The sun had just set, but Karen and I didn’t go inside. We talked longer, opening up another bottle of wine to really push us into the danger zone. We were friends. Have been for a long time.

I don’t remember how we landed on the subject of witches, but Karen was ready for the topic. Said she’d been thinking about them a lot lately. 

“You don’t really believe in them,” I said. Her back was turned to me, lighting those tiki torches to keep the flies off and save us from the darkness. 

“What do you mean? Hell yeah I do,” she said. It was a matter of fact. No debating with her. I was the odd one. 

I drank some wine. I couldn’t smell it that well. The smell of the tiki torch fuel was running the show. 

“Not grabbing a broom and flying off into the sky type of shit, though,” Karen said. “Ow!” she sucked on her finger. Burned. 

“Is there a different type?” I asked. 

“Well, let me put it this way,” she stopped what she was doing. She left the torch she was working on and rejoined me. It stood alone in the darkness unlit. Like an outsider looking in.

“Think about it this way… People have a lot of energy, right? A lot of good energy and a lot of bad energy, right?”

“Sure.” I thought of my aunt. Bad energy. Really bad energy. Don’t know why I thought of her. She had make-up tattooed on because she didn’t want to ever fuss with it. Like that old story by Oates… The man with the painted mask, the colors running out at the neck.

“And so, yeah, spells and shit and curses probably aren’t real. Like taking a cauldron and putting things in them and chanting and shit. That’s fake.”

“Right, so-,” but she didn’t let me finish. 

“-So, what I’m afraid of are the people that do it anyway. Imagine someone with so much ill will towards you. With so much evil and hate towards you that they go out of their way to do impractical things. Things like piss and bleed into a jar and bury it on your property. Things like steal your hair or prick dolls with pins.” 

“Okay,” I thought of Aunt Selena again. Her gnarled knuckles. How she’d make my dad cry late at night. How he’d scream for her to leave.

“And what’s the difference? I mean really?” Karen asked. She looked at her wine glass. Her face, through the warped glass, bent and morphed. Beyond her, past her shoulder, the unlit torch stood there in the darkness. A spectator watching from the black. 

“When someone has that much hate towards you,” Karen continued, “It doesn’t matter if the magic is real.” 

I ended up staying the night at her place. Sleeping on the couch. Thinking about home… The home I grew up in, not the one I live in now. The home with my father and mother and my Aunt Selena living in our attic. I imagined her shuffling around. Murmuring. Sometimes she’d come down thrilled to see us. Sometimes we’d go weeks without a word. 

My mother hated having her in the house. My father, I think, deep down, did as well. But Latinos don’t leave their family behind. It’s tight knit. But nobody tells you, as a kid, who in your family is what. What they do. What they like. 

Karen lives on a lake and I can hear the swell and brush of the tide. The dock, not too far off, creaks.  It’s past midnight and it takes me a second to notice that one of the torches in the backyard has turned on. The orange flame flickering alone, whipping back and forth in the breeze. 

When my mother left, my father turned away from the world. Aunt Selena kept telling him, telling us, that she wasn’t right. That my mother was the bad one. That my mother was keeping our family back. 

I remember my father, drunk, talking to me in the dead of night. His breath was thick with rum and mint. He had tears in his eyes. 

“There’s a door inside of me,” he told me. He held my wrist tight. His hairy arms. His bald head. His voice quivered. “There’s a door inside of me and I closed it tight a long time ago.” 

I was eighteen when this happened. About to go to college. My mother had been out of the picture for some years now. 

“I can feel it trying to open. I can feel the door knob rattling. Shaking.” 

“Let your father alone,” my Aunt Selena chimed in. She was standing at the glass door of the lanai. The light behind her obscuring her features. Like a dark shadow in the window.

Now I’m walking towards the one flickering torch in the backyard. I didn’t bother to wake up Karen.  I’m drunk and the world is kind of spinning and the closer I come to the circle of torches the closer I can see faces. People that I know. 

My Uncle Javi, my Aunt Maria, my abuela, my grand uncle. Faces I only remember from old faded photo albums. Photo albums covered in dust that my Aunt Selena would plop down onto our kitchen table and talk to me about. My mother would always leave the room. My dad would sit quietly, subdued, eyes glued to the floor. 

And I can feel it. What my dad was talking about all those years ago. The door in my chest… The rattle of the wood. The knob trying to turn. Something inside of me trying to be realized. Trying to come forth and spill out of my pores like bile. But it scares me. And tears start to sting my eyes. And when I look backwards I can see Karen staring from the window. 

And the torches surround me and there’s a blaze of fire. 

And then I’m ten years old again. And I’m in my attic and I’m watching my aunt take long folds of cloth and cut them into shapes. And I watch her take pins out of a cushion. And I watch her hands… scars like pin stripes along her palms. I look at jars. I look at filth trapped in glass. And downstairs I can hear my dad sobbing. And the door slams and my mother has just left and I will never see her again. 

And when my dad’s crying peaks I turn to run down the wooden steps to him but my Aunt says, “Let your father alone.” And so I do. And I watch my aunt work on her crafts.