7. The Return of La Muelona
The Return of La Muelona
Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro
Santa Elenita del Mar was a town that could only exist in the shadow of the land’s own curse.
If you closed your eyes and breathed in deeply, you could almost taste the rot that seeped from the soil—the blood of the land, spilled by the hands of those who had worked it for centuries.
The smell of ripe bananas wafted through the streets, cloying, too sweet, like a graveyard of fruit left to spoil underneath the scorching Caribbean sun.
The flies, black and buzzing, thickened the air in the clouds, sticking to everything—your skin, your food, the walls. They clung to you no matter where you ran—hovering, relentless, like hunger given wings.
It was as if the town crawled, something twisting just beneath its skin. As if Santa Elenita was alive with decay.
I had lived here my entire life. All of us had.
The ghost of the Spanish conquerors still lingered in the cracked facades of the town’s old houses, framed by cobbled streets, their red-tiled roofs and crumbling stucco walls weighed down by centuries’ worth of history—a history of bloodshed, exploitation, and secrets that were never meant to be unearthed.
And yet, that history began to resurface the moment Isabel arrived.
I had heard her name whispered among the women since I was a child. They called her La Muelona, but not with affection. No, Isabel was a creature most people feared. They said she was a bruja. A fortune-teller. A gitana. A corrupter of hearts.
She claimed to see beyond the veil, between the living and the withered buried beneath our feet. To communicate with the spirits that lingered in the remnants of our town. But those who sought her counsel quickly learned that her gifts were more than mere fortune-telling.
She knew things. Dangerous things. Things she shouldn’t know.
Some said she could cure sicknesses that the doctors couldn’t, that her bebedizos and potions were more than remedies—they were magic.
But others, like Mamá and Abuela, whispered darker things, always with warning: that she was a harbinger of curses who bound the souls of the dead to her will.
They said she took blood from the living, offering power in exchange for sacrifice.
“She’s brought nothing but ruin to this town. She’s sacrificing babies. Drinking people’s blood like it’s rum.” Mamá’s voice was low but sharp with conviction.
I stared at her, unsure if I was more disturbed by the rumors or by how much she seemed to believe them.
I told myself they couldn’t be true. But that didn’t last long.
As I got older, I began to wonder about Isabel.
There were rumors that she had once been the wife of one of the plantation owners.
A woman shut away behind four walls while the banana crops fattened under the blazing sky.
But when her youth faded, his gaze wandered.
And greed, more than love, set the course for what came next.
The land was already flourishing, heavy with fruit. But he wanted more, more yield, more gold, more proof that he could wring even the earth dry. So he turned to old whispers. A priestess told him the land could give twice as much, but only if fed something in return.
He gave it Isabel.
He thought her worth ended with her beauty. But the land remembered differently as soon as it consumed her.
He led her into the fields at dusk, kissed her cheek, and slit her throat with the same blade he used to reap.
Buried her underneath the oldest tree, where the roots coiled like veins.
Isabel’s blood seeped into the soil like an awakening, as had the blood of the many workers before her who had broken their backs under the sun, who had died feeding this place with their sweat and lives.
The earth drank her in and recognized itself in the woman. And with her, it finally found its voice, vengeful, full of decay and memory. Through her, it could rise, not only show the town what had been done to it, but to make them feel it in their bones.
But the ground doesn’t keep secrets. And nothing stays buried forever.
Days later, Isabel returned. Not as a ghost. In the flesh. Quiet. Changed.
She didn’t speak of what had been done. But the land did.
And it spoke in her voice.
The day I first met her, I was seventeen years old.
The sun was already high in the sky, its heat pressing down on everything, smothering the town in an unrelenting grip.
It had been a sleepless night, my mind wrestling with the realization that I couldn’t stay in Santa Elenita.
Not anymore. It was the weight of tradition, of the life I was expected to lead.
As the daughter of the mayor, I had to marry a plantation owner, the son of Senor Andrews, give my body to him, like every other dutiful wife, and bear children I didn’t know if I wanted.
The women of Santa Elenita knew their place: wives, mothers, daughters. We were born to serve, to labor, to give birth. And when we gave birth, it was often to children who would one day serve the land, the plantations. Without question, without protest.
But I dreamed of something else—of freedom, yes, but not just that.
I dreamed of never again being dragged between rows of sugarcane, of the bruises left by rough hands and rougher laughter.
I dreamed of never again smelling rum on someone else’s breath, of never again tasting blood in my mouth because I’d bitten down too hard just to stay quiet.
I fantasized of tearing down the skin that had been passed from man to man, a transaction sealed in handshake and cigars.
There had never been a moment of choice, only expectation. A knowing look. A nod. A locked door.
I was a body promised before I knew how to say no. A debt paid in silence.
And though I never spoke of it—not to Mamá, not to Abuela—something inside me changed.
It didn’t break. It opened. In our family, the women stitched their anger into quiet things: a hem, a prayer, a sealed mouth.
I’d been taught silence was safer than teeth.
But the urge to bite back rooted itself in me, bleak and stubborn, even as I was already steps closer to the altar, toward a wedding day that felt less like a vow and more like a burial.
The land must have felt it.
And so did she, as if the same thread had been tied to us both, one knotted by fate, the other by choice.
Isabel’s house sat on the edge of town, near the dense jungle where the flies seemed to come from, hidden among vines and trees, far from the eyes of the men who owned the land.
The air there always smelled different—a mixture of herbs, blood, and something rotting deep within the earth.
I had heard stories of people disappearing into that jungle and never returning.
All stories starting and ending with her: La Muelona.
Alas, if I disappeared, if I could vanish, wouldn’t that be a form of escape, too? Wasn’t that what I wanted?
I should have known better than to get involved.
La Muelona’s house was a withering structure, leaning as if it were about to collapse under its own weight, with darkened windows that seemed to stare back at you, even if no one was inside.
I hesitated, considered my options, but I had none.
I knocked on the door. It opened immediately—no creaks, no hinges, no stalling—revealing Isabel inside.
She was standing at the doorway, her black eyes glinting with something ancient and cold.
Her skin was pale—too pale—and her curly brown hair hung around her face.
Isabel was tall, almost unnaturally so. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t need to.
I could feel the pull, like a hook in my chest, urging me to step inside.
“You’re here.” Her voice soft but sharp. “Come in.” As if my arrival was never a question, only a matter of time.
I obeyed, my heart pounding in my chest as I took a step forward.
Her house was coated with murk that seemed to writhe when you weren’t looking.
Inside, the air was no better than outside.
But there was something else, far worse.
It was the smell, the stink of a thing older than decaying wood and mold.
There were glass jars, dozens of them, filled with stuff I couldn’t name.
Though it was the flying bugs that unsettled me the most. The flies were here, too. They crawled atop the jars, across the table, and along the walls—swarming in thick clouds, so dense it almost looked like the room was moving.
“I…” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what exactly I came here looking for.
How could I ask for freedom when my body had never truly been mine?
When men’s hands still lived in my skin like something spoiling, like something buried that wouldn’t stay dead?
Suddenly, I felt a stirring inside me—old, sharp, waiting.
“I—I want to know my future,” I said, my voice hollow as I spoke.
Isabel’s lips curled into a smile. “You already know your future,” she said.
“You know what it holds. You’re the mayor’s daughter.
You’ll marry the son of Mr. Andrews and birth light-eyed kids.
In exchange, your father will continue to hold power, prestige, even though everyone knows who has the real power. ”
Them. The banana plantation owners. The settlers. The invaders of our land. The snatchers of resources, of names, of bodies.
“But you want to change that, don’t you?” Isabel’s voice snapped me out of my own thoughts.
I didn’t know how to answer. Yes, I did.
But I didn’t know what she was offering—or what it would cost. I only knew I didn’t want to live like my mother, like my friend Clara.
I didn’t want to continue to be traded like fruit.
Touched like land someone thought they owned.
Smiling while something inside me spoiled.
“What you seek isn’t simple,” she said sternly. “It comes with a price. Everything does. The land demands it.”