Chapter 1
The question was, how did I get back here…
I felt foreign in my own skin from all the prior years of abuse, and the mental torment. I became a cracked shell of a person hiding beneath my faltered, once thick skin.
For years I couldn’t stop the demonizing dreams from recurring.
The same paralyzing dream over and over.
To be honest, I think I was just a lonely girl who had to put her belief in something.
If I couldn’t believe in myself, there was always magic.
It didn’t help that the Robles family was notoriously known around town for having ancestral ties to the occult that were rooted deep in Mexico, going back centuries.
Ma would comfort me back to sleep, after waking from my own screams. She would run in with a wool blanket and warm tea, before rocking me in front of the crackling fire, singing to me, her nana’s lullaby.
The tea is made from chamomile and lavender, from her herb garden, and the local farm’s honey.
It was our sacred ritual every night the terrors came sinking their teeth into my peaceful slumber.
“Tell me again, Ma. Tell me the story about Mictlan.” I sipped my warm tea, letting the warmth melt my festered soul. Ma tucked me snugly back into my bed.
“I tell it every time, amor (love). Don’t you want to hear a different story? What about a story about a princess?” Ma insisted.
“No, I want to hear about Mictlan. Please, please, with a cherry on top.” I put my little hands in a prayer motion with an over dramatic cheesy smile.
Ma brought her brown overworked manos (hands) on top of mine. “Okay just once and then we’re off to bed.”
I nodded my head excitingly, ready to hear my favorite tale.
“Once upon a time, there was a dark and magical place, called Mictlan. Where the lord, Mictlantecuhtli, ruled the underworld. Mictlan consisted of nine terrorizing levels, where souls would get lost for four years. They had to survive and endure some of the most dangerous of challenges. The hound spirit guide, Xolotl, aided them on their journey to the underground god, Mictlantecuhlti, who controlled even the most evil of spirits, making sure they never harmed his people above on Earth.”
My eyes became heavy as Ma’s voice started to drift, as if it was floating in the air like soft silky petals drifting in the wind.
My dreams took me under again as fire and the screams of death plagued my little body. Cries and laughter echoed through the fire.
“Mi linda. (My beautiful girl)” The whispers escaped me and entered my senses again.
I could hear hounds barking in the distance and the sound of burning embers.
It was suffocating my lungs. But there was something else…
the tinge of raw flesh and decay. Then there was that majestic scent of rose petals again.
The petals danced around me, putting me back to sleep as the darkness engulfed me.
A sweet dark slumber became me, peaceful in the night as I slept once more.
I tried my mightiest to remember the resilient girl in the photos that decorated these worn-out walls.
The same farmhouse walls that built me. I couldn’t sense that brazen girl within me any longer.
I glanced at my witchy pointed black hat, with my oversize broom.
I could hear the fall leaves making their way across the wood stained barn.
It sat right next to Ma’s brick-red shed, still untouched.
I watched from the open curtain-laced window, the autumn leaves rolling into the barn, and I closed my eyes, wishing I could go back to simpler times, where feeling alive most days didn’t feel like an omen.
I missed even the tiniest of things, about a place I forsake for so long.
Things I wish I didn’t take for granted.
Like when herbal teas and fictional tales made everything better.
I listened to the wind make the leaves dance in the air, as they bestowed me into another distant memory.
“Ma, look! I’m a witch!” I vroomed past her with my broom.
“Faye, don’t you think we should try something new this year?” she sighed at me.
“Por qué (why), Mama?” I asked, spinning around the small kitchen.
“It’s just, you’ve been a witch four times in a row and there are so many other things you could be,” Ma said, braiding her long, dark curly hair.
“Nothing is cooler than being a witch.” I waved my sassy little finger ‘no’ at her. “Why do you hate them so much?”
I watched as Ma’s face went blank. “What, me? No, it’s not that, Faye. I love brujas (witches), I do.” Her expression was performative.
I straightened my pointy black hat. “Is it because you don’t want to be yelled at again?” I asked, confused.
I noticed my mother’s eyes glossed over as she blew her bangs out of the way.
“Listen, Faye, you can’t let a few words bring you down.
Especially if they aren’t true. It’s just a bunch of ‘Hocus Pocus’.
” Ma smirked, and winked at me as she grabbed her purse and put on her witchy hat, placing it on her long dark hair.
“Time to trick or treat, your primas (cousins) are waiting for us!”
I smiled at the picture of me and my cousins in our witch costumes. Halloween was always our favorite. What wasn’t my favorite, was being harassed by some of the townspeople who would throw candy at us and scream:
“brUJA!”
“They’re all witches!”
Eventually, as Raquel, Penny, and I got older we started giving in to the role just to freak them out even more.
I remember us being at high school parties and acting like we were hexing people, pointing at them while laughing our asses off.
Raquel on the other hand, never grew out of the phase and committed her life to the occult and learning everything about the craft that rang true in our veins.
She owned who we were with a sense of pride that I had yet to discover myself.
Ma always tried to convince me it wasn’t real, always finding ways to joke about the town’s myths and legends.
I was proud of my prima, and maybe even a little jealous.
Rocky always knew what and who she wanted to be and she owned it.
I couldn’t name one person who wasn’t afraid of her honestly, besides the few people who actually knew her.
We hadn’t seen each other in five years.
Not out of malice or spite, just out of pure numbness to the world.
I had left this town years ago, with no intention of ever coming back.
Yet, here I was with all my broken and missing pieces.
Honestly, I was embarrassed and ashamed over too many things I’ve yet dared to cross.
I hated myself for running away from this place only to seek solace from it.
Truthfully, I felt like an idiot. I was waiting for the “told you so” moment.
Rocky always hated Vadon. She told me to stay away from him, but I was never good at listening.
Rocky was busy off in college, becoming a mortician.
She didn’t need to be bothered with my marital problems. She was living her best life and deserved to have that experience peacefully.
Being back in this brick home plagued me with memories I hadn’t thought of in years. I didn’t even want to think about any of them, good or bad. I felt as if my entire existence and world had crumbled beneath me and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
I stayed in my room locked away most nights as I let myself succumb to the pain.
I couldn’t remember the last time I showered or even brushed my hair.
I was a mess of tangled memories and hopelessness, and I was wearing it on my face.
I knew deep down that with Vadon, it was never true love, but the comfort that kept me captive in his hold.
I was like a caged bird afraid to fly after being held captive for so long.
Maybe this was my karma, for not truly being in love with him.
For trying to numb my pain leading up to him. For trying to run away from my past.
Maybe I deserved it. Maybe it had finally caught up to me and I had to take the punches as they came and swallow the blood until I choked.
I knew I would have kept trying until it killed me.
Not for me, but for her, for Birdie. I fought so hard until my shields broke and thresholds were severed.
Until my arrows faltered and I failed. That is what hurt me the most. Knowing I failed in trying to give her what I never had.
Had I deserved this pain? Had I gotten myself here?
The only thing that I could do to make anything make sense, was to blame myself.
It was easier than reliving the pain I had internally suffered for so long.
This was my fault. For thinking I deserved to live a certain life I never belonged to.
With a man I truly didn’t love down to my bones.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the safety Vadon made me feel in the beginning, but it was all love-bombing and manipulation.
It was a trap that I fell right into. He met me when I was a nineteen year old kid, figuring my life out.
Figuring me out. A kid stuck in survival mode and desperate to get out and away from all the pain that overcame me from this small town.
Looking back now I couldn’t help but feel he knew how vulnerable I was and used it against me somehow. I should have known that when things seem too good to be true, it’s because they are.