More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches. That was what Nana Alba used to say when she told Minerva bedtime stories; it was the preamble that led into a realm of shadows and mysteries.
On the night of the new moon evil witches liked to dance against the treetops; that was what her great-grandmother used to say. They’d slip out of their human skins and grow wings, turn into balls of light, and cavort in the sky. The teyolloquani, the most fearsome of all, drank the blood of their victims and ate their hearts.
That’s what their name means, “heart eater,” Nana Alba had said. Listen, this story, you should hear it and learn how to fight them. About how to know them. Know the signs. A true witch is born, the day of their birth marks their path.
Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.
“A life without luxuries would be terribly dull,” he said. “Once in a while we must have a taste of what we desire.”
She had that terrible split second of panic in which she did not know what shape a man’s rage might take.
The black upon the white door was like a cavity in a tooth: the announcement of decay upon a pristine landscape.
She would no longer be my Ginny.
I think we were all terrified children attempting to shield ourselves from true horror, and that we recognized the indications of a great evil, a terrible darkness, stretching out like a gnarled, clawed hand that scratched the back of our necks.
Valentín hesitated, but she clutched his hand and finally he nodded and relented. “They say it was witchcraft. That some evil person from Los Pinos put a spell on Tadeo and killed him.”
Minerva had to mind her words. She was a woman, a Mexican woman at that. A brown girl on a scholarship.
She met a monster and survived,
“Monsters don’t age. They live forever.”
There’s a foulness here, almost like a stench.”
There was a foulness. Ever since that day when Tadeo went missing, something felt askew inside the house, as though the walls in each room were crooked. The air itself felt heavy, charged, like a cloud pregnant with rain. She’d noticed cracks that had not been there before in the kitchen tiles, or a broken piece of pottery by the back door. In her room, any flowers she cut withered with incredible speed. The house, warm and familiar, was now like a house she’d never visited before. A stranger’s house.
The scissors had rusted overnight. They were crusted with brown and red flakes, as if they’d been left out in the rain for many months.
In the days before her disappearance Ginny is strange, but she is not racked with the anxiousness of a young woman thinking of elopement. Instead she lives in fear of unseen forces, of evil lurking in shadows.
Isaiah Marsh, lost at sea, she thought. Lost like Thomas, who did not return to his room one evening? Or lost like Virginia Somerset, who walked out of her dorm one cold December night? How many people were lost that way, people who slipped into darkness, never to be seen again?
Behind the membrane of normality of this summer evening lurked a foulness that she could not pinpoint, yet she sensed. “Witches,” she said.
Old age could wreck the human brain, but perhaps insidious thoughts could ruin it in one’s youth, chipping away at one’s sanity.
“I’ve always been concerned with the idea of absolute evil. There’s cruelty in all those stories. Witches committing terrible deeds to get their kicks—but then if you spin it around and look at the witch trials, you have innocent people who are being accused of something simply because their neighbors have a petty grudge against them.”
Time is a treacherous mistress. In our youth it flows slow and deep; the days stretch out endlessly. When we are children, a summer lasts for a century. As we age, the flow of time speeds up. Suddenly, a year vanishes with the snap of one’s fingers. How quickly time eludes us, how easily it tricks us.
You simply live through it.
There’s a darkness that wants to swallow you, but you must not let it.”
Stories have a rhythm to them. A beginning, a middle, an end. Mysteries beg for answers, narratives demand conclusions.
