Brujeria

Oelania Rubino

photo credit: Oelania Rubino

I asked Mami for chocolate.

I finished my Guarinas and café and didn’t ask again. By then, I knew just how far was too far and I didn’t want to get slapped. After all, Papi had not been home since the spell was cast. He came in and started throwing up green. Same shade as the bottles that collected by his feet when he drank at the colmado. 

My brothers were helping Mami bring him in. I watched as he vomited. He looked like Jesus, but his skin was canela. His pelo bueno stuck to his head with sweat. His body dangled side to side as my brothers' skinny bird-like frames struggled, but persisted, to hold him up.

Mami said the lady was Haitiana, prostituta y bruja. La tipa esa.

I once saw Mami cry and ask God to make Papi stop loving The Witch because she kept him from coming home.

I met The Witch when Papi took me to a colmado in Pueblo Nuevo. He would buy me chocolate and papitas as long as I didn’t tell Mami where we had gone. The Witch was a prieta but a real mujeron. Her clothes clung to her body like her skin wanted to inhale them. She smelled like a cafe and her lips glistened a ruby red. Papi embraced her tightly and she called him Papi, too. Perhaps the spell made him think she was me. Perhaps that's why he laughed with her like he laughed with me.

He never laughed with Mami.

The Witch even touched me. She touched my long coils and told Papi: She looks like you. She looked up at the sky, laughed and thanked God that he had been able to pass down his hair texture and spare me from my mother's moños de tusa—hair like corncobs. 

Mami always said that I looked just like Papi too, but only when I was being bad – Igualita – which was often.

I was bad. Mami told me so.

When Mami helped me do my prayers at night, she always asked God to heal my tongue. It looked like a regular tongue to me, but Mami was very smart, a school teacher. So, I prayed and prayed for a new tongue, too.                    

I could never help myself.                    

Like when they said at Sunday school that Jesus was one hundred percent man and one hundred percent God, so I asked if he pooped. I had to go outside and get my own tree branch to get a pela. Like when we used coconut shells and mud as pretend kitchen toys and my cousins pretended to scrape the pegao from the bottom of the paila. They said the cucharon went broom broom but I said it went grup grup. They would say no it doesn't but I would say, yes it does, yes it does, yes it does!

The Witch hugged me goodbye that day. Her bracelets made music when they crashed into one another as she embraced me, kissed my cheek.

I smiled as papi wiped the lipstick from my face and reminded me of our deal. He dug his right thumbnail into my dimple to scrape away the last bit of chocolate. He scratched my skin digging into the comma on my face. He was trying to erase his sin, hoping I wouldn't tell Mami.

He hurt me a little, but I still smiled.

Oelania Rubio is a writer/artist who was born in Barahona, Dominican Republic and lives in Brooklyn. @lanisaidit