7. The Return of La Muelona #2
Isabel’s eyes locked onto mine, and for a moment, I felt as though she was seeing straight into me—beyond my skin, beyond my soul, into the deepest parts of me I hadn’t dared look at.
And maybe she was. Because, according to the stories, Isabel knew what it meant to be offered up. She was once the wife of a powerful man, then nothing, then something worse, hidden under the soil.
I felt my heart skip. If there was a price, I didn’t have money to offer. I was unwed, had no man to provide for me other than Papá, and he’d certainly give me no penny to spend on brujería, not even if I begged. But maybe it wasn’t coin that she wanted. Maybe it was something else.
I swallowed, each breath scraped down like ash. Still, I dared to ask. “What price? How much?”
“Blood,” she answered. “Always blood.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“Blood is the currency of power,” Isabel replied, her voice as smooth as honey. “It’s what Santa Elenita has been built upon. The land demands it. The land takes it. And it will give in return.”
I felt the sting of her words, even if I didn’t fully understand them. I’d heard whispers of blood magic, of curses passed down without asking, but I never imagined it could be true.
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice trembling.
Isabel didn’t respond right away. Instead, she stepped closer, her eyes never leaving mine. Then, almost in a whisper, she said, “You don’t have to give it now, if you don’t want. But someday, it will come for you. The land, the blood—it will all come for you. Your blood. For the future.”
Blood. Perhaps just a few drops. Papá had already sold me—no ceremony, no vows. Just quiet agreements behind closed doors. He let men touch me, use me. Promised me to men with hands like rope and voices like mud.
And still, he expected me to stand at the altar and smile.
I was desperate. But it wasn’t only desperation. What they did to me hadn’t faded—it festered, a slow hunger crawling through my skin.
Maybe that’s why Isabel hadn’t looked away when I came through the door, because she saw the scorch of rebellion smoldering within me, a wild flame unraveling the silence and the bones that held it.
So, I held out my hand to her. “Do it,” I said. “Take it.”
Isabel turned away, gathering herbs and powders from her shelves. The room was prickled with the scent of crushed leaves, earthy and pungent. She stood in front of her wooden table as her hands and fingers—long and graceful—moved swiftly, each motion deliberate as she kept adding to a stone mortar.
“These will do it.” Her voice low, almost soothing, though there was a quiet intensity masked in her words. She leaned over the mortar, her breath steady, and added drops of liquid—a gooey, amber oil, and a touch of something that shimmered faintly, almost silver in the candlelight.
My stomach growled, sickened by the scent invading my nostrils.
“This will help you.” Isabel carried a small vial with the inky brew in it. “Drink up.”
I reached for the vial and emptied it in one gulp. The dense liquid felt like drinking rust, metal. My stomach complained, and bile quickly pooled in my throat, but I swallowed it all down.
“Good,” Isabel said, grabbing my arm.
The sting of her blade sliced through my skin. The blood welled up, hot and sticky, as she caught it in a vial.
I had offered it freely, but now that it was leaving me, I wasn’t so sure. Still, I let her take it. I had nothing else to give. Not my name. Not my body. Those had already been claimed. This—this was the only part of me that still felt mine.
The room shifted. Not suddenly but subtly, like the walls had inched closer. I swayed where I stood, the edges of everything blurring. The smell of iron and herbs clung to the inside of my throat.
Isabel’s eyes never left me. Her gaze was steady yet piercing, as if she understood the weight I bore, the pain, the fury, the refusal to be broken, as if she’d seen it coming long before I even knew it myself.
“You will see,” she whispered.
I didn’t know then what would happen next, but I woke up in my bed hours later, my skin throbbing where Isabel had cut me. The heat inside my bedroom was nothing compared to the fire that now lived inside me.
The memories of what I’d done came first, overwhelming, suffocating. Then came a vision.
The land. The plantations stretched endlessly across the horizon, an ocean of green and yellow.
Beneath the surface, the dirt was cracked and dry, veins of corruption pulsing through it, stained red.
The workers, men and women, drifted through the fields like hollowed shells, unaware of their own lifelessness.
Their eyes were dull, bodies bent and ragged, broken by the endless weight of their labor. They were ghosts, their lives stolen by the land that owned them.
And in the center stood Isabel. Silent. Still. Her eyes found mine like she’d been waiting.
The stories had always said her husband gave her to the land because his greed hungered for more—more profit, more power. He listened to the whispers and offered her up to feed that insatiable thirst.
I used to think the tales about her husband and what he did to her were superstition, a story meant to scare us.
But now I could feel it—what the stories had left out: her marrow-deep ache.
She remained. The land held her. She became its roots and its poison. Its fruit and its craving. She was the land that kept growing. And the curse that would soon make it bleed.
Not as a punishment, but as a witness. As memory. As reckoning.
She wasn’t a monster. She was what was left behind when a woman refuses to disappear.
I woke with a sharp tightness in my chest—something inside me changed, felt wrong. The sheets stuck damp against my skin. Then came the sound. A tremble in the walls. A thin, jittering whine.
I held still, heartbeat racing, eyes straining against the gloom. Wings flicked throughout the room like razors in the heat.
The stink followed, sweet and sour, heavy as syrup. It settled in my throat. I swallowed it down.
Had I brought this on? Was this what the blood had called?
The sound rose, sharpened.
As if something had awakened.
As if it had heard me.
And somewhere below the floors—or deep inside me—something began to pulse in return.
The following days were more unbearable than usual.
The town had fallen silent, eerily quiet.
There was no sound of children playing in the dirt, no gossiping women by the markets or after la Misa de media manana, no laughter in the streets.
It was as though the very life of Santa Elenita had drained away, leaving only an emptiness, a hushed silence filled by the incessant buzzing of the flies.
It was worse by the banana plantations. The workers, the ones who would toil in the fields every day under the burning sun, had vanished without a trace.
The plantation owners, once eager to increase their profits, now moved erratically through the streets.
The train went around with empty wagons.
The very crops that fueled the town’s economy were left to wither on the vine, their fruit turning black and diseased.
I walked through the abandoned plantations in the sweltering heat, the oppressive silence making every step feel like a betrayal.
It was in that stillness that I saw them.
The swarm—restless, their buzzing like a chorus of death.
They blanketed the sun-bloated bananas, their skins split and oozing, the flesh inside gone gray and weeping.
The things crawling over them weren’t just feeding—they were blooming.
It was then that I understood what Isabel had meant. The land was angry. It was not just the crops or the workers. It was the very ground under our feet that was reaching out. Isabel was the land that remembered, and the curse it sent to make us pay.
That truth weighed on me as I made my way back to Isabel’s house. I had no destination, no purpose beyond fleeing the stillness that hung over the town like a shroud.
She was standing in the clearing near the jungle, waiting for me. Her eyes glittered in the moonlight, and the black-winged things hovered around her, like sentinels guarding a secret. Her face was as calm as always, but I knew, deep down, something terrible was happening.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” she asked, her voice cold. “The truth woven into the earth.”
The air grew heavy around us. The ever-present humidity made it hard to fill my lungs.
“The land always takes back what was stolen,” Isabel said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Invaders came with soft words and sharpened steel. Planted hunger. Harvested bodies. Turned daughters into dowries and sons into shadows.”
Something in the trees seemed to stir.
“They thought the earth would forget. That blood would sink and stay. But it rose. Always.”
“What is happening, Isabel?” I finally asked, my voice trembling. “What is all this?”
“The flies,” she whispered. “They are a sign, a symptom of what has been festering here for generations. The land is sick, poisoned by greed, by lives ground into the soil, forgotten. And now it’s come to collect.”
“Collect what?” I asked, though the answer already twisted in my gut.
“What was never laid to rest,” she said. “The debt of comfort built on suffering. The cost of looking away.”
I was struck by the intensity of her words, by the certainty in her eyes. She didn’t just speak of the land—she spoke like it. Slow and low, something ancient in her breath. Like the earth itself had borrowed her mouth to speak its wrath.
Physically, she looked changed, too. Not sick, exactly. But weathered, worn through, like someone who had survived a fire only to smolder from within.
“You brought me here for this,” I said, my voice shaking. A spear of pure terror rooted me to the ground. “To… witness this? To… become part of it?”
She stepped closer. “You already are,” she said softly. “The land knows who’s been broken. Who’s been used and discarded. It remembers.”