Blood Magic

“52Tona” by DARKRECONSTRUCTION

The Filipina wife sits in the back of the car as it goes. She likes it there, and her American husband does not mind it. He thinks that it makes him look protective. The Filipina wife quips that it makes him look possessive. They laugh. They have not been married for a year yet, but she already smells someone else’s perfume on him, notices him say being with her in places that she has never been before.

The things outside go by. They are what she understands as America. Traffic. A flush of trees and signs and order. Tall buildings, brush, and then the model homes, one after another, the same but different. She is going to her department chair’s model home for their book club. Where he is going, she does not know.

It isn’t a normal club. They read and attempt spells from an old library book her department chair found. They are harmless spells written at the turn of the century for wives with too much time on their hands. Her department chair copies pages from the book. She scans and prints them on the school printer. Once, she accidentally left her printouts on the copier and they were found by their principal. Her department chair’s excuse was that it was going to be repurposed for an annotation assignment. The principal ate it up. The principal had been one of those teachers who were only in the field for a year. What teachers did was still magic to her. It wasn’t a lie. A spell could be a lesson.

The Filipina wife and her department chair are both teachers at a middle school. They both teach English and are both immigrants from the Philippines although it has been twenty years since her department chair has been back and only two since her American husband petitioned his Filipina wife here. Where the Filipina wife saw pristine rice paddies cascade into the glistening steps of Mountain Province, her department chair could only remember burning garbage, their pillars of black smoke reaching for her departing plane.

The Filipina wife wonders how her department chair is able control her own American husband. Her department chair’s husband works from home in forensic accounting, but he is never there when she comes over. She doesn’t know where he goes. She sometimes imagines that he is stuffed in a pen like her family used to keep goats. She imagines him blindfolded like her father used to have them. He explained it was to prevent them from getting hungry and overeating. The thought gives her a weird sort of thrill.

She looks at the back of her American husband’s head and imagines him in a pen, blindfolded. She imagines that his eyes are wide open but can’t see. She wonders if this makes it easier for her to see what’s on his mind. She wonders if she would see her face or another’s he is hungry for.

“Baby?” She says. She sees his eyes look at her and then the road. She doesn’t have to do anything to know what is there.

“Nothing.” She says and looks out the window.

The Filipina wife comes out and her Filipina-American friend, Beanie, is dropped off at the same time. Beanie’s husband is too big for their car. He used to be a basketball player for the NBA. Beanie is a science teacher at her school, but she doesn’t have to be. They have money but she can’t have kids. She and her husband mentor kids and invite them to her house instead. Once, the Filipina wife and her American husband visited. She, Beanie, and Beanie’s husband played team tennis with their students while her American husband moped on a lawn chair and stared at his phone. They had not gone since.

“You get a Lyft? Beanie asks.

By then, the Filipina wife’s American husband was gone as if he were never there. She is surprised Beanie noticed. “No, mabakit? Why?”

“You came out of the back seat. I was just thinking somebody else was bringing you in.”

“Hindi, we just do that.”

“Just do that? That sounds fun!”

“It is. Diba?” She says but it isn’t.

The two get to the door and, before they can ring in, the door opens. Her department chair stands in the door, a fist to her hip, the back of her hand to her forehead. She lets her head back and her long, black hair falls. She wears a black blouse with a long, fall-colored skirt. Her veiny ankles are exposed between the skirt and her pointed, black buckled shoes.

“Darlings! Welcome back to the coven.”

Beanie picks at a tear from laughing too much. “I love you! You’re so full of shit!”

They embrace and each give and receive pecks on the cheek.

“Darlings, the only thing I am full of is wine, talaga!”

The conversations start mundane, then move to school things. They talk about the kid who was caught with half a scissor the other day. He was sharpening it with the other blade. Did he know what he was doing? Was it really doing anything? They didn’t know, but, just to be safe, admin followed the protocol. He is always talking to himself. The Filipina wife remembers watching him go back and forth between a tree and a bench.

During the Halloween Festival, the Filipina wife remembers reading his palm for a ticket. She saw a mind line that went straight across his hand, a small welt in the center dividing one half of the line from the other. His mother was young, blonde, and beautiful. She read palms too. She told her son he couldn’t run away from his hands. She was wearing scrubs, but the Filipina wife couldn’t tell if it was her uniform or a costume.

“I saw his mother.” The Filipina wife says. “She was very understanding. Maawain siya.”

“Is she a doctor?” Her department chair asks, her nose diving into her glass.

“No clue.” Beanie says, touching the tips of her fingers. “Would a doctor be able to come in any time she wanted?”

“I don’t think so. Hindi ko alam.” The Filipina wife says, although she likes to believe that she did. She thinks of going shopping with her. She thinks of going out to lunch dates with her that would turn into dinners. She thinks of her dying her hair blonde. She thinks of them keeping each other’s secrets. Why couldn’t she make more non-Filipino friends? Why did she only have her American husband and his?

They eat. It is a beautiful roast that has been in the crockpot all day with wine and thyme. Her department chair’s husband put it in there before he left.

“Oh, he hates this stuff, but he loves to cook it.” Her department chair says. “He would rather eat fast food somewhere.”

The Filipina wife imagines him eating fast food in a pen, her department chair feeding him. She imagines him eating everything, even the wrappers. She cleans her plate at the thought. The others think the Filipina wife is hungry, but the thought of her husband with someone else has been on her mind. She is worried. A man or a woman or a goat, the difference didn’t matter.

They crack open the book and go to their next spell. It is a spell to make bad thoughts go away. On the table, there are all sorts of ingredients. The basics include lavender and dried flowers they get from a local holistic dispensary they Yelped. The only thing that looks out of place is the honey. It is generic honey in a plastic bottle shaped like a bear. Most of the spells require them to leave honey outside of the door. Once, they had forgotten about the honey and the Filipina wife thought it would be all right to leave some outside of her classroom the next day. When asked by her students what she was doing, she told them she was using the honey to lure a bee out of the room. This upset a student allergic to bees before the Filipina wife dismissed him to the nurse’s office. The rest of the class occasionally looked up at the lights or turned their heads. The idea that they were looking for something that wasn’t there amused her, but she could understand their plight. At the end of every spell was an anticipated disappointment, but it was fun to believe in things that didn’t happen. It was fun to believe in the unbelievable, even only for a little while.

The spell requires the usual mixture of herbs and dried appendages. There are tails of eight different animals. Legs of six animals and five different insects. There are spider eyes although they are indistinguishable from ground pepper. Her department chair had dared one of them to taste them, but no one wanted to make the confirmation. The Filipina wife imagines the grate of the eyes on her tongue. She expects to taste what they see. She expects a sour pain. She expects to taste something acidic that would eat her away.

There are jars with pickled things and jars of blood. Last week, a spell had called for goat blood. Her department chair had learned that the best way to collect a goat’s blood was to suffocate the goat to death, so she had her husband do it. According to her department chair, he was “such a child about it”, but he did it. The Filipina wife knew goats sounded just like human beings when they screamed, but she never heard one dying before. She tried to imagine the sound the goat made when it was gasping for breath, but she couldn’t even imagine the sound of a human being struggling to breathe. She wondered what sound her department chair’s husband made. She wondered if a goat could cry like a child too.

“Saw it on an episode of No Reservations.” Her department chair replies when the Filipina wife asked where she had learned about goats. “Oh, Anthony Bourdain. So sad, you know.”

“What happened to him?” Beanie says. She is chewing on a cherry stem. They have fresh cherries that are not part of today’s spell but might as well have been.

“Darling, talaga! You must be kidding me.”

“What? What about him? I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Anthony Bourdain. He’s dead. Ay, patay na.”

“Oh, wow. When did that happen?”

“I don’t know. It happened and it’s sad, darling. Ansabe ko? A man’s dead.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry to me.” She says and drinks her wine in the silence that follows before she speaks again. It unnerves everyone when she does this and it happens often. “There isn’t anything to do about a dead man, talaga. Nothing to apologize for what’s natural. Diba? Anyway, the lions.”

“Lions? I thought we were talking about goats?”

“No, there were lions in the episode too. This superhuman tribe had been at war with this pride. I think that’s what they’re called, a group of lions, a pride. Anyway, they were at war with this pride for centuries and this American woman—leave it to Americans—comes in with her Jeep and college learning and tied-back hair. She puts her privileged foot down and says they can’t kill all the lions. This tribe farms goats. I forgot to mention that. This tribe’s primary diet is goats and blood. Goat blood, cow blood, lion blood. It doesn’t matter. Any blood will do. They have a diet of only meat and blood.

“The lions, guess what darlings, the lions also have a meat and blood diet, so they are in constant competition for the meat and blood in their entire world. But this American woman, this know-it-all, comes in and says they must co-exist. That it’s important that the lions are kept in check but not killed. And this tribe had been killing them for centuries. This tribe were lion killers. Lions were afraid of them. And, darlings, these weren’t any regular old pussies. These things had teeth. These things could bite. These things could swallow a person whole. Anyway, I don’t remember where I was going with this.”

“How do the goats play into this?” Beanie slurs, drunk but still paying attention. The cherry stem falls from her mouth to her feet. It points at the Filipina wife like a compass.

“Oh, darling. Forget the goat. The goat is dead. Anthony Bourdain and my husband killed it by choking it to death. Poor man felt terrible about taking its life that way. And now he’s dead, too. Talaga.”

The Filipina wife cannot tell who she is talking about: her husband or Anthony Bourdain. She feels her lungs well with blood. She tries to imagine what it is like to be choked to death. What it feels like to drink someone’s blood and get stronger. What it feels like to swallow your own and die.

The Filipina wife knows the taste of goat blood. When her family slaughters a goat, they put the blood in a slow-cooked papaitan along with shreds of skin and organs and green peppers. The stew would smell awful until the blood cooked and thickened and sweetened the pot. Before her eyes, the goat transformed. The blood, its magic.

They pick out four spider legs and put them in the concoctions they have in front of them. There is a bar of cinnamon and a cherry stem swimming in the Filipina wife’s half-empty cup of Diet Coke. She drops the legs into her cup and watches them make ripples beside the stem. The stem is not supposed to be there, but the others do not correct or notice it. She imagines each of the ingredients communicating with each other. They are sharing a secret in a language only they know. Beanie pinches the cinnamon out of her cup and stirs her brew. She looks like she is concentrating but the Filipina wife knows she is drunk after two glasses. Beanie is always this way. Beanie is always hard on herself. Beanie is always not able to take it.

Her department chair shakes her cup in her hand. She holds it above the spell book and her finger runs over the words. Her department chair is always the one who picks the spells. It is her book and that allows her the right, but she never allows the other two to read it. She always must be the one to see and choose.

“Susmariosep! There’s a part here about us doing something else, but I don’t understand it.”

“What does it say?” Beanie leans in, but her department chair’s shoulder crowds her path to the book.

“Darling, please, sandali. I am trying to read. How can I understand if you won’t let me investigate!”

Her department chair leans further in. She nods. The Filipina wife looks into her cup and theirs. They are all different and she cannot tell which one is right. Perhaps they are all wrong. Perhaps they are all right. Beanie continues to stir her potion.

“It says we need to do a joining and relieve the embers to the wind.”

“I haven’t done that with Richard in a long time. Too long.” Beanie jokes and stirs her potion more rigorously.

“Oh darling. Ganon? You never know what to keep to yourself. Diba?”

“That’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it?”

“Darling, there is nothing metaphorical in these instructions. It is all literal. Clearly the embers are related to fire. But a joining. I just don’t know.”

The Filipina wife takes out her phone. She searches up “joining” but nothing comes up. Nothing relates to any witchcraft. Everything relates to the sexual connotation of the word. She remembers the last time she and her American husband made love. They had gone on vacation to San Francisco. He had mentioned that, just once, he wanted to sleep with a blonde so she pretended to be one.

The vacation started just like any other vacation. They went sight-seeing. They saw the Golden Gate Bridge, they saw the crooked road, they saw all the streets that slouched on the hills in all the impossible ways they couldn’t where they were from. This was the aim of a of their vacations. It wasn’t until they went to the hotel where things deviated from the plan. She left their room saying that she was going to get ice but left to their car instead. There, she uncovered a change of clothes she hid under the spare tire. She put on sexy lingerie and a trench coat and a blonde wig. She went back upstairs, feeling embarrassed as she passed through the lobby. But, as she went up the elevator, she began to feel more and more confident. She thought of her background. Her motivations. She thought of the character she was going to play.

By the time she knocked on the door, her name was Sylvia and she had been phoned in for a client. Her husband looked her up and down in shock. She came inside and talked all business. He didn’t question what she was doing and went with it. He asked about what services were available. What the costs were. She asked him to take a shower and he did. The control excited her, and she could tell that the lack of it excited him too. At the end of the night, he paid the fee and she left.

Every day of the trip continued like this. They spent the day like a normal couple and went sightseeing. They saw Fisherman’s Wharf, they went to a museum, Alamo Square, all the hipster restaurants, China Town, bookstores. Then, at night, they would continue their escapade. She was the blonde Sylvia, not his Filipina wife, and he loved it. At the end of the vacation, it was worth it to become someone else.

“Maybe the joining means we need to set all of this on fire? Sunugin ito.” The Filipina wife hears herself suggest, but it is Sylvia’s voice that comes out when she says it.

“Darling, how do we set a liquid on fire?”

“There are ways. Maybe we have to boil it down and burn it. Lutuin mo. Maybe we’re supposed to put out a fire with our spell.”

The Filipina wife thinks of her husband. She remembers his face when he heard Sylvia’s voice. It wasn’t the same face she saw looking at her in the mirror earlier today. It was a different kind of face. She wants to see that face more often, but she can only see the face with someone like Sylvia going down unfamiliar streets. She can only see the face in a dark pen, blindfolded and struggling to breathe.

“Darling, you may be on to something. I’ll start a fire in the grill outside and then we’ll do it together. We’ll pour it in all together like we were touching the tips of our swords like the three musketeers!”

Inside, the Filipina wife watches her department chair get the grill ready outside. She is crumpling pages of a magazine and putting them into the grill. She thinks she sees herself on one of the pages she crushes, but it’s not from anything she would ever be in. Beanie is in the bathroom, hugging the toilet.

The Filipina wife made the excuse of having to call her American husband and stayed inside. She put the phone to her ear as her department chair left, but she never dialed. She keeps the phone to her ear and looks down at the book. The spells are in alphabetical order based on the need. She turns the page. There is one for rewinding time. Another for nagging children. There is one just labeled “mothers”. Finally, she gets to L. In it, she sees what she is looking for.

The spell asks her to think of who she wants the bond fulfilled with while making the potion. She thinks of her American husband. She thinks of his face when he is thinking of someone else. She thinks of his face while they are sight-seeing. His face is in the reflection of a bakery window in Fisherman’s Wharf. His eyes are outside of his head. They are floating outside of the holes and beyond the glass. She reaches for them, but they disappear. She thinks of his face when they married, when they first met, when they see each other across a crowded room. His eyes are moving closer to her, but they are looking the opposite direction.

She pulls the tail of a rat and three of the spider eyes. She puts them in a fresh cup. She gets out the jar of goat blood and even with the lid still on the smell almost makes her gag. She holds her breath and quickly opens and closes the jar, pouring it in with the dry ingredients. She wipes the brim dry with her thumb. She lifts her thumb to her nose and coughs. She stirs the cup with another stick of the cinnamon. The last ingredient is her own blood. She picks up a plastic knife from the table and lets its teeth bite into her thumb, the one she used to dry the goat blood. She wonders if she is going to contract some sort of disease. Maybe it will change her? Maybe her hair will change color? Maybe she will put on the face of her husband’s mistress?

She tries to imagine what her face looks like as the plastic teeth of the knife bite into her thumb. One stroke and a line of blood appears and drips once into the cup. She lets the drop’s red arms stretch across the surface before mixing it with the cinnamon stick. The spider eyes float to the top. She wonders if it is enough. Nothing is ever enough, but she will give more if she has to.

Outside, her department chair is dipping the lighter into the mouth of the grill. She frowns down in displeasure and is not her usual confident self. The Filipina wife flips the book back to where it was before she started and walks into the kitchen. She runs her thumb under the tap until the bleeding stops. She wraps her thumb in a paper towel and squeezes. On the refrigerator, her department chair and her husband smile. She imagines her husband’s face over his body. She imagines him choking a goat to death for her. She imagines him choking her department chair and then his mistress with her face and then herself. She feels the blood well up in her chest. She feels her heart about to burst.

***

Outside, she and her department chair hold their cups before the fiery mouth of the grill. The Filipina wife is afraid her department chair will notice the strong smell of the goat blood, but the smell of the coals and burned pages mask everything else. Her department chair looks over the house, her face lit orange by the fire. The light dims. The sky is blood-red.

“Where the hell is she, talaga?”

The Filipina wife looks inside and sees the open book. It is only then she realizes the inside must smell like goat blood. She thinks of the strong stench and feels the tuck of fear from being caught. But what will be the consequence? If everything worked out, would there still be a need for an apology? If everything ever really came true, what did they really deserve?

Beanie comes out through the side door. She has a cup and her purse on.

“I’m sorry. I got a call from my husband while I was in the bathroom. I have to go.”

“Oh no, Darling. Ansabe? What is this about?”

“He says it’s a surprise.”

“Oh, a surprise? How vague.”

“I know! I wonder what it could be. He’s waiting for me already.”

“Darling, there’s at least another hour before our allotted time. Still more spells to do! Come on, have another drink, he can wait.”

“I’m sorry. Really, I am.” Beanie takes her spot beside the Filipina wife. She imagines Beanie’s face on the body of her American husband’s mistress. She imagines him choking her to death.

The Filipina wife says, “I forgot to mention, my husband said he was coming too. Sorry na.”

“Maybe all our husbands are conspiring against us? Maybe they have a spell of their own?” her department chair says. Her face is so removed from the Filipina wife’s. It is hard to imagine them coming from the same place.

“Let’s finish this spell,” Beanie says.

“All right, Darlings. Remember, it’s like tipping our swords. Talagang Three Musketeers. I’ll count. At three, we pour.”

Her department chair counts but before she gets to three, the Filipina wife pours hers in first. A second after, the others follow. The smoke rises and the smell of the ingredients fumes into the air.

The Filipina wife looks at the smoke. She can smell her potion more than the others. She can feel its power. She sees her American husband turn in the distance. She sees him begin to make his way to her. She sees him follow the smoke.

about the author

E. P. Tuazon is a Filipinx-American writer from Los Angeles. He has published his works in several publications and has two books, The Superlative Horse and The Last of The Lupins: Nine Stories and The Comforters. He is currently a member of Advintage Press and The Blank Page Writing Club. In his spare time, he likes to wander the seafood section of Filipinx markets to gossip with the crabs.

about the artist

DARKRECONSTRUCTION is a nonbinary queer painter from Queens, NY, USA. They have been painting their entire life to express their emotions, hopes, and dreams. DARKRECONSTRUCTION prides themselves on creating dreamlike, frothy, ephemeral compositions on a variety of surfaces including canvas, reclaimed cardboard, and fabric. Their work focuses on the contrast between urban life and nature. They are inspired by concrete walls overgrown by ivy and tree branches, train underpasses covered in graffiti and grass, a strong New York summer rainstorm beating against their window, the decaying Red Hook warehouses, tiny alleys, and the way the air smells on the first few days of September. It is their aim to create paintings that bring a moment of serenity and calm to the viewer. You can connect with them on www.darkreconstructionart.com and on Instagram @darkreconstruction.