New Dead Families

I ask for a drag off his smoke and taste a billiards bar in hard winter. This one likes his women desperate. He likes to dangle his attention carrot-like in front of whomever he wants to ride, he wants a woman to buck a little. I talk too much, to scent the trail. Easy.

We were a manless home growing up, all aunts and girl cousins sharing eye infections through community make-up. We were howlers at the full moon, all bleeding at once, the neighborhood cats desperate at our trash cans. When the moon was dark mama, a couple of aunties and older cousins went prowling, crowned in hairspray, clawed in acrylic. Nina, who’d snarl if the word grandma even crossed your mind, stayed. Even then, before we’d ripened, we frenzied, dancing our bodies against each other in the wood-paneled living room. We writhed to Pat Benatar, Heart, Gloria Trevi, until we collapsed in sweaty, kid-stinky piles. In the morning, those who’d been out came home, mouths full, comparing notes and dangers.

Can I tell you something about yourself? He says, one of those men who think they can decipher the intricacies of a lifetime by the stories a woman tells him in a bar. I take the posture, eyes wide, tilt chin and turn one toe in a little so I present vulnerable. Already I’m speaking two registers above my normal voice. I hate him but I want the world to be a better place. You’re a sweet girl, and there are a lot of assholes around here. You need to find someone to take care of you. I know exactly how to respond in a way that’ll have his hands ready for spanking.

I’m one of the takers. A wanderer like the old ones, like the oldest. I have a taste for war boys, I like to take the killing out of them. I love my kind, I love all women, and we are always the ones who break most when men decide to war. Nina, who’d been born into dozens of bodies before she finally decided to nest, saw all our gifts and tended us accordingly. Mi Neri, she’d sigh, playing with my name, I don’t envy you the nightmares. During my teens I wept and raged at my gift. My cousins were givers. I would have given anything to be a muse, or even been born into a line of vengeance, but no. I was a taker.

I didn’t know what it’s like to be taken care of, I never met my father. I say it in a quiet voice, my words get even quieter at the end of the last sentence and the man, this puffed up asshole in an ill-fitting suit and cheap shoes, covers his excitement with a whimper of sympathy and reaches out to touch my face with a damp hand. Oh sweetie, he says, oh honey, let me get you a drink. He returns with a tall glass. He thinks he’s ordered me something sweet and fruity, all that sugar to cover the taste of two shots of vodka but the bartender is family. She’s not family family but she has the blood in her, thin, old. When I came in I noticed immediately, she carries it despite the wounds and shit luck. I slipped her a fifty and told her all drinks bought for me needed to be virgin. She recognized me, even if she didn’t know what she was seeing, and nodded.

Nina’s stories said back in the beginning all women carried gifts in their blood. There were givers and takers, muses and healers, vengeance lines who roamed at night on wings, and unnamed gifts. All of us were born with knowing. Nina was born a Dreamer and saw things before they happened, she had communications, she called them. All her babies were born girls on purpose. The seeds are there, but no one knows how to water them anymore, how to coax them into taking root she used to sigh. My mama was born a taker and I was too. I chose your daddy because he was believer, Mama told me, and I didn’t care what else came down through his blood as long as he believed. But in the end, she was too much. We’re always too much.

Half my drink is swallowed so I let myself be led to a booth by the disaster of a man. The bartender eyes alarm at me as we pass, the man’s hand as low as it can be on my back. I wink back safety and she trusts me. I’m not a woman who matches conventional standards of what men have decided to call beautiful but I am all me. I live in this body comfortably. My hips are wide, breasts abundant and low, my skin is brown. Even when they think they aren’t, men love to reenact conquest on bodies like mine. Bodies like mine have been taken for centuries. I take back. In the booth his arm is hot around my shoulders, this man is all sweat, even water wants nothing to do with him and escapes. I breathe through my mouth and search for the right thread to pull. He is full of loose ends and mistakenly considers himself a warrior when the fool is just a bad soldier.

We don’t mess with warriors, there are too few left. They were our keepers once. These days they’ve been marked, so many marked, locked down, so many poisoned. Others have taken up the mantles of gods named by man. They lose that way, convincing themselves they have a right to rule bodies, a right to say what love should look like between lovers. The wild world is wise and transfers seeds, if your boys can’t handle it, the wild world knows girls can and will and have. But still, so many seeds are never tended and passed on.

I make a game of it just to make his mouth bearable, passing a mint back and forth with our tongues. I taste past the billiards hall in winter, into his childhood. A spark of empathy flares up when I taste his father, buzzcut, belt, but it dies out when I taste the sins against his sister. I want to bite off his tongue when I taste the girls who meant it when they said no. His own buzzcut, addiction to power swelling as he rose in the ranks. A boy, no more than seven, shot in front of his mother because he was a boy, screams in another language on another continent. I’m grateful for the mint, this man has no sweetness of his own. He is false sugar, a baited trap, a cruel, cruel man. Minverva he groans, pressing his thigh against mine, pulling at me with his hands. You two okay? The bartender is at our table. I love her, her blood is savior, I smell it in her adrenaline.

The worst part about being family is the hard loneliness. Yes, there is family and we meet each other sometimes, recognize the bruja in bruja but shit is complicated. We live in a world that trains us, no matter our intention, to grasp at each other’s throats, deluded there isn’t enough air.

We’re good, love I smile some secrets of our line at the bartender, I grab her hand and she jolts at my touch. Blood knows blood, power knows power. I know inside her cells are surging, blinking awake a little. Only a little. Too much can kill. She drops my hands and leans over, palms on the table and shakes her head, breathing through her mouth. Her eyes narrow at the man then sweep to me, knowing is born in her, she smiles. The man, being who he is, leaps in his assumptions. Join us? His eyes are wet. I let her know the choice is hers. She, like so many, wants to know how the story will end. It’s late. Her bar-back is wiping down the taps. She slides in next to me.

My first taking was like this, a team effort. Mama and some other taker aunties had been storying me up for years, explaining traps and tells, different ways of siphoning the bad. We don’t kill, we are not a vengeance line, we are protectors they’d warn, showing me how to oil my body with my own scent. He was, of all things, an ice cream man. He drove a white and pink van full of freezers. He had fairies painted on it. He drove the poorer neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods, his jingle a lullabye. He had a pattern of patience, years spent building trust. The girls never told, where they came from shame was a ball-gag, could kill futures. An auntie gave his face and name to my mama. She and I went to the beach he frequented. I reddened my eyes at sunset and asked in choked voice for a big stick. Subtle, Mama and the aunties had laughed later. I played played, a girl abandoned at the beach by her older, angry boyfriend. He couldn’t help himself, I was all legs and curls back then, in a childish one piece. He offered me a ride home. I sat on one of the coolers. Engine trouble, he explained, when we stopped between warehouses. When he came at me I let him. You have to be like the serpent, know when to be still and when to strike. When he pushed down the straps of my swimsuit, I began taking. Mama, who’d been following in her car, slammed open the van door, hopped in and coached me. I found his dark threads and sucked, not with my mouth. I took all his wrongs into me, transmuted them into my first meal. We left him there, pants down, a shell, his weapon forevermore useless between his legs. He lived. In terror and harmless, but alive.

The bar closes but we’re all friends now, so when the doors are locked we stay in. Bartender programs the jukebox, she is primed, has smelled something on the air she wants in on. She has poured me more virgins and opened a bottle of something aged for the man who is not even bothering to hide his “chubby,” his word for it, anymore. Darling woman, she is hungry. She has lived her life hungry for wanting to right wrongs, has gathered strays since childhood, men and animals. Her food is giving but she has given too much.

When I was younger I was rapturous in my practice. I’m tired now. In my twenties and even into my early thirties desire was a never satiated mouth in me, calling, singing, taking. I walked into rooms like I was setting them on fire. I wore sexual prowess like a boa. In my wanderings I visit other family and everyone has their version of tired. Muses have the folks who won’t listen. Givers go gaunt. Listeners ache with fullness, all those secrets rubbing against each other at every move. I tire of bodies beneath me, but I have a job to do. I’d love a body beside me, a companion to come home to, someone whose beat against my ear could make me forget.

There is a room where they keep the kegs, a cold room. The man is drowsy but the cold perks him up. The bartender is laughing, her hands across her breasts to hide the effects of the air on her nipples. I dance behind her, put my hands over hers and lift them high above her head, she leans into knowing this time. We are a sisterhood, a long game against all we’ve lost. He’s drunk on more than spirits, stumbling toward us, his threads loose around his knees. I reach with my mind, all the women inside me reaching, the bartender too, we pull.