Felicia Flor de Luna Martínez

“The word for daughter is fluid, like firelight. The word for mother is bitter. Bitter as the best things are. Like young dandelion greens. Like cacao. All true words are mother and daughter.” 

A Witch’s Primer  

When the elder witches were discovered, our mothers were just children. Some of the corpses were stiff, like preserved wood. Some were soft, caught perpetually in that moment prior to decay. A sweetness arose from all of them despite the rancid ash. Their tongues, lithe in life, lay in glistening lumps between their graying teeth, saliva fragrant and still fresh. 

Maya tasted first, Araceli’s grandmother, sister of her Great Aunt Juana, and mother of her mother, Juana Ines. Her tongue lingered on the soft skin still shaped like a mouth, like lips.

“Martyr,” Maya whispered before finding the true word’s shape, not yet able to say it aloud, unshared. Even subvocalized, it tasted acrid and sour. “Saint” came next, then “sacrifice” and “solace.” The bitter knowledge roiled. Maya passed the shape of the words to her small daughter, Juana Ines, and the girl heaved up the morning’s sweetened cornmeal across her mother’s soft shoes, could hardly keep anything down for two days after. Such foul words. To be learned by all, finally said true, and remembered.

Before the discovery of the elder witches, one could ask about the meaning of the word “coven” and though the question shivered, tried to break free from the usual syntax and shift the question’s grammar, it nonetheless made sense. Maya herself had asked, “but what is a ‘witch,’ mama´?” And Socorro, her already silver-gray hair a wiry nest around her shoulders, knew the girl did not speak nonsense, and yet she could not answer. The words seemed to cover an emptiness. A chasm. “That is the wrong question, mija,” she’d finally said, licking her thumb and wiping honeycomb from the corner of the girl’s mouth. Sweet before the days of sour. “That is the wrong question.”

#

The vaqueros raged. “There is devilry on the mesa, I tell you truly! Look to your sons and daughters, look to your wives!” The man’s voice roared across the waving switchgrasses. His companions sat tall upon their mounts, heavy saddles over deep red-browns and dappled grays, the animals’ taught muscles twitching. 

For Socorro, little Maya beside her, the man’s words were not a warning, not exactly. Too much inevitability lingered in the reddening syllables. She felt a foreshadowing of fire to come. As it was before. As it always had been. As the stories of her people told. 

Always the same. 

At that time, after every burning, the women of the township would gather around us, our half circle of close bodies and held hands our only comfort after the agony still ringing in our ears. The women’s bowed heads and shoulders, their tear-filled eyes, spoke of sympathy and attention. The carefully tied ribbons of their bonnets and sashes rustled and swayed. Hesitantly at first, but soon with clear intent, they moved fixedly towards the blackened post to take the body down. Charred beyond recognition. 

Later, the townswomen would sing songs and put up altars. “Never again, never again,” they chanted. They held the children’s hands. 

“Why do they give us flowers, mama´?” little Eliana, long before she became Socorro’s mother, had sobbed, barely able to speak, her whole body still trembling in disbelief, and yet needing to know. She could see Mari’s corpse being placed in a low wagon just beyond her mother. “To help your people mourn,” one of the townswomen answered before Ximena could reply, her heavy skirts sweeping the dust as she turned. Acts of friendship. Until they were not.

  Always the same.

At that time, no witch could speak the true words for “mother” or “daughter,” for “coven” or “witch,” an absence we thought must simply be a part of us. Perhaps even part of our gift, Mari herself had speculated. 

So much magic, and still no true knowledge of ourselves. Perhaps that is one reason we failed to truly hear those women. Perhaps that is why, when they spoke to us, we chose to listen at all.

And how the vaqueros raged.

Before Socorro could so much as whisper, the mounted men were already turning back towards the township and their rancho, their horses rearing and screaming. So much paralyzing fear. The air tasted rancid, of frightened horse and human sweat. “Sorrow,” Socorro whispered. This was a true word all witches knew. And “inevitable,” sharp as a scythe. She reached for her daughter, the words forming on her lips in a sparkling mist. 

It was then that panic rose up in little Maya’s chest, a rising that felt like falling, falling into nothingness, all control stripped away. She held tightly to her mother, seeking the shapes between them, desperate to speak new words. To shield, to protect. 

Nothing came. She felt her fate, the fate of her people, of her mother, mingling with the hate she could still feel around them. For Socorro, it was only shrouded desperation. Desperation so heavy it nearly drove her to her knees. 

Maya did not let her mother go. Socorro’s sorrow was a thundering rain. 

#

In our coven, all are mother and daughter. In the township there are other words for people who share kinship and community, and we long lived beside them. We tried to honor their ways. Though we do not distinguish family as they do. Sister. Aunt, too. These are not gendered words for us. Nor are men and women the only names we take, not here along the mesa. We have no sense of property in the consent of partnerships, as the townspeople do, or exclusivity. All are witches among us. 

“Why do we still go to the township, mama´?” Little Maya, always so full of questions, had learned the lessons from the stories of the burnings (blessedly, still only stories to her), and had held them to herself carefully, good witch that she was, so that she might consider them later with Paula and Rafa. First friendship, and then hatred, and then friendship again. It was the inevitable cycle. One must be patient, practice magic gently, and wait. 

“True word magic is a gift and the people of the township are weaker than us,” Socorro replied. Maya thought this over. Hadn’t Ana told Rafa that her family was afraid of us? That it was one of us who had poisoned her pony and soured the well? Ana had seen a woman with wiry braids chanting in her garden. True word magic was strong, Maya knew, but this sounded false. Every witch knows that no true word can be said alone. It takes the consent of more than yourself. 

“What is “consent,” mama´?” A perpetual question. “Agreement,” “permission,” “assent.” 

To practice true word magic, one must share, and accept what is shared. Always a choice. The good things. And the bad. “Wouldn’t you like a new dress, mija?” Socorro said, interrupting Maya’s thoughts. “Ana’s mother told me we might find a new color of fabric in the mercantile if we go tomorrow. Perhaps it will be red.” She smiled. Maya’s favorite. The color of the spiny claret cup cacti after the days of rain. Socorro nudged her daughter gently, swallowed her own misgivings, though these never really left her – they were there, always there – and sent her daughter to tend to the evening chores.

#  

Mother and daughter, learner and learned.

Maya’s first grownup spell bound the living cells of a frog’s permeable dermis together again, after severing. She watched as her mother set the sharp kitchen knife aside, as she breathed in the frog’s rapid heartbeat, it’s frantic, sinuous twisting. Socorro wiped her finger against the blade and sucked the slickness clean. Maya leaned in. Tasted, too. 

The girl could feel the power rise between them. She let her conscious mind linger on the skin’s permeable nature, on the coolness of the creature’s damp flesh trembling in terrified breaths. The skin itself was an organ. The thought came to Maya in a rush. Even cleaved apart, the dermis acted as itself. Each hole had to be restructured, re-opened, the surrounding chromatophore’s smoothed. Work as delicate as lace. The true words hummed. Mother and daughter, together, intoned, with the skin itself an accomplice in their re-making. A taste like metal lingered. As did Maya’s elation. “Heal.” She spoke the word true.

Later, the frog fled from Maya’s stroking palms, terrified at its half-formed memories. Maya shivered, remembering, too. Violence could be a healing. The witch, still very young, had a sense that this was true. But this? She had stitched the poor frog back together, her magic effortlessly joined to her mother’s in a way that still amazed the girl. But why? For herself? Her own pleasure? What was the word? “Selfish.” Maya wept bitterly. 

She shared her grief with her mother. “This is our way, mija,” Socorro said, seeking to comfort, though she too knew that this path did not feel quite true. “Another lesson, then,” Socorro decided, giving in at last to a worry that would not resolve. It was there, always there, somehow, as sure as smoke rises and flames lick trembling thighs.  

Maya kept her lesson close. She thought of the stories of the burnings. Of how the townswomen carried the witches’ corpses away to some unknown place. “So that we might mourn,” the stories went. 

A peculiar thought came to Maya, then. Her people held so much power. But the townspeople held the knife. She watched as the healed frog cowered in the far corner of the room. 

Rage began to grow in Maya, bright and pure. 

#

“Why do they burn us, mama´?” Socorro, just past her sixth winter, had asked her mother, Eliana. “Fear” Eliana had said without hesitation, reaching out to smooth the girl's dark braid, though not intoning, not yet seeking to share such a shape with her daughter, still so young. “We are all mother, all daughter, all learner and learned,” she said instead, her voice lilting and lithe. “Manyfold,” Socorro responded, repeating the lesson, “like the fire ants burrowing.” “Yes,” Eliana’s voice chimed. “For the fire ants, unity is a colony, vast and whole.” Little Socorro replied, “for witches, unity is a coven, careful and wise.” She put her hand to her mother’s lips, and then to her own, completing the ritual, good witch that she was. 

Later that night, after the moon had set and the fire had burned low, Eliana heard her daughter talking to herself. “Fear,” she heard the small girl whisper, her child’s breath sparkling, sharp as a knife. 

#

“Questions must be answered!” the vaquero hollered down to us, his mount rearing up. “Send the most powerful witch, now. Send your leader to pay for these crimes.” Marco called up to him that there was no such person. No such designation among us. 

“!Mentirosos, todos!” the vaquero growled as he reared his horse, turning back towards the town. Liars, all. 

It is said that Eliana screamed as she burned, screamed as her voice was lost to us. 

Always, always the same.

Socorro, Eliana’s daughter, honored above all in the townswomen’s ceremony, was given the first flowers to lay. “They will bring you solace, dear,” a thin voice said, pale lips near her ear. 

Socorro didn’t understand. Didn’t want to hear her. The reek of her mother’s flesh was still fresh on her clothes, in her hair. Her hands shook so hard she could barely place the zinnias and marigolds she was handed upon the bright white altars set in the dust. “Martyr,” the woman said slowly, breaking up the syllables, as if Socorro couldn’t understand. Her pale eyes were so pitying. Socorro noticed that when the woman spoke, the air she breathed outwards rounded itself, created a hollow. Empty and cold.

“Martyr,” Socorro repeated, trying to be a good witch, trying to control her tears. Though the word had no shape for her. She took the woman’s hand. “Very good, child” the woman said, surprised, and then satisfied. “Very good.” 

#

“What is a witch, mama´?” Maya, now old enough to have her own daughter, her own mother having been long ago placed on the low wagon, her body secreted away, recalled how her question had shaken Socorro, sent her hands questing with a longing to clear, to clean and make right. “Why don’t I know?” Maya said now, letting the question fill her. “That is what I want to know.”

So she followed them. After Great Aunt Ximena was marched to the burning pole, killed for living too long (for the townspeople feared life, as well, it seems), Maya, now bold as she was curious, followed, seeking to fill a chasm. There, always there.

The ceremony came and went. And she followed. She watched as the men unloaded the low wagon on a plateau past the township’s edge, past the last plowed field and the plentiful stone wells, past the vaquero’s lodgings and the open land their cattle grazed upon. She had never been so far from the township, at least not on this side of the grazing land, though it wasn’t very far. Perhaps no witch had. Home was the mesa and that was all. Such good witches, she thought.

Something else began. Maya watched as the women moved quickly, all pretense of solemnity gone. Soaking rags from a barrel of water set back in the low wagon, they quickly, frantically even, began to clean the body. Great swaths of charred flesh fell away, the carbonized skin peeling and pooling in sickening puddles across the hard ground, across the women’s bare arms and onto their soft shoes. Maya was filled with horror. 

The work did not take long. 

Though the setting sun tinted the women’s fair skin shades of deep red, Ximena’s flesh was perfect in the fading light. Perfectly brown with deep wrinkles and folds, a splash of age spots on her beautiful hands. As she had been in life. 

Before Maya could react, could even think to sob or cry out, two of the men reached down, grabbed Ximena by the legs and underarms and wordlessly tossed her body into the long shallow crevice stretching across the plateau. 

They did not pause before they left.

A cold wind passed over the ash and disarray. A faint scent of flowers followed. Maya sobbed, held herself close, and, like the good witch that she was, and that she knew she could be, she waited.

Long after the townspeople had gone, long after the sun rose again, full and high, Maya went back to the mesa to fetch her daughter. Together, the girl’s hand in her own, they climbed down into the crevice, into that burial place open to the sky where the elder witches lay. Together, they tasted so that they might spit out the lie that had been fed to our people for generations. So that they might make it right and say it true.  

Witches do not burn. 

The pair lingered briefly beside that great emptiness, that hollow of doubt, that chasm of fear. It had grown with every true word shrouded, had grown until our very spirits fled, severed from the flesh unending, leaving only a rising scent like flowers, that perpetual sweetness clinging to the eternal grave. We know this now. But what were we then? We could not truly say. And so we died, the truth of us screaming. 

No. We will never forget.

Maya and Juana Ines left the plateau together that morning, walked to the very middle of the town. They ignored the greetings of the friendly and the curious as the townspeople chattered and tended to their chores. Mother and daughter. Learner and learned. They walked all the way to the dusty town square with its wilting flowers and insipid altars. All the way to where the burning pole stood. Hand in hand. 

Juana Ines looked at her mother. She marveled at the way Maya’s form shimmered slightly, so beautiful, and felt the heat from her gentle hand. “We are witches, mija,” Maya whispered. The true words formed between them. And up the flames rose.