Bruja

Ross E. Lockhart

The other maids in the hotel call me bruja.

I hear their whispered Pater Nosters
as I pass them in the hall.
They cross themselves, the timid sheep.
They stare, but lower eyes once I turn to challenge them.
I play their fears, staring back,
burning them with the evil eye until they weep.
When the boss comes through I become one of them, downcast eyes.
Si, Señor. No, Señor.
To him I am invisible among a hundred other nothings.

When I was twelve,
twenty-three days before the first time I bled,
a neighbor's dog attacked me.
He bit me, held me down.
I remember his heavy dark paws against my chest, hot breath in my face.
I was terrified, but instinctively reached up,
took his head in my hands and stared him in the eye.
I told him how the world would end.
That dog ran out into the street and dove beneath an oncoming car.

When I was seventeen,
an old lady neighbor
called me a painted slut, a whore.
She hurt me with her bony finger pointed, her damning crackling voice.
That night, I took a jar, filled it
with pins and needles, razor blades, bits of hair and bits of wire.
I pissed in that jar and said a backwards prayer,
then buried it in her yard.
Two weeks later, she was dead.

Last night, the whiskey-breathed fat man in room 209
accused me of stealing from him.
Tomorrow, he will check out, and I will go to his room,
gather up his fallen hair from the bathroom floor.
I will retrieve the fingernails from the nightstand,
the bloody dental floss and used rubber from the trashcan.
I will sew these relics into a doll cut from coarse cloth.
I will carefully stitch and I will name it after him.
I will feed that doll broken glass and he will choke and he will die.

I am bruja, witch. In no sense lost.