Sobrenatural

Stephanie Gaitán

“The Nightmare.” John Henry Fuseli

If I mention the specter around Mami, the little hairs on her arms stand up and tears well in her eyes. She was walking home down a long dirt road from a colmado in El Caimito Jánico when she noticed an abandoned wooden house off in the distance. Beneath its metal shingles, the door opened slowly. There stood a mujer en una bata blanca y larga—a billowy nightgown. Mami froze. She couldn’t move her eyes up to look at the woman’s face. She felt that the woman wasn’t alive, but rather was a ghostly apparition, reaching out to her for some unknown reason. The living and the lost in limbo looked on at one another. The specter stood there, as if to say, Todavía estoy aquí.

This was before what I call “the discord”—before Mami landed on American soil, before her father’s emotional neglect, before the five children she pushed out of her womb. Before the first father of her first child was shipped back to Nicaragua and the second father stepped in. Before the men who violated her body. Before poverty ripped her mind apart, before roaches emerged from the walls and took possession of every corner in her home.

El sobrenatural reminds us that we’re not alone, not really. Perhaps phantasms are born of our loneliness, our struggles, our serendipitous moments. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve had a witch sit on my chest, and loop me into sleep paralysis. It only happened once.

My friend thinks I’m a witch with untapped power—a good witch. She derives this belief from how she interprets my hyper-sensitivity: an empathy that makes me cry at sentimental anime and leaves me weeping and gutted for days after reading a violent headline. A human being who feels deeply can appear to some to be supernatural in a world that seems to be unfeeling. To feel is dangerous, but necessary.

Once, when Mami was a sickly child, she was in bed with her mother and the bed began to levitate. She felt it push against gravity before falling back to the ground. She could’ve passed it off as a childhood dream, but something in her held onto it as reality. Sickness can open us up to things that are otherwise closed off. A sick body experiences everything in a state of fog, but who’s to say truth doesn’t lie within the fog?

I spent part of my childhood in Miami. At one point we lived in an efficiency apartment. While we were there, Mamá came to visit, all the way from Washington Heights. Her primary purpose for visiting was to lift the curse that was placed upon Mami. Te hicieron brujeria. Te echaraon un polvo en tu cama. Mami believes it must’ve happened in New Jersey because my Pa’s family always had it out for her. At the age of nineteen, Pa committed to raise a child he didn’t father. This is when his family’s resentment toward Mami began. I believe in energy forces that can neither be created nor destroyed. Curses can be born of long-harbored hate if the force of hate is powerful enough. I hoped Mami’s curse was removed. But maybe it was only transformed.

Maybe the curse lives in her mind, warped by physical ailments, bad living conditions, poisonous lovers. Maybe it’s all sobrenatural; maybe not. Maybe el sobrenatural and the dimension we live in overlap. Tal vez la realidad y el sobrenatural no son tan diferentes.

Stephanie Gaitán is a poet and fiction writer. She believes in direct action through community efforts. Her past-times include uplifting indie artists and time-traveling to the 90s and early 2000s with her daughter, via childhood touchstones. Her work has most recently been featured in InQluded and Palabritas. She lives in the Bronx, New York. @myeyesarebooked