Page 3 of Daughter of Rot

We’re moving on to the oregano, which I dried on my own in the spring. Smell it. Take it in. We are like witches in the kitchen. We make magic with everything we’ve grown. I even made the chicken broth, if you can believe it. None of our family line comes from curanderas, my little olive. Cooking is as close as we can get. After your grandpa died, your grandma used to sell fraudulent love spells. They were all lies. She wasn’t a bruja. She was a grifter with a sweet way of speaking to men and women alike. Our old house in Chihuahua had a room filled to the brim with candles, roses, love letters, sigils, bible pages, and polaroids of men and women who wanted to control each other or who wanted to break up. They never questioned why your grandma was single. You know how I feel about her. She did what she had to even if it meant her children suffered. A delicious meal makes you forget your suffering.

I like to have a bowl out for each individual ingredient. This is almost like witchcraft. Almost. Thank the animals and the plants involved in feeding you. Always. Add olive oil to the stock pot. Let the oil heat up and add your minced garlic, white onion, and diced tomatoes. Let them simmer and once the tomatoes have softened, add your broth.

Now, our meatballs. The star of the show. In a large bowl, add oregano, salt, pepper, mint, minced garlic, and rice. Add the ground beef and for every pound of meat, add an egg. In this case, we have two pounds so, two eggs. Mix it all together and shape the meatballs. Add more broth into the pot and simmer at a low heat.

Your Tía Letty skips the mint and the onion, she uses canned tomato sauce and adds cabbage to hers. What an abomination. I’ll tell you what else is an abomination: she used to think she was better than me because she had a job in an office in one of those twinkling skyscrapers. Well, she was fired for having an affair with her boss. Letty left her marriage for that woman! Can you believe that? There’s nothing wrong with falling in love, but at least get a divorce. Letty has never been one to be honest. She lies to me all the time. Not only that, she botched this recipe. Cabbage in caldo de albóndigas is absurd.

This is a family recipe that you can pass down. A recipe to continue within the lineage. You can pass it down to your daughter. Do you want a daughter? A baby of your own? A baby who will ruin your body and suckle you dry? Do you know what you want to do with your life, Olivia? You couldn’t possibly know. Do you want to become a mommy like me? Don’t answer. I don’t want to know. If you become a mommy, you’ll see how hard it is, how hard life becomes.

SHADOWS KNOW WHERE ALL THE LIGHT IS

According to Olivia (age 6), the color yellow in a crayon comes from sunflower petals. If you eat dirt, you can taste what ants think. If you follow daddy around, he will show you the parts of a car or a mower or how to build a perfect bird house for the bluebirds that tussle over worms in the morning. According to Olivia, the word “tussle” means dance.

Fathers are like ghosts. Gone for months, returning with stories from the road. Olivia likes to imagine him driving cows across the country and freeing them by the sea.

According to Olivia, if you follow twisting foot trails in dirt, you will most certainly find fairies. The gnomes with little vests and red pointed hats live under the house. The ghosts in long white ballgowns live in the clouds. The grackles will laugh with you. The crows will laugh at you.

If you laugh too much, you get into trouble. If you don’t smile at all, you get into trouble. If you follow mommy around, she locks the door in your face and tells you to go outside. If you follow mommy around, she hides her crying by making you clean up the broken glass she’s strewn across the floor.

A mother is an unpredictable lightning storm. Sometimes, she will say nothing to you all day, and sometimes she’s sweet in her own way.

If you follow mommy around, you’re like a shadow. Shadows know where all the best hiding spots are. Shadows know where all the light is. Shadows know how to stay quiet until they have to burst. When they explode, they’re made of pink flower petals that float up, up, up, until they have no choice but to scatter back down to the earth like confetti.

THE NEIGHBORS

Rebecca is a witch. Olivia knows by the way Rebecca wears her eyeliner sharp and her curly black hair long and streaked with white. Plus, Rebecca yells it out all the time. I’m a witch! I’m a witch! And then she cackles until she can’t breathe. Olivia adores Rebecca’s fashion sense. She wears floral and geometric patterns, which flow at the sleeves or at the hem of her skirts. Rebecca smells like the earth, like eucalyptus and roses. In the shape of a cross, she smudges cascarilla on the back of her neck and on the bottoms of her feet. She carries cloth bags filled with herbs for every remedy. She carries sigils in her shoes, crystals in her pockets. She’s adorned with red string bracelets, and her earrings are either multicolored and dangling or hooped and big. Olivia often thought of Rebecca as a watercolor painting of delicate green hues infused with lavender. Olivia’s hands tingled and her mouth watered at the thought of being a witch. Of course you can become a witch. You can be anything you want. Rebecca exclaimed this to her and then emphasized: being a witch is all about intention. If you want it in your heart, trust your gut. Witches were romantic. They were powerful. They danced under the moonlight. They howled at the moon. The witches were free.

On Mondays, Rebecca and her daughter, Yvette, bring brownies or cookies as gifts to Olivia, something to sweeten the start of the week. On Tuesdays, Yvette brings a book to share with Olivia. They choose an oak tree to sit under while grasshoppers and bees around them listen in. As Yvette reads, the words float out of her mouth in neon pinks and purples. Wednesdays are much too busy so they can’t make it, but they make up for it on Thursdays by bringing Olivia a trinket. Olivia has a sizable collection of small, warped, and goofy looking animals. A koala with a rainbow bandana. A dog with a tail made of pink and purple ribbon. A blue whale with a puzzle piece inside. A ceramic cherub with his mouth open and full of teeth. These were her favorites.

Olivia hides her collection in a cherry red birdhouse near the river. She found the discarded birdhouse on the side of the road when she was wandering one morning. The round and small blue door on the front of the birdhouse was the perfect entryway for trinkets. The trinkets gently plopped in, one by one. With a small gardening shovel and Isela’s gardening gloves, Olivia dug a hole near a cottonwood tree adorned with the carving of “R + M = LUV 4EVER” in the center of the trunk. Bundles of colored ribbons were tied around the trunk and the tips of the tree’s branches. They waved around spastic and helpless to the gusts of wind. Reds. Blues. Yellows. Greens. Pinks. Purples. The tree with no choice but to host these colorful and bustling tendrils.

Olivia prayed over her trinkets. She asked Saint Michael to protect them. Rebecca wasn’t devout, but she spouted out facts about these religious icons as though she knew them intimately. Every week, Olivia learned a tragic fact about a saint who died much too young or under unfair circumstances. Olivia found Saint Michael to be beautiful beyond words and when she saw him in her dreams, he was aggressively luminescent to look at, but she was sure it was him.

Yvette taught Olivia how to read because she was a storyteller. She gifted Olivia notebooks filled with her own tales of love, vampires, joy, goblins, grief, wizards, brujas, and of course, the saints. Olivia buried these notebooks near another cottonwood with the intention of keeping them safe. She marked the tree with a tiny X at the middle point of an erupted root that Olivia imagined as an insect bridge on top and an insect portal underneath. A bright yellow fairy door was painted in the center of the tree’s trunk. Olivia knocked once, out of curiosity. Chittering and rapid clicks came from the other side. When she buried her notebooks, she informed whoever was behind the door that they could read the stories if they wanted to. It was a magical barter for using the space beneath their home.

On the days Yvette had to study for a test, she read to Olivia from her textbooks. Olivia listened closely as she was finally starting school that upcoming fall. Olivia learned about the body at a cellular level. She imagined cells as tiny universes, spotted with millions of stars. She learned about the tree root systems. She imagined cities of mushrooms, underneath the earth where worms and slugs spoke to each other in a long-forgotten tongue. She learned about constellations and the legends behind their formations. Olivia couldn’t help but smile while listening to Yvette’s narration which was silly and theatrical.

Olivia loved looking at Rebecca and Yvette because she saw Rebecca as the future and Yvette as the past. They looked so much like each other. They both had shiny curly hair and deep brown eyes. Even their laughter sounded like the same kind of song. Olivia never looked at her mother in this way. When she looked in the mirror, she saw her father’s brown eyes and his unibrow, and maybe her nose belonged to her mother’s side, but she had not seen what her grandmother looked like or what her grandfather looked like. She knew of them by word of mouth, never by photos. When she looked in the mirror, there was a pit in her stomach, like something was missing. No past. No future. Her face, a void. Her existence, a spectacle.

DO BANK TELLERS DREAM OF EXPLODING ATMS

Isela gets up at 5:00 in the morning to sit in silence as she takes a bath. She shaves her legs every single day while she thinks about having to step into the bank again. She’s a bank teller and the repetition of the job is irritating her on a spiritual level. It’s been three years of her life so far. On top of her job, she now has to make sure Olivia gets to the school bus on time. Olivia’s first grade teacher is judgmental and adamant on calling Isela at work if Olivia misses a day of school.

Isela used to dream of becoming a famous clairvoyant or a botanist who could communicate with plant life. Instead, she’s a monotonous machine. Transaction after transaction. Click a few buttons on the keyboard to withdraw or deposit in service of men and women who had way more money than her. She smiled to herself when she fantasized about being robbed by masked gunmen. Her life could be a movie if she were robbed at gunpoint. She fantasized about someone slitting her throat for a couple thousand dollars. She loved the idea of being a headline. She envisioned finally quitting and then spitting on the face of her creepy co-worker who was much too handsy and smelled like cheap cologne.

On the weekends, Isela cleaned an office building with two other women. Zofia and Naomi. Zofia was in her sixties, from Poland. She was strict, she was blunt, she loved her cigarettes. Naomi was in her twenties, she had family in Guatemala who depended on her. She was quiet, punctual, and she enjoyed listening to Spanish pop on her boombox which she brought along with her for every shift. It was within the confines of this office building that Isela could be nosy. She rummaged through sticky notes and shredded paper bins that were left unlocked. She found copies of death certificates, emails, house appraisals, and read each one like a tabloid. She took chocolates and pens from desks and pocketed them for later. It was one of the simple pleasures of cleaning an entire floor by herself.

After her morning bath, Isela oils herself with coconut and spritzes her favorite perfume. She sprays a cloud with top notes of yuzu and pomegranate, middle notes of peony, magnolia and lotus, and base notes of musk, mahogany, and amber. She stands in front of the mirror in the nude and looks at her stretch marks shining under the lights. Reminders of regret. Reminders that she could have had a different life. She stares at her breasts and pinches at her nipples to harden them up. She stands tall and then proceeds to do her makeup. A light sepia eyeshadow for her eyelids, a red lip, and small brown wings on the corners of her eyes, and a tiny hint of blush.

After her makeup routine, she selects a black and white outfit for the bank. She picks a white button up blouse with bell sleeves and a black pencil skirt with beige nylons underneath. She slides into her house slippers as her pumps are at the front door. After she’s dressed, she probes through Olivia’s backpack, searching for a new journal or a hidden diary or a secret note she’s not supposed to have. Inside, there are library books, a math notebook, and a sketchbook filled with drawings of birds and doodles. She sees her homework marked with smiley faces, there’s one C, but Isela doesn’t care about grades.

She wakes Olivia up at 6:45 and times her in the bathroom. She has fifteen minutes to relieve herself, shower, brush her teeth, get dressed, and brush her hair. Olivia comes out with her hair in a side ponytail and star barrettes scattered on top of her head. Isela eyes the rest of her outfit.

You don’t match. Go change your shirt. It washes out the color in your face. Why are your lips chapped? Go fix it. Take those stars off of your head. You have five minutes. Hurry up. I don’t feel like waiting for you.

Isela watches the time and eyes Olivia who comes out with her hair no longer in a ponytail, but a brushed-out puff of hair. Is that how you want to look for school? Olivia shrugs and this pierces Isela with a sharp and annoying pain in her throat and belly. She wants to give into impulse and slap her daughter. Even a flick on her forehead would do. She curls her hands into fists. She opens them and shakes them out. She grips Olivia by the hair and drags her into the bathroom.

Little girls should have neat hair, Olivia. Neat hair. Neat clothes. I buy you all these things and you act like you don’t even care.