9. THE NEIGHBORS
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 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.