Water, Blood, Magic, Wine
Brujo helped her bring the buckets into the bathroom and dump the berries into the tub. They poured boiling water over the blackberries, and stirred them until the water cooled, and the blackberries were a mash of purple and black. Nina stripped off her clothes except for her underwear, and settled herself into the tub. The flesh of blackberries around her, Mother’s blood in their juice oozed over her ears. Brujo leaned over the tub, eyes wide, unblinking, and touched her calf. Where he drew his finger along her skin, a thin cut opened—Nina felt the sting of the blackberries against the wound. He cut her on her calves, her arms, her belly, and paused as he brushed the back of his hand against her cheek. And almost she told him. Almost, she could not bear to lie to him any longer. But he grinned, and touched her throat. Nina was thrown into darkness as blood from her neck spilled into the blackberries.
Real magic is what you bleed into it.
For a long time, Nina was senseless. When she awoke, her throat was parched, and she could feel granules of blackberry seeds under her thighs and back and feet. She couldn’t see anything. She felt a smooth hand brush her forehead, and lower a straw to her lips. Water had never tasted so good.
“How long?” she whispered.
Brujo answered, “A day.”
Only a day. There was a heaviness in her chest, and she imagined her heart was beating slow, slow, slow. Everything was still.
A hand on her calves, her arms, her belly. Needles of pain in those places as the blackberry juice rushed into the wounds to drink up her blood. And then a deep pain, deeper than death, across her throat. Drink, little berries. Drink me and live forever.
The second day passed. Nina thought Brujo might have given her a cracker and some more water sometime, but maybe it was only a dream, because her stomach gnawed at her, and her throat felt like sandpaper. He came again, touched her again, whispered something to her. But she didn’t hear him. Maybe she didn’t hear him. And maybe that was a dream too, him speaking, because he had said he loved her, he had wept over her, and his little hands had caught every tear before it fell into the tub so that the magic wouldn’t be broken. Brujo would never say he loved her. He was a changeling child. Incapable of love.
On the third day, there were no seeds left in the tub. Nor berry flesh. This was the last day. Nina’s whole body ached. Let it end, she whispered to no one. Let me die, it is too much, and there is no magic worth the price of my pain. Mother, let me die and sleep. But Brujo came to her. Real for sure, because he touched her, and she bled into the tub again. And he dumped sugar and yeast into the tub with her.
“Nina,” he whispered. “You have to mix it all together.”
She moved her arms, arms as heavy as wooden beams. Weakly, she stirred the whole concoction as Brujo praised her. Praised her pain, praised her endurance, what a good girl she was to fight off panic and death so that he could be real and wear Gap clothes, and call Steve his daddy. How brave, to dare to control a demon. How powerful, to bring magic and blood together, to raise Mother from the dead and give her a new body, the body of a magic boy.
He left her again as she struggled. And he didn’t come back through all the long hours of the third day. Nina was alone with the blood and the blackberries and the sugar and yeast. Alone, she brought it all together. Alone, she made magic. Alone, she worked her will into the world that remained to her, this subworld in the bathroom. Alone, she felt the tub froth with magic.
And wine.
And then, she ceased.