his shadow on the wall. You cannot find it in you to let him in.
You feel yourself grow silent. Your mind rubbed smooth by the waves. Your body warps into a shape you cannot name. Something hollow.
In stillness, you are wheeled to a room where they knit and sew. Your eyes, the only parts of you that move, watch needles travel to and fro.
A skein of wool is in your hand. You do not know how it got there.
Your fingers stir. Flex into the fibres. Turquoise blue, the ocean’s colour.
You press it to your chest and find your hands rigid. Unable to let go.
For soundless days and nights, you card the wool, until your body loosens, and you find the end to wind around your finger.
When The Sun next draws itself outside your window, you begin to knit.
Your work is silent. Fixed in only motions that you need to stitch and stitch until turquoise runs from your needles like a stream, and slowly grows into a river.
It flows from you, tumbling over the end of your bed. Pools on the slick floor and stretches to the window.
Once it has run its course, you search for shapes.
With squares, you make a scarf. A blanket.
With the rising of the moon, you knit a pair of tiny, turquoise socks.
El Cuervo hops across the floor to take one in his beak.
Wordless, you pass him the other, but he shakes his head.
Fingers clenched, you stroke the fibres with your thumb in restless, swirling patterns
He flutters to the sill, eyes fixed on you for an aching moment.
‘Bless you, mijo.’ Your voice is faint, and scratched from lack of use, but Nahuatl is a soothing balm against your lips. ‘You keep him warm for me.’
El Cuervo’s black eyes glitter as he nods. He has never looked more human.
You ache to climb upon his back as he ascends into the midnight sky. To be taken to the place where he alone knows your baby to be.
You picture him, his lone lasting image on the altar, shining brighter than any saint. His eyes unopened, for you do not know their colour. Clean of blood behind your eyelids, and in a peaceful sleep. Rocked, perhaps, as a boat on the ocean, with a single turquoise sock upon his foot.
You rub its twin against your cheek, and let the water carry you away into a dream.
A dream where you can hold him in your arms forever.