The Witch Girl

“Mila, Mila,” her husband and children called her.

He watched her from afar, hidden under the jungle fauna.

Her supple skin, full breasts and legs covered in a sheen of sweat. In a moment of lust, he decided he would take her.

He decided without deliberation.

These people are savages, closer to animals. He could take whoever he chose. It was his right as a God-fearing man.

The husband ran towards the Spaniard and, with one swift, loud movement of his pistol, the man lay motionless.

In the front dirt yard of the home, he took the woman screaming and took her in front of the children.

She was yelling something vaguely. He did not understand their language.

“Kill me, kill me,” she cried hysterically, looking at the body of her husband, but the Spaniard did not understand.

And when he was satisfied, it was already growing dark.

His horse stumbled through the forest, uneasy and afraid, unaccustomed to the strange and frightful noises and smells of the exotic land.

The horse had a cautious spirit.

They were being carefully tracked, as carefully hunted as he had hunted the woman, his horse already anxious.

It took only a sound of rustling leaves and a scratch on the thigh to jump and run as fast as possible.

The Spaniard lay dazed on the ground and, mercifully, the jaguar tore his neck, separating his head and carrying off his body.

The death was immediate.

Jacquard didn’t remember much.

It was like a hallucination in the liminal place, but his soul had not been here before, in this land, exposed to this place.

The soul tried to seek out connection, the closest forms of life and connection to the heart, simply because that is what the soul seeks.

It makes its way across the floor of the jungle like a fog of the madrugada, like a trail of desperate ants, like the ghosts, like fungi spreading under our feet deep in its own underworld.

Intelligent and calculating, the soul found the way to the woman who lay unconscious on the dirt in front of her house, young children crying next to the body that held her husband’s life, now no more.

She was struggling to choose life.

And here the spirit chose her, or was invited in, whichever came first.

But I would like to make a note here that this is not a usual phenomenon.

The laws of reincarnation are not inherently retributive.

It simply does what it can to survive.

Sometimes it’s desperate and no different from how we act in response to events in life.

Jacquard chose the woman’s unborn child to reincarnate into out of desperation.

And so he is six years old, or she is.

Her name is Magdalena, given to her by the Jesuits that had taken over the village and the education of the children.

Every night she watched her mother, wanting to be held and seen by her, but her mother never looked at her.

She would not smile or eat very much.

She always moved as if no life was inside.

She moved with stillness.

But she loved her beautiful mother and didn’t want anything more in the world than for her to gaze at her with her deep brown eyes.

Unto her, Magdalena, to call her name so that she would exist.

But she had the feeling that despite all maternal instincts, her mother despised her and blamed her for everything.

The next year, a fortnight before her seventh birthday, she was sold to the mining company that took her far away, that worked in the silver mine that tore into the exposed heart of the Andes, cleared of its dangerous mystery and laid bare and arid red earth as a girl alone faced innumerable misfortunes at the hands of men, the Spanish men, that she had once been. She had been like them. And when they came to her uninvited, they remarked on her eyes, how they seemed to flash red like the delicate violence of a jaguar hunting only in the dark. They called her the witch girl because she looked into their eyes with judgment and knowing. What is their fate, the secret traps of this land that they had yet to discover