Bruja Business

Fiction by ​​​Roxanne Ocasio 

Northeast Ohio Writer

Three of us are in the backyard, making a blood sacrifice of someone’s ex.
This story has a happy ending, I promise.

PASADO

We met at a salsa class. I liked them because they were real, genuine women with lives outside of their partners. Bri and Catalina were on competitive dance teams, but both eventually stopped being able to afford it and quit. I briefly joined Catalina’s team, but likewise wound up unable to afford it and quit. Stephanie was the smartest of all of us because she wasn’t on a team, so she got to sleep when ADHD didn’t keep her awake. 

Having a life costs money none of us had. 

We were sitting at the studio one day, changing back into street shoes after class, when Catalina mentioned that she occasionally read tarot as a side gig. That’s when I got the idea. It was supposed to be a short-term thing to help us catch up on debts. White folks will pay for anything exotic, and setting up a bruja business in the hipster suburbs seemed like a perfect way to make money.

I had ulterior motives, but I shouldn’t get ahead of myself.

Before we knew it, we had a whole-ass house in the hipster progressive suburb of Lakewood decked out in saint candles and vacation souvenirs and random Cinco de Mayo trimmings from the bargain bins at box stores we’ve since boycotted. Unnecessary decorative clutter that would make all our mothers proud, from Puerto Rico to Mexico to Peru. Don’t get excited though; we’re millennials, so we were renting from some shady landlord who doesn’t even live in Ohio. Mortgage is a word none of us can spell.

Jaja, spell. Anyway. 

Catalina read tarot. Bri managed the money because she hates people and we respect that because lowkey, we all hate people these days. I was the heavy hitter of the crew—a real bruja casting spells and charms and curses like it was my job, because well, it was. Don’t ask where I learned though; that’s a trade secret. Stephanie, the extrovert of the group, did the marketing AKA talked to random white women at coffee shops in the neighborhood. Word of mouth is still better than any targeted social media ad and I will die on that hill.

I did almost die one time, but that’s a story for later.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The house is a sweet little colonial, painted blue like the sky we won’t see for nine months, nestled into a cute, unassuming block. Rent was not cheap because suburb, hence why all four of us moved in together. Inflation is murder, even with a full-time job that has nothing to do with what I studied in college. Tale as old as the generational class war.

The neighborhood is beautiful, though. We live between four coffee shops, three bars, two liquor stores, and two dispensaries. The only shitty part about living here is the drunk white boys stumbling down the sidewalk at midnight and last call every weekend.

Actually, that wasn’t the shitty part. It became useful later.

The real shitty part was the secret racists. Our suburb was full of businesses displaying Pride flags and anti-discrimination signs, but there was always that random white couple who gave the brown chicas a little too much side eye when they popped into one of the nearby cafes.

They’re the same ones who think cilantro tastes like soap.

I think a Taíno did it. The original generational curse.

PRESENTE

The sacrifice has woken up from his drunken stupor, and he’s trying to escape.

Bri lets loose a string of profanity in Spanish, crossing herself.

​The back door flies open. Catalina leaps off the porch with a baseball bat, like she’s swinging for the winning run in game seven of the World Series. She connects with his bald head and knocks him out. Blood splatters onto the grass, just missing our tall gray wooden fence.

“Oh fuck,” Stephanie says, and looks at me. “Is he dead?”

I check for a pulse and sigh. “Not yet, thankfully.”

“He has to be alive, right?” Catalina flips the bloodied bat as if she’d hit that homer. “Don’t worry, I learned how to knock someone out without killing them.”

Stephanie adjusts her glasses. “Should I ask?”

Catalina only grins. “I saw this in the cards. It’s going to work.”

I wave them behind me. “He’s a February Aquarius,” I tell Bri.

“Oh,” Bri says, “that explains it.”

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

My favorite café is the gluten-free spot and not just because I’m gluten-intolerant. Black and white tiles and full of potted plants, decorated with propaganda signs dedicated to villainy. I didn’t know it then, but I was speeding full tilt into my villain era.

Give me a break—I’m Boricua, we don’t tell stories in order.

The baristas at the café are always kind. For a minute, I swore the one guy was only giving me half off on pastries because he thought I was cute, but it wasn’t until about the fourth or fifth time that I realized it was the café’s offering to us.

One morning I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to make a run because it was too early to go into my office job. Of course, todas las chicas wanted something, so I made a mental list and walked to the gluten-free café. I got my chai latte and started back with my giant bag of pastries when a guy in a Browns jersey on an absurdly-neon bike knocked the cup from my hand. It splattered onto the sidewalk, onto my gray dress pants, and down my blouse. My hair smelled like chai for almost a week.

The guy didn’t apologize or stop.

The Browns didn’t win a single game for the next eight years.

Another time we went to the Truck Park, which is one of the three bars we live between. Winter had been long and we just wanted to get out of the house for a while, porque en casa there wasn’t any alcohol. Not much to do in Ohio in the winter other than drink. One of the bartenders knew us; himself Latino, his offering was using his employee discount on our tab. Half off anything will make for a repeat customer. 

Catalina was in front of us in the crosswalk when a car went barreling through a red light and clipped her foot. Her whole body seized up with tension. Tears ran down her face, the panic of what almost happened overtaking her.

I threw a curse at the driver of the car. They got a flat tire at the end of the block.

MUCHO TIEMPO PASADO

Mami told me about how when she was a young, hot chica in Adjuntas, she snagged my handsome as fuck father even though he was popular with all the ladies. There was a girl that kept coming around, though, shaking her ass in everyone’s face, so my mom went to the town bruja and asked for help. Something about a sugar cane field or some bullshit like that.

Mami won’t talk about the curse porque se convirtió a Jesus.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The Episcopals were not friendly. I barely even made it inside before at least five wives mean mugged me for existing. The church building was basic American; a bit old but modernized in ways that made no sense. The Catholics were less unfriendly. Inside that cathedral, I felt properly small, reminded that I am a vessel for the work of the universe. But there was entirely too much standing and sitting, and my knees are too old for that. The folks at the UCC wave to us any time we walk past. Unlike the other two churches, they’re cool with us because they think we’re just quirky brown lesbians and not unfurling world-changing magic in the backyard of our rental.

“See,” I told Bri one Sunday, “this is why I stopped going to church.”

PRESENTE

“You sure about this?” Stephanie asks.

“I told her,” Bri says, for the thousandth time, “con los santos no se juegan.”

But it was too late to consider the saints, too late to run to that beautiful cathedral on the main road for safety. Not that they’d let the brown girls in, anyway.

I close my eyes and say the words.

The ancestors echo them back. 

PASADO

I stopped going to church after I got married.

He stripped me of my magic. I’m still not sure how he did it—he’s a complete dumbass—but his family helped. Enablers with money. Descendants of colonizers. A typical, privileged white man who insisted he wasn’t privileged while abusing everyone around him.

He broke my arm on my birthday. The ancestors whispered, not yet.

His family managed to convince the police that I broke my own arm to frame their son. That my violent, Latina blood meant I was a monster full of rage. That I had stolen thousands of dollars of his property, that I was a cheater, that my mom who only has a middle-school education was helping me fraud them.

All things, of course, he had done to me.

When I’d had enough, when I finally left, when I arrived at Mami’s house sobbing with a glass shard in my foot and a moving truck my primos had packed up de emergencia—my shoulders felt heavy with shame and guilt. I should have known. I was too smart to fall for something like this. I was lost. But Mami found me. “You’ll get through this, m’ija,” she said.

At that moment, the ancestors reminded me of their promise.

I didn’t tell her what it was, because brujería. She’s a God-fearing woman, after all.

UN MILAGRO

Of all the drunk white boys to come stumbling down our block, that man finally showed his face. He was alone, as I always knew he’d be, and uncharacteristically walking, because he always insisted on driving when he shouldn’t. Four DUIs, he’d confessed once while drunk, after which he’d screamed in my face about how coming home to me was the bane of his existence.

I was about to become the end of his.

It wasn’t hard to get him into the backyard. He was confused, like he’d seen a ghost, and kept cursing my name, not that it mattered. The curses just made him weaker. He mentioned a woman—the current victim, by my guess—as we tied his arms and legs together. I was tempted to break his arm the same way he’d broken mine, but Catalina hitting him with the bat was punishment enough. 

Once the sacrifice was complete, the body yielded to the magic, gave up its essence in exchange for what we asked. He ceased to exist, hallelujah and ashé.

For once in his life, he did something good. Pendejo.

FUTURO

No one will report him missing because he never existed. There will be fewer near misses in traffic, fewer drunk white boys stumbling down the street between midnight and last call. Letters start to come in: student loans forgiven, car notes paid off, rent mysteriously covered again. The secret racists leave the neighborhood, so people stop whispering about those brown girls that live in the blue house. Bri gets married and has two kids, while Stephanie moves back to Arizona with her partner. Catalina breaks up with her boyfriend and her girlfriend because she realizes she’s worth more than two half-assed relationships. She and I decide to stay in the house and keep up with business. Eventually, we will make so much money that we buy the house off the shady landlord.

Turns out, we can spell mortgage after all. 

We’ll buy the neighbor’s house when they start calling immigration on us, and I won’t say what I do to them, but they will have trouble with anything involving numbers. I’ll decide to rent the house to a pair of kids from my old neighborhood. One is a chupacabra, but he’ll tell us when he’s ready or their little mystery spirals out of control or they finally admit they like each other, because it’s muy obvio.

But no more blood sacrifices. We’re fresh out of abusive exes, thank God.

Roxanne Ocasio

Roxanne Ocasio is a northeast Ohio native and proud Puerto Rican. Her short story “The Chupacabra Next Door” was included in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern Maine and is a two-time alumnus of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation workshop. When she’s not writing, she’s taking long walks through parks or cute neighborhoods, feeding her gluten-free pastry addiction, crafting the perfect playlist of reggaeton and K-pop, or becoming overly invested in local sports.