River Woman, River Demon (eBook)

Jennifer Givhan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
Blackstone Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-6650-5752-3 (ISBN)

Infos

When Eva's husband is arrested for the murder of a friend, she must confront her murky past and embrace her magick to find out what really happened that night on the river.

Eva Santos Moon is a burgeoning Chicana artist who practices the ancient, spiritual ways of brujer�a and curanderisma, but she's at one of her lowest points-suffering from disorienting blackouts, creative stagnation, and a feeling of disconnect from her magickal roots. When her husband, a beloved university professor and the glue that holds their family together, is taken into custody for the shocking murder of their friend, Eva doesn't know whom to trust-least of all, herself. She soon falls under suspicion as a potential suspect, and her past rises to the surface, dredging up the truth about an eerily similar death from her childhood.

Struggling with fragmented memories and self-doubt, an increasingly terrified Eva fears that she might have been involved in both murders. But why doesn't she remember? Only the dead women know for sure, and they're coming for her with a haunting vengeance. As she fights to keep her family out of danger, Eva realizes she must use her magick as a bruja to protect herself and her loved ones, while confronting her own dark history.

A psychological thriller that weaves together the threads of folk magick with personal and cultural empowerment, River Woman, River Demon is a mysterious incantation of reckoning with the past and claiming one's unique power and voice.

Jennifer Givhan, a National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellow, is a Mexican American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors' Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series edited by Billy Collins), Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize chosen by Ross Gay), and Rosa's Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series, 2019). Her honors include the Frost Place Latinx Scholarship, a National Latinx Writers' Conference Scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal's Greg Grummer Poetry Prize chosen by Monica Youn, the Pinch Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Lim�n, and ten Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and the Kenyon Review. Givhan holds a master's degree in English from California State University Fullerton and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and she can be found discussing feminist motherhood at JenniferGivhan.com as well as on Facebook and Twitter @JennGivhan.

---

Award-winning Mexican-American and Indigenous author Jennifer Givhan brings us an exquisitely written, spell-binding psychological thriller-weaving together folk magick with personal and cultural empowerment-that is perfect for fans of Mexican Gothic.When Eva's husband is arrested for the murder of a friend, she must confront her murky past and embrace her magick to find out what really happened that night on the river.Eva Santos Moon is a burgeoning Chicana artist who practices the ancient, spiritual ways of brujeria and curanderisma, but she's at one of her lowest points-suffering from disorienting blackouts, creative stagnation, and a feeling of disconnect from her magickal roots. When her husband, a beloved university professor and the glue that holds their family together, is taken into custody for the shocking murder of their friend, Eva doesn't know whom to trust-least of all, herself. She soon falls under suspicion as a potential suspect, and her past rises to the surface, dredging up the truth about an eerily similar death from her childhood.Struggling with fragmented memories and self-doubt, an increasingly terrified Eva fears that she might have been involved in both murders. But why doesn't she remember? Only the dead women know for sure, and they're coming for her with a haunting vengeance. As she fights to keep her family out of danger, Eva realizes she must use her magick as a bruja to protect herself and her loved ones, while confronting her own dark history.River Woman, River Demon is a mysterious incantation of reckoning with the past and claiming one's unique power and voice.

Textauszug

2

October 19

A hand on my shoulder—shoving me down. I gasp, water gurgling into my mouth and nostrils. The moon is nowhere in sight.

Another hand, under my armpit, pulling me from the water.

I come up sputtering, wiping the cold from my face and eyes. I’m shivering. The candle has congealed around the black nub of wick, dripping off the plate and down the windowsill. The first pinkening light of dawn filters through the window.

“Did you sleep in the tub, my Eva woman?” Jericho’s voice mingles concern with amusement, his usual reaction to all things involving me. He’s not so much long-suffering as long-loving, a quality I adore him for—though forgiveness and tolerance have had to extend both ways in our marriage, and he knows it.

I pull my knees to my chest and stare at my pruned fingers as he grabs a towel, helps me up, one foot out of the tub, then the next. He wraps me in the towel’s warmth and holds me close, my back against his bare chest, the warm sienna of his skin melding into the honey of mine as I lay my wet hair against his shoulder, my own tangled strands blending into the dark dreadlocks that flow down his back.

We stare at each other in the mirror, his hands against my breasts, down to my belly, down further as we begin to sway in rhythm, our bodies lockstep as he continues drying then lets the towel drop so there’s nothing between us but his boxers barely containing his erection, pressed against my ass.

He tilts my chin toward him, my eyes unlocking from his in the mirror as our mouths meet, all the uncertainty washing from my body as I cling to my husband. He lifts me to the bathroom counter, undressing in one quick motion, and as the waters within me part to let him in, as our mouths open to each other, I’m thinking I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.

And Karma isn’t.

The anniversary of her death has come and gone. Eighteen years and a thousand miles between Los Lunas and Calexico, and I’m still stuck in that toxic oxbow. It’s like soaking bones clean in a pot of vinegar until they whiten. Only I’m the muddy pot, not the scoured bones for divining. I’m the leftover water, boiling nothing but muck.

The morning unfolds as mornings do in a Magickal household, with strong, black coffee. For Jericho. Mine is soused with milk and as much sugar as the liquid holds without coagulating into a solid. We sit on the open steps of the railed front porch together, imbibing our caffeinated brew while the sun rises over the river.

If I say we practice Hoodoo, some folks may imagine tricks far worse than those we typically fix. It isn’t that an outsider’s images of gris-gris, devil’s shoestring, animal bone, or hemp-bound and knotted doll babies for sticking would be incorrect. The fictionalized images come from something real. But they’re only half the story.

A nonbeliever can look away, can go back to their life, as if what they’ve seen or read hasn’t wriggled its way like a worm into the bottle of their bellies. A skeptic can close the book, leave the theater, or watch their television darken like the new moon while shaking their heads and commenting, Damn, that was frightening, I’m glad it’s over, without ever grasping at the reality coiling just above their heads—if only they’d look up.

For us folks of color, conjuring isn’t entertainment; it’s the brass key pointing us to freedom.

Jericho taught me that. How Magick can be, beyond the layers of doubt and shame and skepticism where the white world has conditioned us. When we come back to ourselves, the power and strength are ours.

Still, it’s Magick, not fairytale. It’s survival.

And even Magick with the best intentions has a way of turning dark sometimes, turning ugly.

See—while Jericho’s a conjurer of all trades, professor of roots and bones, of Hoodoo and mojo and herbs, and we share the ways of brujería and curanderismo—I wasn’t always a Witch. For a long time, I was a merely motherless girl stripped of connection to her Ancestors. My mother died birthing me, and my father followed her a few years later, though he’d been absent since my coming into this world meant his beloved exiting it.

Ten years my senior, Alba turned to the Lord for support when she unwittingly became the guardian of her eight-year-old sister. While the Lord did all right by her—Alba raised me as well as any teenager could have—I never felt comfortable among her church folks; perhaps because our mother was a Witch, curandera, and bruja, a light and shadow worker. And although I’d been cut off prematurely from our mother’s knowledge, I still managed to inherit what skipped Alba: our mother’s bruja spirit, her fire, and her diary, which I found hidden among her things after our father died. He’d packed them away in the garage; still, they’d called to me, and when I showed Alba the dried flowers, the incense and herbs, and yes, our mother’s book of shadows, Alba didn’t see the harm in letting me keep any of it because it wasn’t labeled as such. To Alba, it was just a diary. To me, it was my mother’s understanding of that which healed and that which cursed—limpias y hechizos. I didn’t fully comprehend but couldn’t stop poring over the pages, dog-eared and well-worn, memorized so well I could nearly hear our mother’s voice speaking each word aloud, whispering in my ears alone, Follow me, hija—a secret I held deep in the pit of my baby-bruja self, unnurtured, unprepared until I was twenty and met Jericho Moon, the man I would marry.

On the wooden steps of the house we bought with what I earned from my glass sculptures and he from his Magick, we sit in silence, sipping our coffee from enormous mugs, sun slicing pink low in the sky, while the children sleep in. My legs drape across his lap—his skin cedar-citrus and shower damp, my nightgown slung low across my chest, breasts sagging slightly against my belly from nursing two children who haven’t needed my body in years. My husband’s body wedges against mine, and we blend one into the other. Yin to yang. A serpent eating its own tail.

Sometimes I fasten myself to Jericho like a barnacle to a pier, not only to keep myself from drifting away with the tide but because he’s just so fucking wonderful. I’m afraid if I let go, even briefly, he’ll be gone like everyone else I’ve loved. So I cling.

This morning, I as good as trust him. As good as overlook the pastel sticky note that was pasted to the top of a student paper in his leather satchel—and there’ve been others over the years—the flowery handwriting, the effusive gratitude for an enlightening coffee date and plenty of xoxos, which could be a millennial’s way of signing Respectfully yours . . .

Or had they shared physical xoxos, this student and my husband? Any of the others in the past? He’s denied. Of course he’s denied. The girl just needed his advice in seeking an internship. He was nothing but professional with her at the coffee shop on campus. Another girl was a silly young student, overzealous, taken with his ideas. She got carried away. Of course that was all.

And I always relented. As good as forgot.

But memory is tinged by what we’ve claimed to forget.

Memory is a choice, as each moment is a choice, and this moment I choose to focus on Jericho’s flannel pajama pants—so endearingly threadbare, so steeped in the comfort of our thirteen years together, my own nightgown sheer, our bodies lodged as nesting dolls into each other’s while we sit quietly among the trees. It’s our morning ritual, and I cherish it.

I choose not to focus on what the trees are murmuring. A rustling in the cottonwoods, whispering, Ten cuidado, mija. Take care.

I ignore them and listen to Jericho’s words instead, breaking the quiet spell.

“You coming to Rag & Bone tonight? We could use your help.”

“I’ll leave that circus to you, Jer.”

He chuckles. “Still calling my Magick a circus, huh?”

“Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” I recite from Yeats’s The Circus Animals’ Desertion.

“Foul, huh? I named the shop for you, woman. Your favorite poem from the day I met you.”

He nudges me in the ribs, kisses me atop the head.

We sit still as long as we can, drawing out the dawn before Jericho must drive from our rancho in Los Lunas below the South Valley into midtown Albuquerque for his morning lectures and afternoon committee meetings, and afterward, to Rag & Bone, less than a mile from campus near the Nob Hill district.

When we moved to the desert and Jericho put down roots—first in my belly, then in the land—his Magickal shop and showcase flourished. But I still call it a circus.

“You gonna be in your hot shop?” he asks, and I know him well enough to detect the concern behind his question, the gentle suggestion that I break out of my funk and create something. Anything.

I sigh, sipping the last of my milky brew, then stare into the coffee grounds at the bottom of the mug I purposely allow into the drip, so I can divine. “The glass Muse has abandoned me,” I reply, wallowing because Jericho lets me wallow. “It’s all shit. Everything I make...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.10.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-6650-5752-1 / 1665057521
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6650-5752-3 / 9781665057523