The Haunting of Alejandra

by V. Castro

She felt numb as she imagined her mind and body crumbling, her every cell fragile as limestone.

They say nothing exists after the brain short-circuits to darkness and the heart squeezes out its last bloody tears.

Even her own hand was not a hand at all, but a blade she used to carve her heart for anyone who asked her for it.

She had no money of her own. No job. Her name was not even on any of the bills. Half her life lived as a shadow.

Without knowing it, or appreciating it, he had all the wind to propel him forward as he coasted with the ease of a kitesurfer on a picture-perfect day. Meanwhile she was that tugboat in the back pulling something bigger through deep waters.

The disintegration of any love she once possessed for Matthew had to be connected with the painful chasms cracking open in her soul.

That love was a sweet blossom she held on to tightly until the thorns on its stem made her bleed. Those wounds were the stigmata of motherhood, precious and painful.

La Llorona: the crying woman in white drawn to tears and sadness.

It was after their defeat at the hands of the conquistadors that the real nightmare had begun for her people, especially for the women and girls who had to submit to these strange men.

All of them were demons: They had arrived in a horde, in waves of conquest and exploration and destruction, all done in the name of their king and god.

They had been abandoned by the gods, who could offer no hope. They had to create their own hope.

“You have two inside of you. I want them.”

The shadow morphed, taking the shape of a human with translucent skin that glowed white like a full moon, or a cluster of stars. Each vertebra was calcified to a sharp, bony barb.

As I have these souls, and yours, I also want your blood and tears to be bound to me. Your seeds forever mine. I will take them now, then you will take yourself to the sacrificial cenote and cast yourself inside. As asked, I will bring catastrophe upon the house of your tormentor.

Women with nothing to lose are dangerous. “I accept.”

A starlit sky of a birthmark. Generations of souls, she imagined. A sky full of lives.

She smiled as she neared the hole in the ground that led to other worlds, the world of her gods.

Atzi’s death would be her final act of love for her firstborn daughter.

Yaretzi, you and your seed must find me again so I may guide you through the terror. I will plead to the gods to give you all my strength and love so you may endure.

The creature’s senses were hypersensitive to desperation, a perfume excreted by its favorite kind of prey.

“Your superstitious belief in one god will not save you. I don’t come from the places your small minds conceive of. Your blood and your bloodline are mine.”

Difficult woman. Sick woman. Dead woman.

“You’re next,”

A believer in corporal punishment, her father had given her four smacks across the back of her legs with his belt.

How could wrongdoing be corrected by more wrongdoing? How could you learn about love from someone who gave you nothing but pain?

Part of her believed he only wanted her to get help because he had grown tired of her no longer catering to his needs with a smile on her face.

Melanie Ortiz. According to her bio, Melanie was also a practicing curandera, a spiritual medicine woman. A curandera.

“I want to stop crying. I want this dark cloud that feels like it’s preventing me from fully loving my children or myself to go away. I’m hurting. I’m scared.”

“I’m seeing a woman, no, women, in my dreams that are so vivid I almost think I am awake. Always crying, but not wailing. Their tears roll down their cheeks silently. They are dressed differently, I guess from different places and times. Sometimes I close my eyes to remember as much detail as possible to understand more. There is another phantomlike figure that hides in steam and shadow that tells me to harm myself, feeds the awful things I think about myself. I’m not sure if it is real or in my mind. I just want to feel free. Free from whatever is haunting me. I’ve ignored it too long. My children deserve better.”

“Water, crying women. Sounds like La Llorona. We are both very aware of her story.”

Two months later, DNATree alerted Alejandra to all her blood relatives, where her DNA originated (Nuevo León and Guadalajara, Mexico), and the breakdown in percentages of her ethnicity.

Love was too much of a gamble, a game with winners and losers. And women were usually on the losing end, from what she had seen.

Wasn’t that what most of modern medicine was? Holding back death for just a little longer? Life was meant to be lived so death could be a little easier when it came for you.

Her wound remained open energetically and flowed with the swiftness of a treacherous river into the next in her line. Unhealed pain and rage growing riper generation after generation.

The creature loved the taste of her suffering and the way her pain made it shiver.

Love is not hard work, but repairing the damage is hard. Opening yourself to being loved and giving love is only difficult when there are objects attached.”

There is also nothing to prepare you for when the cords of marriage begin to unravel. When you know in your bones it is truly over and you leave before it becomes the end of you.

It had come from another realm that had been extinguished when universes collided.

The demon stuck out a glowing, tentacle-like tongue to absorb this fluid. A single drop satiated something inside of it. The energetic current within its core flared. It wanted more.

The human’s final breath and act was a kiss upon the head of her young. Her lips lingered as long as they could until her head fell limply to the side.

Generational curses provided a steady source of energy to devour, not without torment first to inflict more energetic pain on its victim.

“She says a woman in white wants to be let in. If she isn’t, it will eat her alive. When I pressed her after class, she said the woman stands outside the window at the end of the playground and eats birds.”

She cried out in pain from the bottom of her abdomen: I need help! I am so fucking alone!

“You are not a worthless bird! You are a strong little girl with the heart of a dragon, or better yet a jaguar. Do you understand me? I love you. It was a daydream of the worst kind. I love you more than anything in this world.”

Though her garment appeared white, the closer the woman approached, the clearer it became that the dress, and the creature, were created from different textures of flesh and fabric. From what Alejandra could see, the creature was constructed of loose threads of old lace and dried strips of human and fish skin blanched from radiation. The face was wet and soggy like the skin of an albino toad. The eyes flared white-hot with the cosmic radiation of destruction.

“Yes. I think it’s going nowhere. It will only grow bolder as you grow stronger, as it feels you slipping away. Which is why it’s important you fight for yourself and your children.

Her need to grow and heal was lost on him. She would not back down or apologize.

I want to be a healed woman. A strong woman for whatever comes next.

Sometimes you have to know when to let go and what to let go of.”

Don’t ever think you can change people. Take them as they come or don’t take them at all.”