The Witch Narratives: Reincarnation (45 page)

Outside, the theatre was not much to look at, simply a tin building with a blue sign. Ah, but the magic conjured inside whenever Salia took to the stage.

Salia was white.

Salia was black.

She was all the colors of the rainbow.

In essence, she was a chameleon, possessing the power to become whoever or whatever she wished, all with the help of a magic lodestone, a piedra imán, watered and fed by Salia.

Marcelina wished now she had seen Salia sing in one of the great operas, or one of the lesser operas she made great by her performance. Juan once suggested they spend an afternoon at the theatre, but she remembered the effect Salia had on her husband. Just think how the men must have worshipped her on stage, their eyes mesmerized by her beauty.

A sign hung lopsided on the theatre door.
Closed Until Further Notice!

There was only one way she would be able to enter the theatre. She hurled a rock through a window and very carefully cleaned out the remaining glass by punching it with another rock. She leaned over the opening and dropped the flour sack on the floor, then lifted her leg over the window sill and climbed in.

She walked down the aisle between the rows of seats. The patrón had ordered the white velvet chairs, just for Salia.

Facing the chairs was a semi-circular stage with elaborately carved wood and the words
Engine House Melodrama Theatre and Opera
painted in white, the same color of the Roman columns holding the dropped ceiling of the stage. Draped, purple, velvet folds of material, with tassels of gold, hung
from the stage ceiling, cascading into pools of royal velvet. Flood lights ran around the stage, along with an alley, so an engineer could control the lighting. A silk screen hung in the back drop.

The silk screen still possessed an embossed image of Salia as the gypsy
Carmen
, her last performance at the theatre.

Marcelina waddled up the stage steps, her shoes sounding like hollow logs under the blade of an axe, the theatre designed to broadcast every word said by the actors.

She stood in the center of the stage, rocking her hips, and heard the applause. Never, in her wildest dreams, could she imagine what it must be like to be loved by so many, a great singer, admired by all.

She went to take her bow, and stopped in mid-air, her eyes rolling to the flour sack. The lights went out. The applause flickered. Never, in her wildest nightmares, could she imagine what it must be like to be hated so much by so many. She did not envy Salia as much, after all.

She took a white wafer from her skirt pocket and held it up to the light. “I bless this host in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” she said, then dropped the wafer into the sack. She pounded the sack with her shoe, grounding the wafer to dust. She shook the bag to mix the holy wafer dust with Salia’s ashes.

Marcelina waved her arms and danced around the stage, scattering Salia’s ashes. Peach dust covered the stage like talcum powder. “My Friend, you will haunt this theatre. It will serve them right,” she sang. “What a joke on Madrid. The villagers will expect you to haunt Witch Hill, but only Felicita and La India can be found there, rocking in their chairs.”

She ripped the flour sack in two and dusted the chairs in the front row, making sure she left all of Salia.

She made her way to the door.

She heard laughter, like the tinkling of ice against crystal. “Already, my friend, you haunt this theatre. It has begun.”

The theatre masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung at the exit. The mouth of the white mask, Comedy, was laughing, red and white ribbons flowing down the sides.

The mouth of the black mask, Tragedy, was turned down. A tear dripped from his eye hole and black ribbons.

Beneath the masks was a sign with a quotation written by the gringo playwright, William Shakespeare. The sign read:
All the World’s a Stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances
.

Like the Comedy and Tragedy masks, Salia’s life seemed to end in tragedy, but perhaps, she had the last laugh. Marcelina closed the theatre door and smiled at the darkening sky. Tears dampened her cheeks when she thought of Salia trapped inside the burning house. Sparks of fire jumped this way and that. Part of the roof crashed in. But, then suddenly last night, when it all seemed over, Salia had run from the burning house and flashed into a fireball.

“With magic, all things are possible. One can even travel by the spark of a flame and race across the sky like a shooting star,” Salia once told her.

Felicita taught Salia how to fly, and her preferred mode of transportation had always been as a fireball, witch lights the villagers call these fireballs.

Last night when it all seemed over, one spark lifted slowly upward from the ball of fire, and then flashed across the sky like a shooting star headed east, towards Europe and the theatres awaiting any great opera singer.

Yes, there in the sky, I see
it.
Salia’s star
.

All the World is a Stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.

Salia had one hell of an exit to rival any great opera singer.

59

O
n the walk home Marcelina hugged the child in her womb and thought about the visions of the night before. La Llorona had taken all her babies. If she dug up their graves, she knew what she would find.

I can give you what you want
, Tezcatlipoca had hissed at her in her dream. And the vision came to her of a healthy baby in her arms. Juan Junior. Her son. The one who would live.

For years she prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, Patron Saint of Pregnant Women, only to miscarry or have all her babies stillborn. After her twenty-day old son died in his cradle, she busted the statue of St. Anthony of Padua.

This Juan Junior might survive, if only…

In a daze, she found herself back at the bottom of Witch Hill. She held a hand to her forehead and swayed at the picket fence.
How did I get here? Why did my feet lead me here, as if pulled by an invisible force?

You know why
, the voice whispered. She had not heard his voice in years.

Last night, she wanted a second chance, to be fourteen years old again. Before that ever happened. To be given another chance.

Well, this was her second chance. Forget the nonsense of a spark. Salia, her rival, was dead. Marcelina had the house all to herself.

This time, she walked through the front door.

She slowly climbed the stairs to the third floor, her heart beating in anticipation. Her eyes had a glazed look. She hadn’t felt this rush since her wedding night, this desire, this agonizing throb, as if her heart beat in her secret place. The excitement of the forbidden.

She entered the room at the end of the hallway.

The black curtains parted, as if expecting her upon the stage. A melodrama awaited her, and she was the star.

The idol of Tezcatlipoca was untouched by fire, waiting patiently, all these years.

Well, she had waited too long. She had lusted. She had envied.

“Maybe, the piedra imán has a mind of its own, and chooses who it wants to belong to,” Two-Face had told Jefe earlier, after they couldn’t find the magic stone.

Me
, Marcelina thought.
The piedra imán chooses me. I shall take good care of the precious lodestone. Feed it three times a day. Water it. Mother it. The shape-shifting stone will make me thin and beautiful
.

She imagined herself tall and slender with shapely legs, dressed in a shimmering flapper dress and dancing the Charleston on a table surrounded by men. While she danced, she munched on a fried chicken thigh.

She climbed the steps of the altar. The legs of the panther skin, draped across the idol, parted, opening its secrets to her.

Of course
, she thought.
Salia would have hid the piedra imán with Tezcatlipoca guarding its power
.

She searched around the skin, finding only a black rose. She cocked her head at the idol.
Such kind eyes
, she thought.
Why hadn’t I noticed before how he looks at me with such love? Juan never looks at me so lovingly
.

It was inevitable. She always wanted this. She lusted after this, ever since she was a child.

She writhed on the floor, rubbing her backside against the dirt. It felt good to give into temptation. She didn’t even care that a cockroach crawled up her leg, or a spider traveled up her arm.

Welcome home, Marcelina
, the voice whispered.
Welcome home, my prodigal child
.

She lay there with a black rose stuck in her palm and La Llorona bending over her.

Sneak peek at

The Witch Narratives,

Resurrection

Part One

Lust For Power

For what does man live but to gain power in the world?

1

May 26, 1934
The Santo Domingo Reservation, New Mexico

I
t was near the stroke of midnight. The witching hour. The time of day when chaos rules, along with the children of Tezcatlipoca, the Patron of Sorcery, Witchcraft and Magic. There is but one way a Native American can gain power in the white man’s world and that is through the way of the Shaman or to embrace Tezcatlipoca. A witch’s ascendancy cannot be measured in dollars like a white man’s authority.

Tonight, Jefe’s sleep was disturbed by a future filled with omens. A foreboding drained of yearnings. A destiny emptied amidst danger. A forthcoming exhausted for lust. In his dream, Jefe deflowered twelve virgins. Each virgin held a torch burning from passion. After he had his way with the last virgin, an eagle swooped from the sky, grabbed his shoulders with its claws, and carried him away. Jefe was a badass witch but never felt as helpless before, flying through the air with his legs dangling useless, the eagle’s prey.

Jefe now kicked his legs against the mattress. His body was drenched in sweat, his breathing labored. His heart beat painfully.

He opened his good right eye, being half-blind in his left eye. Something was wrong. His temple pounded like his brain was about to explode. Jefe had not felt such fear since his grandmother, the witch known as La India, carved up his face with her knife.

He jerked to a sitting position, alert to every danger. His dream had to be significant. His nightmare reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think clearly in this room that stunk so much of women. He could still smell the juices of the virgins he deflowered in his dream. He was choking on vagina. He was born cursed by women, for women and of women. From his grandmother, to Felicita his stepmother. And Salia, his half-sister. From his wife. His mistress. His daughters. Women would surely be the death of him.

A man was often damned by the women who surrounded him. Look at him. Married to a shell of a woman whose nerves shook so loudly, he
couldn’t resist the urge to rattle her often. It was a trick of nature she was Storm-Chaser’s daughter. Weeping-Woman was proof of the shaman’s weak blood.

His grown daughter, Two-Face, still snored on the mattress beside him. His wife, Weeping-Woman, slept at the foot of the mattress like a faithful dog. The babe Anjelica, born of his dead mistress, slept in her cradleboard.

He had to get out of this room before he killed them all.

He yanked his buckskin pants over his hips and on bare feet left the hogan. A cloud of dust from the dirt floor evaporated from beneath the door blanket as it flapped behind him.

He could still feel the eagle’s claws cutting into him. His back was sticky with blood and felt like his skin was slashed to ribbons. He grabbed the hogan wall for support. Like his hunchbacked body, his hogan was odd shaped and sorry-looking, not a log house like that of some Puebloans. His hogan was made of sod and leaned crookedly, as if the relentless wind shoved it, banishing them to the far ends of Santo Domingo, but no one, not even his father-in-law, his enemy, the powerful shaman Storm-Chaser could have chased Jefe away. His banishment was self-imposed, though welcomed with relief. The people dwelling at Santo Domingo slept more soundly because he was no longer their neighbor. He was expelled as a member, shunned behind his back, respected face-to-face, and sucked up to out of necessity. It was because of Jefe that the people felt cursed.

Jefe, which means boss, was not cast out alone. Three other hogans leaned towards his hogan, surrounding him like bees buzzing around their queen. The hogans were inhabited by his disciples who followed him when he abandoned the pueblo for the fence. Rings of smoke rose from the roofs of the hogans. The reservation was so quiet, he could hear the smoke puffing from the kiva fireplaces. The reservation was isolated from the outside world, the desolation welcomed.

His face was cloaked in darkness, even the full moon shying away from his ugliness. His grandmother had done her work well when she carved his face with her knife. A jagged knife scar ran diagonally all the way from his temple to his pock-marked chin, cutting his lips into four pieces. His eye had been split so that his view of the world became as skewered as his psyche. His vision was three quarters of the whole because his cut left eye was half-closed, giving him a noticeable cast to his eye, which was a grayish-yellow,
as opposed to his right eye that was almost black in color. Jefe’s sight was deceiving. He appeared to be blind in his damaged eye but could see all of his peripheral vision to his left. It was to the right of this eye that he could not see. Thus, there was always a black hole in front of him, a little to the left of a nose that had been broken in several places.